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Clarence B. Jones, Who Helped Shape ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech, Dies at 95
Clarence B. Jones, a confidant, lawyer and speechwriter for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, who helped plan the March on Washington and drafted part of Dr. King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, died on Friday in Cupertino, Calif. He was 95.
His death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his son, Clarence Jr.
A brilliant organizer and a member of Dr. King’s inner circle, Mr. Jones planned protest campaigns; raised funds for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and coordinated legal strategies to challenge discriminatory laws, defend arrested demonstrators and fight lawsuits against their leaders.
He was one of the lawyers who represented four Black ministers in a seminal case of libel law, The New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the United States Supreme Court held that a public official could not win damages for criticism of his official performance without proving that published statements were made with deliberate malice. It was a landmark victory for the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press, and cleared the way for reporting on widespread disorder and civil rights infringements in the South without fear of libel actions.
It was also a clarifying victory for civil rights leaders. “We regarded the suit as an effort to politically discredit the leadership of the direct action civil rights movement of Dr. King,” Mr. Jones told law students at the University of San Francisco in 2012. “The political objective of the lawsuit was to bankrupt and decapitate the civil rights leadership.”
The many-sided Mr. Jones was at various times a California entertainment lawyer, the first Black partner in a Wall Street brokerage on the New York Stock Exchange, the principal owner and publisher of The New York Amsterdam News, a co-owner of the radio station WLIB-AM in Harlem, a university professor and the author of books on civil rights.
He also investigated the bloodiest prison uprising in the nation’s history — the 1971 inmate revolt at Attica, N.Y., which was crushed by National Guard troops and state police officers on Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s orders. As Mr. Jones and Representative Herman Badillo later said in sworn statements, they were unable to persuade the governor of alternatives to retaking the prison, in an assault that led to the deaths of 29 prisoners and 10 hostages and years of lawsuits and recriminations over responsibility for what a court called an “orgy of violence.”
Mr. Jones was often an unseen hand behind historic events. In 1963, he helped plan demonstrations in racially-segregated Birmingham, Ala., that exposed to a shocked nation the brutality of authorities who turned high-pressure fire hoses and snarling dogs on hundreds of children and adult protesters, many of whom, including Dr. King, were hauled off to overflowing city jails.
Later, when Dr. King wrote his classic statement on racism, the “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” it was Mr. Jones who smuggled it out — a “manuscript” scribbled first on scraps of paper and in the margins of newspapers, and later on Mr. Jones’s notepads. The bits and pieces were assembled and edited for publication by the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker.
That summer, Dr. King, Mr. Jones and others — including Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, John Lewis and the political strategist Stanley Levison — met often at Mr. Jones’s apartment in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx to plan the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and discuss ideas for the speech Dr. King would deliver at the Lincoln Memorial.
There were several versions, written at different times, of what became the “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. King wrote a final draft with Mr. Jones and Mr. Levison. They called it “Normalcy — Never Again.” There was no reference to a dream and little of the stirring rhetoric for which Dr. King is remembered.
“The logistical preparations for the march were so burdensome that the speech was not a priority for us,” Mr. Jones recalled in a memoir, “Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation” (2011, with Stuart Connelly).
On Aug. 28, 1963, 250,000 people crowded onto the National Mall. The day was a show of support for civil rights legislation proposed by President John F. Kennedy, and the speakers had agreed to avoid incendiary remarks that might derail it.
Dr. King’s speech began quietly, with an analogy about America defaulting on a promissory note to its minority citizens, and Mr. Jones, standing nearby, recognized it as one of his contributions. Then, partway into the speech, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.”
Dr. King paused. “Martin clutched the speaker’s lectern and seemed to reset,” Mr. Jones recalled. Then Dr. King put his text aside, dropped his assessment of current injustices and launched into a soaring, improvised peroration on his vision of America as a land of freedom and equality rising from slavery and hatreds.
