The Man Who Kept King's Secrets; Now 75, Clarence Jones, the

galvanizing lawyer who was Martin Luther King Jr.

Source: Vanity Fair (01-APR-06)

By: Douglas Brinkley

"The Klan's position in Birmingham was that a dead nigger was a good nigger," an agitated
Clarence Jones tells me. "Eugene 'Bull' Connor, [the city's infamous] commissioner of public
safety, made it very clear there would be no integration while he was alive. Not only were racial
slurs shouted out of windows by angry whites cruising down Sixth Avenue, but African-American
houses were being blown to smithereens by dynamite sticks and pipe bombs. You hear what I'm
saying? It was brutal."

Martin Luther King Jr.'s former attorney is all riled up as he sits in his high-rise office on New
York's East Side. Although Clarence B. Jones isn't a household name, it should be. From 1960 to
1968 this razor-sharp lawyer was one of King's ace advisers and speechwriters. Together, the men
slew racist dragons from coast to coast. When King checked into New York motels, he did so
under his attorney's good name. It was a diversionary ploy used to shake both the F.B.I. and the
media types off King's peripatetic trail.

Look up Jones in the indexes of the Pulitzer Prize-winning histories written by Taylor Branch,
David Garrow, or Diane McWhorter and you'll learn that, by the time of the famous 1963 March
on Washington, Jones had evolved into King's clutch legal lieutenant. A superb fund-raiser, Jones-
who circulated easily among the rich of New York and L.A.-would find willing donors to fuel
King's frenetic activities with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.), which
King co-founded. Jones was, in essence, the moneyman of the movement.

Yet up until now Jones has been comfortable in the shadowlands of civil-rights history. "Clarence
has enormous gifts," the singer and actor Harry Belafonte explains. "Back in the 60s every law
firm seeking diversity wanted him. But once he got hired he became a problem. Because Clarence
always put social justice ahead of making money. And for those of us around King, [Clarence]
was always ready with the right word to raise the house spirits." Or as ex-S.C.L.C. chief, Atlanta
mayor, and U.N. ambassador Andrew Young puts it, "Clarence was the guy that King could
trust-no leaks and no grandstanding."

When I recently encountered Jones in his Manhattan office, he was finally ready to talk openly
and on the record-to a degree. Jones, the former owner of the Amsterdam News, turned to
business pursuits in earnest after becoming entangled in a fraud case and being disbarred in 1982.
Now a financial guru of the first order, he works for the independent accounting firm of Marks
Paneth & Shron. He counts Wall Street titans Sanford I. Weill and Arthur Levitt Jr. among his
closest friends. Money, clearly, is not his motivation for speaking out. Instead, he is concerned

1
about both the historical truth and his own mortality. Jones-a cancer survivor, six feet tall, his
well-groomed mustache reminiscent of King's-believes he has a sacred obligation to reveal the
untold tale of his time with King, and to teach a new generation about the indignities he suffered
along the way, such as having the F.B.I. bug his phones. Indeed, former president Jimmy Carter,
while speaking at Coretta Scott King's funeral in February, pointedly raised the issue of federal
eavesdropping, telling the gathering, which included Jones-and President George W. Bush-about
how "Martin and Coretta [had their] civil liberties ... violated as they became the target of secret
government wiretapping."

Wearing blue-tinted eyeglasses and one loop earring, Jones speaks emphatically, waving his hands
like an impassioned courtroom lawyer, peppering his comments with "O.K.? O.K.?" after making
a trenchant point or refuting charges that he was King's "beard," tasked with escorting his female
companions. A genial raconteur, Jones always doubles back, worried he's losing his jury (me) in a
Johnstown flood of nostalgia and rhetoric.

Jones's cell phone vibrates incessantly. He frequently switches between pairs of eyeglasses. (He has
recently undergone eye surgery.) His mind is agile, his storytelling detailed. Except for being
noticeably thin, he appears healthy. Now, with decades elapsed, he is letting the world know the
real Martin, whom he still loves like a blood brother.

