Ep 88: A Conversation with MLK's Attorney & Speechwriter: Dr. Clarence Jones

0:00I want them to be as radical as I have been, okay, and continue to be, but I want them to ground themselves with a personal commitment to the pursuit of excellence. The pursuit of excellence has no ethnicity, has no race, has no color.

0:26I'm honored to be able to introduce Clarence Jones to you. He's a civil rights legend. He's 93 years old, but his wisdom and his insights about the world are more relevant than ever today. What he lived through with Martin Luther King Jr. was extraordinary. He was a big talent behind the scene, up and coming top lawyer in LA who was convinced to go out and fight for his people. Really bright man. He went to Juilliard. He was a valedictorian in his high school. He truly cares about excellence in a way that I think the movement today could really learn a lot from. There's a lot of voices out there that we all hear from today about race.

0:59And a lot of them we maybe shouldn't be listening to relative to someone like Clarence. Clarence is also passionate about the Black Jewish Alliance. Clarence worked with a lot of Jewish leaders when he was fighting for civil rights. And I think this is something all of us can learn from today about how blacks and Jews united to really fight for what was right as a key part of the civil rights movement. Clarence and I may not be aligned on all politics, but I think it's extraordinary what he accomplished. This is the man who smuggled out Dr. King's now infamous letter from Birmingham jail. He has some amazing stories about their fights for justice together.

1:29I think you'll really enjoy hearing from him. I'm Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to American Optimist. Dr. Clarence Jones, it's an honor to have you with us today. It's my honor to be here, sir. I'm curious, you met Dr. King, and you were up and coming. You were already a very successful lawyer at the time, and he needed help. And he came out, and it sounds like you were too busy to deal with him. At first, you didn't know who he was. You said, I don't have some tax problem, whatever. But then you listened to him speak, and you decided you wanted to help this man. How did you realize this was somebody you wanted to help?

1:56Well, I didn't want to help him. Actually, his lawyer, handling his defense in the tax case, had tried to persuade me. And I said, I don't have time to deal with no Negro minister, Peter, and so forth. In the event, to make a long story short, one day in the second week of February, Martin Luther King Jr. and someone who traveled with Bernard Lee, they showed up at my door at 2751 Highview Avenue, in altitude of California. He walks in, and Dr. King said to me, you know, Judge Huber Delaney told me so many nice things about you, so I figured I'd just come down and talk to you. Now he walks into my house.

2:36He says, Attorney Jones, you know, we have lots of white lawyers from New York and Chicago and the Northeast who help us. And he gets close to me. He says, but what we need, we need Negro lawyers, a young Negro lawyer like you to help us in our cause. So I said, well, Dr. King, I admire what you're doing, you know, and I wish you well. But, you know, I'm here in California. You know, there's not much I can do except I'd like to help Judge Delaney in any way I can. So he asked me some questions about my family. I told them it was my parents were domestic household servants. At the age of six, they put me in a boarding school, Catholic nuns from the age of six to 14.

3:25I was in a boarding school for so-called colored boys. The way I write about it in my book is that the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, from the age of six into 14, those white Irish Catholic nuns would say to me and the other boys, and I just remember what they said to me, Master Jones, be a good boy. We love you. Jesus loves you. And you are beautiful. Now, they said that from six to 14 years of age, ten and a half months a year now. And as you get older, it's not that you forgot, Master Jones, be a good boy. Jesus loves you, we love you. But as I got older 12, 13, or 14, the thing that I remember was that I was beautiful.

4:10They said that to us two or three times a week. So therefore, when I went to public school, 70 % white and 30 % colored. Okay. I still believe what those Catholic nuns had told me. Well, it seems like it gave you some confidence. You were the valedictorian, weren't you? Valedictorian in my class. That's amazing. Right, okay. Valedictorian in my class, and I tell everybody, you can't make this stuff up. That gave you confidence, you're a superstar, you're successful, but you weren't really involved in civil rights at the time. No, no, I wasn't involved in anything. So how'd you make the choice to, what inspired you to suddenly kind of work with Dr.