“I have a dream,” he declared, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
“I have a dream,” he continued, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”
Mr. Jones later obtained, and signed over to Dr. King, the registered copyright for one of the most heralded speeches of the century.
Clarence Benjamin Jones was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 8, 1931, to Goldsborough and Mary (Toliver) Jones. His father was a gardener and chauffeur, and his mother was a maid.
To give him a better life, his parents placed him in a foster home in Palmyra, N.J., when he was 6. He attended a boarding school in Cornwells Heights, Pa., and graduated from Palmyra High School in 1949, and from Columbia University in 1953. The Dr. Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy was dedicated in his honor in 2017 at Palmyra High School.
Drafted by the Army, he refused to sign a loyalty oath, spent 21 months at Fort Dix, N.J., and received an “undesirable” discharge in 1955. But he sued and won an honorable discharge.
In 1956, he married Anne Norton, whose parents had founded the book publisher W.W. Norton & Company. They had four children, Christine, Alexia, Clarence Jr. (known as Ben) and Dana, and divorced in 1970. Anne Jones died in 1977.
A 1976 marriage to Charlotte Schiff ended in divorce in 1984. In 1990, he married Jennifer Poznanski; they had one daughter, Felicia, and were divorced in 2000. He is survived by his five children and his longtime partner, Lin Walters.
He received a law degree from Boston University in 1959, moved to Altadena, Calif., and practiced entertainment law. In 1960 he helped defend Dr. King in an Alabama tax perjury case, returned to New York and became a fund-raiser and lawyer for Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
His most notable case was the libel suit that arose after The Times published an advertisement in 1960 soliciting funds for Dr. King’s defense in the tax perjury case. Dr. King was cleared, but the suit continued. The ad cited racial conditions in the South. While it named no public officials, L.B. Sullivan, a public safety commissioner in Montgomery, Ala., accused The Times and four Black ministers who had signed the ad of defaming him. Many lawyers worked on the case, and Mr. Jones joined the ministers’ defense team.
After an Alabama jury awarded Mr. Sullivan $500,000, The Times and the ministers — the Revs. Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, S.S. Seay Sr. and Joseph E. Lowery — appealed, and the Supreme Court held in 1964 that public officials must prove “actual malice,” showing that a publisher knew a statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. The ruling undercut some $300 million in libel actions pending in the South against news organizations.
In 1967, Mr. Jones became a vice president of the Carter, Berlind & Weill brokerage and the first Black partner of a stock exchange member. After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, he turned increasingly to business. In 1971, he and Percy E. Sutton, the Manhattan borough president, led Black groups that bought The New York Amsterdam News, the nation’s largest Black community-based newspaper, and WLIB, which served largely Black audiences. Mr. Jones was the newspaper’s publisher for three years.
When inmates seized hostages and cellblocks in the state prison at Attica in 1971, Governor Rockefeller named Mr. Jones and Mr. Badillo as on-the-scene observers. But both took on larger roles during and after the crisis. They tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Mr. Rockefeller from ordering the assault that retook the prison. Mr. Jones, later appointed chairman of an investigative panel to protect the inmates’ constitutional rights, quoted witnesses as saying that some were beaten and others killed while trying to surrender.
In sworn statements in 1989 in support of an Attica prisoners’ lawsuit, Mr. Jones and Mr. Badillo said that the governor, who spoke to them by phone, had been indifferent to their warnings of likely mass killings if the police moved in, to alternatives they suggested to retaking the prison by force, and even to the fate of the inmates and hostages.
The governor, Mr. Jones said, “clearly accepted the inevitability of a massacre.” A federal appeals court dismissed the prisoners’ suit against the Rockefeller estate, saying the governor’s actions were not unlawful. But the state later paid millions to settle damage claims by inmates and their families.
Mr. Jones wrote “What Would Martin Say?” (2008, with Joel Engel), and “Uprising: Understanding Attica, Revolution and the Incarceration State” (2011, with Stuart Connelly).