The mere mention of Birmingham, however, has Jones wired. He points out that, just as surely as
Gettysburg and Antietam were Civil War battle sites, Birmingham was a bona fide war zone.
"And so when Martin decided to make [a national example of] the segregated city, America ...
gulped," he explains. "With [Bull] Connor in charge, German shepherds and fire hoses and mass
arrests were sure to follow." He paces around his plaque-filled office and laments the fact that
back in the Jim Crow era if a Birmingham store owner removed his whites only sign Connor cited
him for "violations of the sanitary code."

Disgusted, Jones suddenly mumbles "Martin" three or four times while shaking his head and then
calms down a bit. Racism has clearly left its psychic scars. His stories of torment continue. Like
the time in the spring of 1963 when King persuaded many of Birmingham's African-American
parents to let their children skip school to participate in civil-rights demonstrations. "As a result,"
Jones recalls, "hundreds of children, ranging from age 12 and older, plus hundreds of adults got
arrested. Unfortunately, there was insufficient bail money to get them out."

King, clad in denim overalls, was handcuffed and tossed in the Birmingham City Jail along with
the courageous teenagers. The national media poured into the racist steel town. Attorney Jones
was one of the few people allowed to visit King in solitary confinement. King was eager to
embarrass Dixie's white ministers, eight of whom had openly denounced him in The Birmingham
News, demanding that he end his "unwise and untimely"-though nonviolent-protest. With a few
other dedicated foot soldiers, Jones among them, King hatched the idea of writing an open letter

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to clergymen of various denominations. In history books it is known as the landmark "Letter from
Birmingham Jail."

"I would take sheets from a yellow legal pad and stuff them into my shirt," Jones remembers,
using papers from his desk to re-enact the scene. "Martin would then write like mad. Very hard to
decipher. I'd sneak the pages out. He had confidence that I would get them to Willie Pearl
Mackey, [the secretary of King cohort] Wyatt Walker. Until he got the paper, he was writing on
the margins of a Birmingham News and New York Times."

Jones insists he had no idea that the essay would become an inspirational document for the ages.
Yet, with a proud grin, he hunts around his office and finds a letter from then-president Bill
Clinton praising Jones for his part in "giving us Dr. King's wonderful letter from Birmingham
jail." Asked how Clinton knew about his smuggling story while most civil-rights scholars don't,
Jones explains that "his friend [historian] Taylor Branch told him about me."

It wasn't the moral clarity of the letter, however, that freed King from his tiny cell. Money did.
With no bail- bond funds available, King and the others were facing the prospect of spending
weeks or months behind bars. But an unexpected angel arrived, courtesy of a telephone call from
Belafonte. Jones remembers Belafonte saying in an excited tone, "'I was discussing [the
Birmingham problem] with Nelson Rockefeller's speechwriter. It's a fellow named Hugh Morrow-
he used to work for The Saturday Evening Post-who you'll be hearing from.' Next thing I know I
got a call from Morrow-'How can I help?'"

Jones replied, "Well, I'm coming back [to New York] tonight. Let's meet."

Since 1961, Nelson Rockefeller had been writing occasional checks to the S.C.L.C., usually in the
range of $5,000 to $10,000. This time, they would need much, much more. "I arrived in New
York late," Jones recounts. "Morrow lived on Sutton Place. I called him at one o'clock in the
morning. Half asleep, he says, 'We want you to be at the Chase Manhattan Bank tomorrow, even
though it's Saturday. We want to help Martin.'

"I walk in at the [appointed] time and there is Rockefeller, Morrow, a bank official, and a couple
of security guards. They open the huge vault. There was a big circular door with a driver's-wheel-
like handle on it. Lo and behold there was money stacked floor to ceiling! Rockefeller walks in
and takes $100,000 in cash and puts it in a satchel, a briefcase-like thing. And one of the Chase
Manhattan Bank officers says, 'Mr. Jones, can you sit down for a moment?' I sit down and he says,
'Your name is Clarence B. Jones, right? We've got to have a note for this.'"