4:46King? He invited me to come hear him preach. I never heard Dr. King speak anywhere before in person. He asked me to come and hear him preach in, this is 1960. Baldwin Hills is like the black equivalent of Beverly Hills. Never heard Dr. King, okay? If you were a successful teacher, banker, musician, businessman, you lived in Baldwin Hills. Yeah. And he gets so many preachers and he congregations 1 ,300 people. Wow. Packed. I had never heard this man speak before. He said, brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen, the text of my sermon today is the role and responsibility of the Negro professional like you to aid our less fortunate brothers and sisters.

5:35He's speaking to you. Well, he was speaking to the contribution. And then I have to tell you, I was 29 years old. I had never seen another human being, you know, with hands, feet, legs like that. No. Never seen another human being speak like that. It takes a lot to impress me. I was mesmerized. Do you spoke to your heart as well? No, he was speaking to me. He was speaking to the whole congregation. But I never heard anyone, black, I never heard anyone. Okay? And then he got to a point in his sermon when he said, there's a young man sitting in this church today. my friends in New York and other places tell this young man a young lawyer.

6:23They tell me that his brains have been touched by Jesus. They tell me that when this young man goes into the law library and does legal research on any problem, he goes all the way back to the time of 1066, the Magna Carta, and William the Conqueror. So the first thing I'm thinking, how does this Baptist preacher know anything about the history of British constitutional law? How does he know that? And they tell me that this young lawyer, when he writes down what he finds on the pages, the words are just so compelling, they just jump off the page. So I began to think when the service is over, I'm going to find out who he's talking about, because I don't think He's talking to me.

7:13I'm going to find out who Dr. King is so impressed with in this congregation, because I need to know who this murderer is, okay? And then he paused for a moment. But he has forgotten from which he came. And then he went on to talk about my mother being a maid and a cook. And then he did something very unfair at the time. But then I knew how powerful what he did. He took an actual poem by Langston Hughes, Life Ain't Been No Crystal Stair. He took that poem, only he changed the lyrics in the poem to make it sound as if my mother was a person in the poem. And the poem talks about this Negro house servant scrubbing crystals, scrubbing stairs.

8:06And she pauses very automatically, and she says, I know I'm doing this for you, son. Don't you give up. Life ain't been no crystal stair. Mama's doing this for you. Well, when he did that, and he made it personal, I said, like it was my own mother, I started to cry. I'm sitting in, you know, third world from the third distance from the front of the church. I take a pair of glasses, put my sunglasses on, because I started to cry, because he had a vivid picture. Now, I'm still upset and emotionally, and I go after the service. He's signing autographs of books on the chairs, on the stairs from the pulpit.

8:51And when he sees me, he comes down from the stairs and he walks over to me. He says, you know, I never mentioned your name. I never mentioned your name, Mr. Jones. You know, sometimes we Baptist preachers, I didn't say anything. I just walked over to him, grabbed his shoulder, pulled him to me, and I said, Dr. King, when do you want me to go to Montgomery, Alabama? Now, in the first book, I wrote what would Martin say? The first chapter I call The Making of a Disciple. I'm 93 years old. I'm sitting here talking to you, and I can remember Dr. King pulling me over. 64 years ago. Like yesterday. And sometimes during the course of that 64-year-old journey, not that I get that despondent often, But sometimes when I hear I'm bombarded with challenging questions, either about the legitimacy or authenticity of his message, the relevance of his message today or the durability and consistency of my own commitments, sometimes I'm bombarded with these.

10:08I think about that. Okay. You ended up having a mutual admiration, obviously. He said that somehow you were in his head, and you could hear how he talked and how he thought. And so you wrote a lot of his most famous speeches with him because you really understood his voice. There's an old expression, the Lord's not finished with me yet. I have the capacity to resurrect in my memory the sound of Martin King's voice. I can hear his voice in my head, just like it was 64 years ago. So tell us a little bit about some of the experiences. One of the ones that stood out to me was the letter from Birmingham jail.

10:44It was very famous. You actually smuggled in a paper. Had you written some kind of help them with the outline or anything on that? What happened was that April 12th, Martin King leads a demonstration. He gets arrested. Arthur Shores, a major civil rights lawyer, was out of town. As his lawyer, I was the only person who could go in and see him. So April 12th, Friday, I never will forget this. April 12th, I go to see them at those times. You know, it's before they knew who I was, so they would, I'd take my wallet out and show my identification. But they didn't pat me down, you know, they knew who I was and so forth.