In recent years, Mr. Jones had lectured widely, taught at the University of San Francisco and was a resident scholar at Stanford University in Palo Alto. In 2018, Mr. Jones and Jonathan D. Greenberg co-founded the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco to foster the teachings of Dr. King and Mohandas K. Gandhi. In 2024, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In an interview with The Free Press that year, Mr. Jones recalled telling Dr. King about what made him a talented speechwriter.
“I hear your voice in my head,” Mr. Jones said. “I hear your voice in perfect pitch.”
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Trump’s ‘American Flag Blue’ in the Lincoln Memorial pool is already gray — and the Olympic canoer ‘vandal’ is fighting his arrest | Fortune
The newly drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s bottom surface has noticeably faded since it was lined with a protective coating in a color President Donald Trump called “American flag blue” this spring.
An Associated Press reporter and photographer viewed the fenced-off Reflecting Pool on Wednesday from the top of the Washington Monument. The new liner appears grayer than when the pool was repainted and refilled with water in early June. Debris that had been visible earlier this week after the pool was drained is now largely gone, after work crews removed it.
Trump’s problem-plagued effort to revamp the landmark has stretched well past his initial goal of having the Reflecting Pool ready by July 4 for the nation’s 250th birthday.
The president at first suggested his renovations would cost $1.5 million, but the bill ballooned to more than $16 million by June.
Trump had said the repairs would last a century, but within days of the project’s initial completion last month, the water was beset by an algae bloom and pieces of the new coating appeared to be peeling off the bottom.
Ohio-based Green Water Solutions, also known as Greenwater Services, was given a $1.7 million contract to install a water-purification system in the Reflecting Pool, while Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings was awarded $14.7 million to repaint and waterproof the pool’s concrete floor.
Vandalism charges were levied against a former Olympic canoeist
Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals for the peeling paint, though critics allege it’s from shoddy repair work.
Trump has said, without citing evidence, that vandals made a “350-foot gash” in the liner and caused other problems. No large slash marks were immediately visible Wednesday from the Washington Monument view. It was not possible to do a more up-close inspection of the entire pool due to a dark fence surrounding the perimeter.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency oversees the National Park Service, said that after the water is drained and debris is cleaned from Independence Day fireworks, the plan for the pool is straightforward: “Repair the vandalism that was done. Fill it back up again.” He was speaking with conservative podcaster Katie Miller.
Court documents show that the National Park Service reported to the U.S. Park Police a June 9 incident in which a sharp knife or razor was said to have cut the pool’s new liner.
Former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn pleaded not guilty last week in D.C. Superior Court to deliberately damaging the Reflecting Pool. Hearn has said he reached inside the pool to examine the peeled sealant and let go of a chunk when he was told to by a park worker.
His attorneys and other Trump administration critics have derided the case as an abuse of prosecutorial power and maintain he is being scapegoated for the poor job done fixing up the Reflecting Pool.
At least three other people have been charged in the same court with misdemeanors for allegedly removing pieces of paint from the pool, court records show. All three pleaded not guilty during initial court appearances.
The work on the Reflecting Pool is just one of a number of projects Trump has spearheaded across the nation’s capital. Most prominently, he demolished the White House’s East Wing to build a $400 million ballroom and plans to build a towering arch. between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
Argentina’s Lionel Messi celebrates the team’s second goal by Lautaro Martínez during their World Cup semifinal against England on Wednesday in Atlanta. Argentina defeated the English 2-1 to advance to Sunday’s final against Spain.
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ATLANTA — Argentina, the death-defying defending World Cup champion, will play for a second consecutive title after scoring two late goals to beat England in the semifinal, 2-1.
For a fourth straight knockout game, Argentina survived a heart-stoppingly close call. First was Cape Verde, the African island nation underdog, who took the champions to extra time. Then was the furious miracle comeback after Egypt took a 2-0 lead. Then, in the quarterfinal, a shorthanded Switzerland squad forced extra time despite a 72nd-minute red card.