Jones hesitated, flabbergasted. "This man filled out a promissory note: Clarence B. Jones,
$100,000 payable on demand," Jones recalls. "Now, I wasn't stupid. I said, 'Payable on demand?!
I don't have $100,000!' And the bank official ... said, 'No, we'll take care of it, but we've got to
have it for banking regulations.'"

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Worried he was being impudent, Jones signed the document. "I took the money and got on a
plane headed back to Alabama," Jones says. "I am a hero. All the kids are bailed out.

"Everybody around Martin knew that I had somehow magically raised bail," he contends, citing
others who deserve more credit than he: especially Belafonte, along with Morrow, Walker, and
Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth. "I stayed mum all these years about the donor. I didn't
tell the story I'm telling you- except to King, who was ecstatic. I had a firm 'Don't Ask' policy.

"I later became close with Rockefeller [then the governor of New York] because we worked
together [trying to help quell] the Attica prison revolt [of September 1971], which lasted for three
or four days. It ended in a siege by state troopers and National Guardsmen, ordered by
Rockefeller. During the crisis I never talked to him about the Birmingham money. It was off the
table. The only thing I did say was 'Governor, I want you to know from my mouth to your ears
how deeply indebted we are to the support that your family gave to us.' Of course, he was rather
diffident about it. 'My mother, my family, from early on supported Spelman College. When it
comes to civil rights we go all the way back.'"

Born in 1931, Jones grew up in North Philadelphia, his mother a maid-cook, his father a
chauffeur-gardener to rich white families. Due to the strains of domestic servitude, young
Clarence was placed in a Palmyra, New Jersey, foster home when he was only six. Next, he was
sent to a boarding school for orphans and foster children in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania. It
was run by the Order of the Sacred Heart, which also operated a mission on a Navajo reservation
in New Mexico. "I vividly recall being in school with young boys seven or eight years old whose
names were Running Deer and Little Bear," Jones reminisces. "The boys had pigtails."

A dutiful altar boy who said his Hail Marys and Our Fathers, praying that his parents would
eventually bring him home, Jones fell under the sweet spell of Sister Mary Patricia, an Irish nun.
She showed him the meaning of Christian compassion. Her kindness still evokes fond memories:
"I remember, a number of years later, Martin King saying to me, 'Clarence, I need you to go up
to the North. I know you've got this firebrand radicalism in you. But you're not anti-white. I've
never heard you talk about white people in an angry fashion.' I said, 'You know, Martin, it may
be [because] the first source of love I had as a young boy were Irish nuns.'"

The goal-oriented Jones attended Palmyra High, graduating in 1949. He was chosen president of
the honor society and valedictorian of his integrated class. "My speech was 'Tomorrow a Better
World,'" Jones remembers, cringing at the sophomoric title. "Much of my class was white. My
parents worked for their parents. So it was a big thing for the domestic help's son to give the
address. My parents were sitting in the audience, proud as peacocks."

The model student was accepted at Columbia University, where he majored in political science.
Determined not to let his skin color impede his scholastic pursuits, Jones started reading the
literary canon, from the Iliad to Moby Dick. He was also a committed freshman football player.

4
Many of his more radical African- American friends, those active in the Young Progressives of
America, used to mock him for being a jock instead of an activist.

That's when singer-activist Paul Robeson-a friend of Jones's uncle-entered Clarence's life. An
outspoken stage performer with ties to the Communist Party, the controversial Robeson traveled
the world speaking out against racism. When Robeson-a former all-American football player at
Rutgers who spoke more than a dozen languages-learned that some student activists were
ridiculing Jones for his efforts on the gridiron, he sought out the teenager and told him,
"Clarence, you go back there and you tell your friends ... that one touchdown by you, a Negro,
with a full stadium on a Saturday at Baker's Field is going to have a greater [impact on] civil
rights than [they will have handing out] leaflets on 116th Street."

In June 1953, though the Korean War was ending, Jones was drafted. Radicalized by Robeson,
he told his New York induction board that he would not sign an oath affirming that he had not
been a member of any of the more than 200 organizations deemed "subversive" by the attorney
general-or that he had never associated with members of those groups. Instead, he offered a
written statement that he was ready, willing, and able to serve his country, provided he was
guaranteed the full rights stipulated under the 14th Amendment. Suspicions were aroused. He
seemed uppity, a prima donna on a W. E. B. DuBois trip.

