Clarence B. Jones, a former speechwriter and attorney who served as a confidante to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died at 95, according to a statement released by his family. Jones died Friday at a senior living community in Cupertino, a suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the family’s statement, Jones was described as living a “life of conscience,” and his family said he believed “an idea” is “more powerful than the march of any army.” The family added that it was “grateful beyond words” for the support that “sustained him, and us,” throughout what it called a long and remarkable life.
Jones was closely associated with pivotal legal and writing roles during the civil rights movement, including his work as King’s personal attorney. He was described as being involved in efforts around King’s writings while King was imprisoned, including credit for helping get pages of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out of his cell and writing “many” of them up to King’s 1968 assassination.
He also helped shape King’s widely known speech on civil rights. The Associated Press obituary said Jones was involved in the writing of “I Have A Dream,” and it framed Jones as a confidante who contributed to King’s message at a moment that has become one of the movement’s best-known public addresses.
Jones helped craft King’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech, which King delivered at Riverside Church in New York a year before his death. The obituary said the address was a hallmark in King’s condemnation of the Vietnam War and U.S. militarism, and it reported that Jones argued the war’s participation exacerbated poverty across the United States.
Before his work with King, Jones was born on Jan. 8, 1931, in Philadelphia, and was educated in New Jersey and later New York. The obituary said his parents worked as domestic workers for a wealthy Quaker family in New Jersey and that he was class valedictorian of an integrated high school in Palmyra. It added that he graduated from Columbia University, was drafted by the U.S. Army, was honorably discharged after nearly two years, and later earned a law degree from Boston University.
In 1960, the obituary said, King approached Jones to join his legal team in a tax evasion case brought by the state of Alabama. It said Jones moved his family to New York City to work full time as an adviser, attorney and speechwriter for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and it said Jones also served on the legal team for the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan case.
After King’s death, Jones left civil-rights work and later worked for a Wall Street investment banking firm, becoming the first Black American designated an allied member of the New York Stock Exchange, the obituary said. It later described a shift toward academia, including that Jones joined the faculty at the University of San Francisco in 2012, taught law students and undergraduates in courses such as “From Slavery to Obama,” and co-founded the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice there in 2018.
Jones also worked with scholars outside the University of San Francisco, serving as a scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, the obituary said. In 2023, it said, Jones published a memoir titled “Last of the Lions: An African American Journey in Memoir,” and it reported that he later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden.
In the final years of his life, Jones drew public attention beyond classrooms and classrooms through appearances tied to major athletes and media projects, the obituary said. It reported that he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game alongside Stephen Curry, and it said Curry produced and co-directed a short documentary about Jones; the obituary also said a film about Jones called “The Baddest Speechwriter of All” won an award at the Sundance Film Festival and is set to stream on Netflix later this year.
The obituary said Jones was survived by his five children and longtime partner Lin Walters, and that plans for funeral services and a public celebration of life were still being finalized.