Dr. Clarence B. Jones

His Life & Legacy

Dr. Clarence Benjamin Jones

Dr. Clarence Benjamin Jones - the New York lawyer who served as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal counsel and draft speechwriter from 1960 until Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, who helped craft the opening of the “I Have a Dream” speech, smuggled the pages of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out of a Birmingham cell, and who in 2024 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. - died on May 22, 2026, in Cupertino, California. He was 95.

Dr. Jones was, in the words of former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, “the guy that King could trust; no leaks and no grandstanding.” For nearly a decade he was a constant presence beside Dr. King: in motel rooms and church basements, on Birmingham jail visits, drafting letters, raising money, fending off libel suits, and ferrying messages between the movement and the centers of American power.

Clarence Benjamin Jones was born on January 8, 1931, in Philadelphia, the only child of Goldsborough Benjamin Jones, a butler and chauffeur, and the former Mary Elizabeth Toliver. He graduated as valedictorian of Palmyra High School in 1949, earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in 1953, and his LL.B. from Boston University School of Law in 1959.

Over the next eight years at Dr. King’s side, Dr. Jones helped the Southern Christian Leadership Conference defend against a barrage of libel suits culminating in the landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan. In April 1963 he drafted the settlement agreement that ended the Birmingham demonstrations. Visiting Dr. King in solitary confinement, he smuggled out pages tucked into his shirt - pages printed worldwide as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In August 1963, he assisted Dr. King in drafting the early portion of the speech delivered later at the Lincoln Memorial, then filed the copyright application that kept “I Have a Dream” in the King family’s hands.

In 1967, Dr. Jones joined the Wall Street firm Carter, Berlind & Weill, becoming the first African American to hold allied-member status at the New York Stock Exchange. After Dr. King’s death, he served as an official observer during the Attica prison uprising, co-purchased The New York Amsterdam News and Harlem’s WLIB radio, and helped launch It’s Showtime at the Apollo.

In his final two decades, Dr. Jones was a scholar at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and a Diversity Visiting Professor at the University of San Francisco, where in 2018 he co-founded the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice. He also served as the inaugural Chairman of Spill The Honey, where he advocated for renewing the Black/Jewish Coalition.

He was the author or co-author of four books: What Would Martin Say? (HarperCollins, 2008, with Joel Engel); Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, with Stuart Connelly); Uprising: Understanding Attica, Revolution and the Incarceration State (e-book, with Stuart Connelly); and Last of the Lions: An African American Journey in Memoir (Redhawk Publications / UNC Press, 2023).

In 2024, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. In 2026, his life was the subject of The Baddest Speechwriter of All, a documentary co-directed by Stephen Curry and Ben Proudfoot that won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by Netflix for global release.

In May 2026, frail and using a wheelchair, Dr. Jones appeared at the 69th San Francisco International Film Festival to a standing ovation. Asked about the rollback of the Voting Rights Act, he was characteristically defiant: “We’re not gonna go back there.”

He Is Survived By

Family

Dr. Jones is survived by his five children, his longtime partner, and a world of former students, colleagues, and friends whose lives he touched across nine remarkable decades:

• Christine T. Jones-Tucker (Edward)
• Alexia N. Jones
• Clarence B. Jones Jr., known as Ben (Kristen)
• Dana N.G. Jones
• Felicia E. Jones
• Lin Walters, his longtime partner

The family extends special gratitude to Ben F. Hill, Dr. Jones’s chief of staff and trusted confidant, whose loyalty, counsel, and care were invaluable during the final years of his life. The family also thanks the staff of The Forum in Cupertino, California, for their extraordinary care, and asks for privacy as they mourn.