Assigned to the U.S. Army's 47th Regiment, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, Private Jones became a
marked man, he claims, in the eyes of his superiors. However, he recalls, "[I] had a personality
that the guys just liked. Some of the guys in my unit began to call me 'Teach.' It got back to me
that they were being ordered to give me a whupping in the shower. Before that [could] happen I
was given an undesirable discharge-as a security risk."

The army had messed with the wrong African-American. Refusing to be bullied, Jones challenged
his dismissal. His first legal round occurred at Fort Dix, where he had been "Soldier of the
Month" and had scored a perfect 10 rating. Quite convincingly, Jones's commanding officer, who
testified on his behalf, described how Jones was a barracks standout for disassembling and re-
assembling his rifle while blindfolded. The army, however, refused to reverse the order.
Undaunted, Jones turned to the American Civil Liberties Union, which took on his case as it was
sent to a hearing at the Pentagon. Splitting the difference, the board awarded Jones a "general
discharge."

Many men would have called that a victory. Not Clarence B. Jones. With the A.C.L.U. by his
side, he challenged the verdict, taking the case to the secretary of the army, Wilbur Brucker. "I got
my honorable discharge," Jones says with a laugh. "And that legal decision allowed me to go to
Boston University [Law School] on the G.I. Bill and even collect veteran benefits. I stuck it to
them good."

On the very afternoon in 1956 that he was released from the army, he met his future wife, Anne

5
Aston Warder Norton, heiress to the W. W. Norton publishing fortune (his second of four
spouses). Educated at New York's Brearley private school for girls and at Sarah Lawrence
College, she had grown up amid wealth and privilege, with a governess and servants, in Gramercy
Park and Wilton, Connecticut. Anne Norton was white, and considered a "looker," in the
parlance of the time. Paradoxically imbued with an aristocratic demeanor but a socialist heart,
she possessed a fierce independence and pride as deep as her ice-blue eyes. (When Anne was a
teenager, her father died and her mother married Daniel Crena de Iongh, a distinguished Dutch
diplomat who became treasurer of the World Bank.)

Jones and Norton started dating steadily in New York, were married there, and then moved to
Boston so that both could attend graduate school at Boston University. Leers followed the
newlyweds everywhere, even in liberal Massachusetts, where interracial dating was largely
frowned upon. Even so, the late 1950s were an idyllic time for the Joneses. Anne, filled with
admiration for Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt, earned a degree in social work while
Clarence received his law degree.

Their love was based, in part, on a shared interest in community causes. They made friends easily
(with playwright Lorraine Hansberry, for example, who sent Clarence her early drafts of A Raisin
in the Sun, eager for his advice). The cold New England winters, however, were irritating, and
Boston was a backwater for entertainment law, Jones's newfound area of expertise. Clarence's
close friend the painter Charles White had just moved to sunny Pasadena. In June 1959 the
Joneses followed suit.

It was while living in Altadena, a Pasadena suburb, that Jones met King, already renowned as the
indomitable leader of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. The circumstances were hardly
ideal. In 1960 a beleaguered King had been indicted by the state of Alabama for perjury on a tax
return. A group of New York civil-rights lawyers thought Jones-who had acquired a reputation as
a legal whiz kid-was the ideal attorney to represent King. "My response to this at the time was, in
effect, that 'just because some Negro preacher got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, it's not
my problem,'" Jones recalls. "I told them I would not- under any circumstances-go to Alabama to
work essentially as a law clerk in the preparation of Dr. King's defense."

Refusing to be brushed aside, King, through an intermediary, asked if he could stop by Jones's
house on his next visit to Los Angeles. At the very least, King suggested, they should become
acquaintances. "What could I say?" Jones asks, grinning ear to ear.

The Joneses lived in a modernist mansion that had a palm tree in the middle of it. Part of the
ceiling was retractable. Depending upon the weather and the time of day, the living room might
open onto drifting clouds or the Milky Way. The San Gabriel Mountains could be seen from
almost every window. Thousands of indoor flowers and plants transformed the residence into a
virtual arboretum.