This gutsy Argentina squad prevailed in all three games, and Wednesday, they pulled it off yet again. In the 55th minute, England took a 1-0 lead when forward Anthony Gordon tapped in a cross.
But, as the clock ticked up, Argentina turned up the intensity. A relentless onslaught yielded near miss after near miss before finally midfielder Enzo Fernández scored off a rocket from outside the penalty area to equalize the game at 1-1 in the 85th minute.
Then, in stoppage time, forward Lautaro Martínez sent the Argentina crowd into delirium with a header off a cross from 39-year-old superstar Lionel Messi, who assisted on both goals.
“I think that this team plays the best when we are facing a difficult situation, with adversity, ” said Argentina coach Lionel Scaloni afterward. “We had a challenging game, a challenging situation. There was blood in the water, and we went for it.”
In Sunday’s final they will face Spain, which defeated France on Tuesday 2-0 to contend for their second-ever title.
England’s Anthony Gordon celebrates scoring his team’s first goal during the World Cup semifinal against Argentina on Wednesday in Atlanta.
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Wednesday’s game, the sixth meeting between these two teams at the men’s World Cup, was the newest chapter in their storied rivalry. That history includes the infamous “Hand of God” goal scored by Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup, four years after a war between the two countries over the Falkland Islands. The British won the war, but the sovereignty of the territory is still under dispute.
(Asked Tuesday about the “Hand of God,” which was the first of two goals scored by Maradona, coach Scaloni slyly deflected. “I think all of the world remembers that game, remembers Diego’s performance, remembers above all the second goal,” he said.)
To hear England’s coach, none of that mattered on Wednesday. “We respect our opponent, but we don’t dip in historic events, and we don’t make it bigger than it is,” Thomas Tuchel told reporters the day before the match.
Yet from the opening kick, both teams eagerly played a physical game: Collisions, jersey tugs, tough tackles, bodies flying to the ground. Referee Ismail Elfath, the first American man to work a World Cup semifinal, awarded a yellow card to each team before halftime.
And after the game, as Argentina’s players celebrated on the field, midfielder Giovani Lo Celso, who did not play in the match, unfurled a white banner bearing the words “Las Malvinas son Argentinas,” or “the Malvinas are Argentine,” a reference to the Argentine name for the Falkland Islands. The banner appeared to have been first held by Argentina fans in the stands.
For England fans, the pain is a familiar one as they watched the team fall short in yet another major tournament knockout game. England lost in the Euros final in both 2024 and 2020, and the last time they reached the World Cup semifinal in 2018, they lost by the same score as Wednesday’s match, 2-1, despite scoring first.
England’s forward Harry Kane (#9) and teammates react after losing their World Cup semifinal match 2-1 against Argentina.
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“It’s a similar story to what’s happened in previous tournaments,” England Captain Harry Kane conceded afterward. “We’d done so well for that 60 minutes. We scored. We deserved to be ahead. And then, for one reason or another, we struggled to keep the ball. We struggled to put pressure on the ball and it just allowed them to create more momentum.”
The atmosphere inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta was raucous and ear-splitting. Argentine fans by the thousands wore the white and sky blue striped jerseys bearing the name of their star Messi. The English celebrated their team wearing all-white or all-red jerseys of their scoring sensations: Kane and Jude Bellingham.
But neither star could save England from another defeat, extending what has already been an agonizing 60-year wait to return to the final.
NPR’s Russell Lewis contributed reporting from Atlanta
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ICE should do traffic stops despite recent shootings, Trump says, seeming to oppose new suspension
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should continue vehicle stops after recent fatal shootings, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, seeming to oppose a new suspension of the practice used as part of his immigration crackdown.
ICE is “doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done,” Trump wrote on his social media site.