11:21I don't want you to misunderstand. I'm just going to state the facts. Normally, I would be wearing a custom tailored shirt and a custom pinstripe suit and a Rolex watch. I was dressed to the nines, as I said, you know. and they knew me because I was such a contrast, you know, this Dr. King's New York lawyer, you know. So I went in to see Martin, and I said, Martin, we got a real problem with bail money. He wouldn't even, he dismissed, I said, Martin, are you listening to me? He said, well, you and Harry Belafonte have to sign that. I said, that's why I'm in here. I just talked to Harry Belafonte.

11:57He said, I should come in and talk to him. He wouldn't hear any of it. He said, have you seen this? And I said, what is this? And he shows me a full-page ad from the Birmingham Herald, the major daily newspaper in Birmingham. And a group of white clergymen had taken a full-page ad in the Birmingham Herald, an open letter to Dr. King, but to the public. And in effect, this letter said, Dr. King, you know, like in Birmingham, like in other southern cities and other places, you know, we are trying to work out our differences with Negroes, okay? Your being here is not a help. You're an outside agitator.

12:45And the best way you can do is leave town because all you're doing is stirring up trouble. And you don't understand. It takes time, you know. We have to wait for these things to happen. Well, when I went in, Dr. King had taken any piece of blank newspaper that he had, any paper towel, anything that you could write on, and he started writing a reply. So he says, Clarence, what's this? He starts giving me pile number one, pile number two, pile number three, so forth. He says, take this out and give it to Dora McDonald, his personal secretary. and you got to have her tight. When you come back, you got to bring me some paper.

13:28Okay. So I stuffed these things, these pieces of paper in my pocket. Now I can visit him twice a day. Okay. In the morning and in the afternoon. So the next morning when I came in, I bought blank sheets of paper under my dress shirt. They made you hide it. They wouldn't just, they wouldn't let you just bring it to him. You had to hide it, huh? That's crazy. No, no, I just put the, no. I just put the white sheet of paper. They just never touched me. They just let me go through. But it's crazy they wouldn't just let them have paper in jail anyway. You had to hide it to bring it to them. That's interesting.

14:06Now that I think about it, somebody else asked me that question. We just never thought about it. I guess maybe if he asked for paper, they thought he might be trying to agitate something. There you go. You know what I'm saying? But twice a day in the morning and in the afternoon, I would take what he had written, put it under my shirt, and then I would take the blank sheets of paper that he needed and give it to him. And then the following, that afternoon, or if it was the afternoon next morning, that went on twice a day for five days until April 20th, Friday. I come back to the AG Gasset motel I'm staying at, and I walk in, and the people at the front desk, they say, Harry Belafonte has called you three to five times.

14:51He's trying to reach you. I said, well, he says, so you want a ticket? I said, no, I'll go up to my room. So I go to my room. And Harry Belafonte says, how soon can you get to New York? I said, what's going on? He says, how soon do you need to be? How soon do I need to be? He says, ASAP. So I got what I think was the last plane out of Birmingham. Harry had explained to me that as much as he wanted to say it with a phone, that the Rockefeller family wanted to help. Nelson was helping the family. No, he said the Rockefeller family. He didn't say Nelson. He said the Rockefeller family. I remember that distinctly.

15:28Call this number when I get in. So I called this number. The man's name I called was Hugh Morrow. He was a PR person for the Rockefeller family, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. He instructed me, now this is April, Friday, April 20th, 1963. Yeah. The Saturday morning, the Chase Bank was then at 46th Street, and Avenue in America is not where it is now on Park Avenue somewhere. Banks were not open. It was Saturday. There were no ATM machines. Yeah. So I go into the Chase Bank, and there is Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of the state of New York. David Rockefeller was the CEO of the bank, right? David Rockefeller was the president and CEO.

16:12Yeah. But Nelson was Nelson that day. So they both helped you. Yeah. Wow. I walked into the bank and David is taller than Nelson. He just died at 102 about seven or eight years ago. Yeah, I know. I know. He's taller than Nelson. Yeah, I remember him. They go into a bank. I never paid any attention. I just go to a bank. Never paid any attention. The only time I ever paid attention to a bank vault was in gangster movies. I'd watch a gangster movie and somebody would say, this is a stick up. And I'd never, you know, I'd go into a bank, I'd even... You don't think about the place of all the money here.