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It was in this verdant setting, Jones says, "that King, accompanied by Reverend Bernard Lee,
came into my home and sat down to talk with me." King began to interrogate Jones about his
hardscrabble upbringing and Horatio Alger rise. It was a pleasant exchange, but Jones held firm:
no Alabama and no working for the S.C.L.C. He was making good money working for an
entertainment lawyer, interacting with the likes of Nat King Cole and Sidney Poitier, and didn't
want to get mired in lunch-counter sit-ins and school-desegregation cases. At the time, in fact, he
was trying to organize a "jobs" protest for the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Los
Angeles. "Plus I had a daughter, and my wife was pregnant," Jones says. "I couldn't pick up and
leave California willy-nilly."

The next morning, the telephone rang. It was Dora McDonald, King's secretary, calling to invite
Jones and his wife to be his guests at Friendship Baptist Church, in well-heeled Baldwin Hills,
where many of L.A.'s "Negro intelligentsia" lived and where King was to be that Sunday's guest
preacher. Unable to get a babysitter on short notice, Jones, unwilling to further offend King,
attended alone. "The church parking lot was filled with Lincolns, Cadillacs, and a few Rolls-
Royces," Jones remembers. "I was escorted to my seat in about the 20th row from the front. The
church was filled, standing room only. Boy, Martin really had rock-star status."

When King was introduced, the congregation roared. King's oratorical temperature soon rose,
and he began an impassioned spiel about Negro professionals. Claiming that white lawyers were
helping the S.C.L.C. more than black ones, he launched into a modern-day parable about a
selfish, wealthy black man in their community. "For example," King exhorted, as Jones recalls,
"there is a young man sitting in this church today who my friends and colleagues in New York,
whom I respect, say is a gifted young lawyer. They say this young man is so good he can go into a
law library and find cases and things that most other lawyers can't find, that when he writes words
down in support of a legal case, his words are so compelling and persuasive that they almost jump
off the page."

For a flickering moment Jones pondered whether King was referring to Jones himself or some
other poor soul. A few seconds later he had his irrefutable answer: King was roasting him for
breakfast, espresso-style. "This young man lives in a home, in the suburbs of Los Angeles, with a
tree in the middle of his living room and a ceiling that opens up to the sky. He has a convertible
car parked in his driveway.... But this young man told me something about himself. His parents
were domestic servants. His mother worked as a maid and cook, his father a chauffeur and
gardener. I am afraid this gifted young man has forgotten from whence he came."

Mortified, Jones slumped down in his pew. "He never looked in my direction or said my name,"
Jones says, finding high humor in the decades-old humiliation. "He then went on to talk about my
mother and so many other Negro mothers who have wanted to educate their children." King, on
a rhetorical roll and perspiring greatly, then read the Langston Hughes poem "Mother to Son" in
his majestic voice:

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Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. ... But all the time
I'se been a-
climbin' on.

The Hughes poem brought Jones to tears. Martin had cut to his core. "I began to think about my
mother, who died at the age of 52 in 1953," Jones remembers. "His sermon had emotionally
messed me up." More reflective than piqued, Jones decided to have a word with King after the
service. He found the reverend busy signing autographs in the church parking lot. "He looked at
me," Jones recalls, "and smiled like a Cheshire cat and said in effect that he hoped I didn't mind
his using me to make a point in his sermon. I simply extended my hand and asked, 'Dr. King,
when do you want me to leave for Alabama?'" King nodded and hugged him. "Soon" is all he
said. "Very soon." Jones had become a "Movement Man."