The Republican president said that to remove criminals he claims were let into the country under the previous Democratic administration “we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump said, “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
Trump administration officials have told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to suspend most vehicle stops after two deadly shootings within a week, people familiar with the decision said Tuesday.
The suspension was ordered after an ICE officer shot and killed a Colombian driver Monday in Maine and a week after another officer shot and killed a motorist in Houston, renewing criticism of the agency’s enforcement tactics that were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.
In Florida on Tuesday, a third man in roughly a week died during an encounter with immigration officers. This time, a 28-year-old man was killed after he was hit by a tractor trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers, authorities said.
It’s a narrative that has been repeated again and again since the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began, with federal officers confronting drivers and then saying they opened fire when the drivers’ vehicles became a danger. That’s despite decades of warnings from policing experts that shooting into moving cars presents a danger of its own and should almost always be avoided.
There have been at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched his deportation campaign. At least four of those deaths involved people in vehicles, including the one last week in Houston, a trend so troubling that U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Tuesday that she had urged Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
John Sandweg, who was acting director at ICE, which is part of DHS, during President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, estimated recently that there have been roughly 18 traffic stop shootings during the Trump immigration crackdown.
The office of Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was told by DHS that ICE was suspending traffic stops, office spokesperson Matthew Felling said.
ICE, which has been under pressure to beef up arrest and deportation numbers, often says people it’s trying to arrest are increasingly resistant to leaving their homes. ICE officers blame immigration advocates who advise immigrants to stay in their homes unless ICE produces a warrant signed by an independent judge instead of the administrative warrants the agency generally uses that are signed by another ICE officer. So, ICE officers say, they’re forced to find other areas in which to make arrests.
Shooting angers Maine
Hundreds of people in Maine protested Tuesday over the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national. Advocacy groups said Guerrero, who had a wife and a young daughter, was authorized to work in the United States.
DHS said Monday that an officer, “fearing for public safety,” shot and killed Durán Guerrero while officers were watching the home of someone they believed was in the U.S. illegally and facing a final order of removal from the country. It said in a post on X that when ICE tried to stop a car driven by someone who came from the home, the person attempted to flee in the vehicle and the officer fired.
That was a shift from how King earlier described the encounter, when he said Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon. King said Mullin told him the officers were trying to serve an arrest warrant but not for the man who was shot.
In a scathing post on X, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the shooting a targeted killing “at the hands of the U.S. government.”
Petro, who has openly quarreled with Trump, urged Trump to provide an explanation and accused ICE officers of treating Durán Guerrero as “an inferior being without rights.”
In Wednesday’s social media post, Trump told ICE to be “judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”
Maine’s congressional delegation on Tuesday demanded a “comprehensive, transparent, and expedited investigation.”
Questions surround the shooting
Photos showed bullet holes in Durán Guerrero’s car windshield, but the officers involved in the shooting didn’t have body cameras, leaving many questions. Among them are how close the officer was to the vehicle when shooting, whether officers told Durán Guerrero to stop and why ICE believes he had put the public in danger.
Border czar Tom Homan told reporters Tuesday that the investigation needs to play out and that officers will be held accountable if they are found to have acted inappropriately or illegally.
Maine’s attorney general’s office, which said it is working with federal agencies to investigate, said initial statements suggest the driver was trying to flee in the direction of the officer, whose name hasn’t been released and who was placed on leave.
Collins said Mullin told her the DHS inspector general is investigating in cooperation with the FBI.
Democrats seeking to unseat Collins in November have sought to connect her with ICE’s methods, which have drawn public scrutiny and derision. Collins later said in a statement that although ICE needs to improve, eliminating the agency would make the nation less safe.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is vying for Collins’ seat, called the ICE officers at the shooting “thugs” during a vigil Tuesday in Lewiston.
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Whittle contributed from Biddeford, Maine; Brook from New Orleans; and Sisak from New York.
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