16:52I'd never even thought about a bank vault, okay? But when I went in this time, there was this huge, like, wheel on a ship. Yep. You know? That's a safe. I love it. Turn that ship. And when that door opened, the bank vault door was that thick, okay? And David, who was taller than Nelson, walked in. As I said, repeat to me, I said, walked in. Grabbed a bag of money. $100 ,000. Wow. I had a chain, a wrist chain made for me. Wow. I said, geez, I'm so thankful and so forth. And then a case for carrying the money was a change of wrist. Wow. So I want to leave. He says, oh, no, no, no, no. I said, gentlemen, you have to go over and see that man sitting there.

17:38So I said, what? So I go see a man, and I go over there, and he's typing. He says, your first name is Clarence. What's the B for? The B stands for Benjamin. So we're sensing Clarence Benjamin Jones. I said, excuse me, what are you typing? He said, well, this is a promissory note. You know, we're a bank. We have to have a record. We can't just give you money. So I signed this promissory note. It was a promissory note on demand. I signed it for$100 ,000 in 1960. That was real money back then. In 1963. So I sign it, and I'm pissed. I'm angry because I wasn't anticipating this. Yeah. And I go to a pay phone.

18:23I call Harry Belafonte. He says, did everything go okay? He says, yeah, but you didn't tell me I have to sign a promissory note for$100 ,000. He says, better you than me. I said, but you have the money and I don't. Okay. Tuesday, that was on a Saturday. Yep. I take the money and the cash, I go to Birmingham. I'm in my office on a Tuesday morning. As a messenger comes in from the Chase Bank, they ask me some identification. I show them who I am. This gentleman says, can we go into an office, private office, my office? I go into the office, and there's an envelope mark. Clarence B. Jones, personal confidential.

19:01I open the envelope, and there was a note that I had signed. And it says, paid in full. That's good, guys. I said, damn. I didn't pay it. That's nice of them. Okay. So they took care of you. Okay. And David was a great man. That's a wonderful story. Tell us a little bit of what it was like to be, you know, during the civil rights movement, you had protesters who were beaten up. The FBI was spying on you. You had all sorts of this, like, really, you know, kind of tough time going on. But what was that like living through that? Was it scary? Was it like you were in a battle together? Would you wake up kind of worried about something, but you keep fighting anyway?

19:37How did it feel being in a minute? Well, there came a point, and I know we shared about Andy Young. Andy Young was saying the same thing, you know. Andy Young does it very humorously. The way we dealt with the stress, we had to humorize it. And Martin King had a kind of strange sense of humor. He would say, now, Andy, if something happens to you, don't worry. I'm going to preach a sermon that you've never heard. And he says, now, Andy, I think I can preach him into heaven. Now, Clarence, I don't know about you, but I will do my best. If something happens to you, I will give, I will preach. I'll say, Lord, let him in.

20:23Let him in, Lord, let him in. So we used to, he used to, we used to externalize. You had to joke about it a little bit. We had to externalize the reality because none of us, including myself. Okay. I'm 93 years old. Okay. I never expected to live beyond the age of 50. I thought if I lived behind the age of 50, that would be old. It would be amazing, yeah. Okay. I just figured. And so you lived that way. I didn't have insurance. You didn't buy insurance for it. You were living in the moment fighting for - Yeah, you didn't think about estate planning or anything. Because you never thought you were going to live beyond the age of 50.

21:03I want to ask also, because you worked on so many of Dr. King's speeches, with him and you knew how he thought, a lot of us were really inspired by how he would go back to the Enlightenment values. He would go back to the founding values of the U.S. and our Constitution and explain to people, we're not living up to these values of our founders of our country, of America, in a way that, frankly, people don't do that today. But he really knew that history, and he really drew upon it in a way that inspires a lot of us who do believe in this country, that we need to live up to our country's ideals.

21:29Now, there was a speech that I had nothing to do with except over the phone. We talked about it. There's a speech he gave March 29th at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The speech is called Sleeping Through a Revolution. Talks about Rip Van Winkle, Sleeping Through a Revolution. That speech that he gave at the National Cathedral, which we talked about over the phone, content. Well, you know, You know, you didn't have texts. You couldn't text each other those days. Yeah, you couldn't text him anything. So we would talk about texts as things I would suggest to him. But that speech in which he talks about Rip Van Winkle, Stephen Wim, one of the most powerful speeches he ever gave, equal to the speech he gave, of course, on April 3rd at the temple in Memphis.

22:25If I had to bookend Martin King's life, I'd bookend them with two things. The letter from the Birmingham jail and the speech he gave opposing the war in Vietnam. Time to break the silence. Those are the two most powerful. He'd written a lot of speeches. Now, let me say something to a question you didn't ask. One of the reasons I was able to be so effective with Dr. King, that I had gone to the Juilliard School of Music before I went to law school. Interesting. And when you go to the Juilliard School of Music, you develop, they have something called ear training. You develop the capacity to memorize enormous amount of pages of music.

23:12I was a clarinetist, I was a clarinetist. But you develop the capacity to memorize pages and pages of music. but you remember that the note A has 440 vibrations per second. Note A, you hear it. Note C, 426 vibrations per second. I have to speak in languages you would understand by telling you performers like Barbra Streisand has what is called perfect pitch, meaning that when she sings a note, it's neither above the line sharp or below the line flat. It's the right number per second. Right, right. Ray Charles, perfect French. Frank Sinatra, perfect pitch. Okay. This young girl, Taylor Swift, perfect pitch.

24:04The ability to be able to sing the note exactly with the vibrations per second, need to flatten. That was the power of Frank Sinatra. I had that capacity. And notwithstanding, I'm 93 years old. I still have the capacity. You still do. When he gave his speeches, you were able to kind of get the tones and tunes right. I still have the capacity to write. And as I write, if I speak it, I can hear it. I can hear my words. The advantage I had to Dr. King, that I could write words. and I could hear how they would sound when he spoke them because I had an ear that was attuned to what the words would sound like.

24:55And this was a big part of his power is how he played it. It's almost like a singing then along with the worship. Oh, unbelievable, unbelievable. Never. That's amazing. Never, I mean, it's like, you know, I mean, And I think of great people like Aristotle and Schopenhauer and Shakespeare. You know, these are great people. This is a very important point. I'm asking you questions about the intellectual side, or I was asking questions about the intellectual side of the founding values, but you're telling me, listen, there's that side, but even more important is this power of the speech and of the music and of how it is to people.

25:29And I believe that came from his encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and a more than average knowledge of the Talmud. Wow, really? Jewish. I'm Jewish, so I studied Talmud. That's amazing. He was to me... He studied Talmud. I didn't realize that. Well, it's to me the first and only... I haven't met a black preacher, okay, that had as a commanding knowledge of the Talmud, as Dr. King had. I want to drill in on this because I'm, you know, as a Jew, I'm very proud of the role some Jews played in the Civil Rights Movement, at least from the understanding they did. So you worked alongside many of them.

26:13Were there a lot involved with you directly that were helpful? Helpful. That's the understatement. I always like to put the, see, one of the things, I have a responsibility as a 93-year-old survivor. I have a responsibility to not speak to you or speak to other people about the role of Jewish people in the Civil Rights Movement. I have a responsibility to speak to you not about what somebody told me, not about what I heard, but what I saw and what I heard. Ironically, I would challenge Dr. King. I say, you know, you're a bad, you know. I mean, I think you are unbelievable. But let's just face it, Martin.

27:02There's no way that 12 % of the population, we Negroes, are going to get 88 % of the population, white people, to do something they don't want to do. It's not going to happen. Now, I don't mean to denigrate you, because you're the best. I've never seen anybody speak the spoken word so magnificently to you. But the fact of the matter is, we're only 12 % of the population. He says, well, Clarence, we have to try to raise the consciousness and so forth. So I'm a very outspoken person. I mean, I'm not an introvert. I'm an extrovert. I could tell. Okay. So I would be places and I would go and I would see white people.

27:43And I would go up and I say to them, excuse me, why are you here? And it'd be taken aback. I said, no, why are you here in this picket line? Why are you here? And these white people that I raised that question was, they would say, you, Attorney Jones, you and your Dr. King should know that I am here, or my brother or my husband or I are here, because this is what our grandparents would want us to do. So I said, excuse me? Yes, you see, my grandpa, or sometimes they say their grandma or grandpa, they died in the Holocaust. You heard about the Holocaust? Oh, yes, I know about that. Well, I am here because I know that this is what they would want me to do.