Before long he was off for Alabama, working for S.C.L.C. lawyers, scouring law libraries in
Birmingham and Montgomery. After months of legal wrangling, a jury would rule in King's favor,
and Brother Jones would be embraced as the svelte new member of King's kitchen cabinet. Jones
soon moved his family to New York's Riverdale section so he could be close to the S.C.L.C.'s
Harlem office, taking up residence in a smart Douglas Avenue home overlooking the Hudson
River. Jones was made a partner in the law firm Lubell, Lubell & Jones, and became general
counsel for the Gandhi Society for Human Rights, which had been founded by King. In short
order, he was working on S.C.L.C. projects every day, with Stanley Levison as his erstwhile
coach. A savvy political strategist, fund-raiser for Jewish causes, and real-estate investor, Levison
was rumored to be the manager of the Communist Party's finances and, as a result, was on the
government's radar. Soon, the F.B.I. began monitoring Jones's varied activities, assigning agents
to shadow him in hopes of proving that King had unseemly Communist ties.

It wasn't until late 1961-when Jones shared a boardinghouse bedroom in Albany, Georgia, with
King-that the two men became personally inseparable. Demanding the abolition of segregation in
southwestern Georgia, as they were doing, was a hard dollar. With constant death threats, the
lawyer and civil-rights leader tried to keep low profiles, grabbing dinners at supporters' homes and
church basements. They felt like fugitives. Both were B.U. graduates, both were fathers, both had
wives expecting a third child. They had a lot to live for. "Martin was depressed, emotionally torn,"
Jones recalls. "He was obsessed about just versus unjust laws. When do you have a moral
obligation to go to jail? He felt his leadership was declining. And he was bitter about the media.
He'd say, 'You don't know how the press can eat you alive. They build you up just to tear you
down.'"

Curiously, King and Jones also shared a deep mutual respect for Judaism. Influenced by Levison,
they had developed into staunch supporters of Israel. "Jewish Americans, along with a few guys
like Rockefeller, financed the civil-rights movement," Jones explains. "And Martin's sentiments
regarding Jews were not opportunistic, as some have claimed. It was real. He consistently sought
to maintain the historic coalition and alliance with leaders of the Jewish community." According

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to Jones, King took great solace in the teachings of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, author
of the 1923 classic I and Thou.

"As King interpreted Buber, there were 'I-Thou' people (Good Samaritans who had a relationship
with God) and 'I-It' people (folks like the Black Power cabal that were self-centered)," Jones
maintains. "He loathed anti-Semitism and was enraged by the rise of the Black Power movement,
of guys like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and others who wanted to reduce the leadership
role of whites in black organizations. Martin would question how anyone who had any familiarity
with the biblical and political history of the Jewish people could have anything but the most
profound admiration and respect for the Jewish community."

When Malcolm X, the charismatic leader of the Nation of Islam, talked about the "white devil,"
often coupled with anti-Semitic rhetoric, King, according to Jones, would privately lament that
Malcolm was behaving no better than a hooded Klansman. This did not mean, however, that
Jones disliked the man. On the contrary, Jones would serve as a liaison between King and
Malcolm X. "At first Malcolm was disdainful of Martin's whole 'turn the other cheek' philosophy,"
Jones recalls. "But after [Malcolm's] trip to Mecca, he changed. [He] started speaking to me in
very respectful terms of his admiration for the courage of Martin." Often, Jones would attend
secret summits with Malcolm X, African-American scholar John Henrik Clarke, intellectual and
civil-rights figure John Killens, actor-activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and others. "It was like
a black caucus of political thinkers," he recalls. "My job was to collect insights gleaned from these
sessions and share them privately with Martin."

A strange White House tete-a-tete on June 22, 1963, brought the two even closer. President John
F. Kennedy, while squiring King around the Rose Garden, informed him that J. Edgar Hoover,
head of the F.B.I., was convinced that two S.C.L.C. associates-Levison and an S.C.L.C. director,
Jack O'Dell-were Communists. "You've got to get rid of them," Kennedy cautioned King.
Although King told Jones that he was not startled by the accusations, King said he was jarred that
Kennedy would try to intimidate him this way. A month later, Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy, the president's brother, would approve F.B.I. wiretaps on Jones's Riverdale home and
Manhattan office.

Shortly after the Rose Garden stroll, King asked Jones to chair an "internal investigative panel" to
determine if Hoover's allegations were true. "The end result was that Martin would not have
direct contact with Stanley," Jones recalls. "Contact, if any, would be through me. Meanwhile,
O'Dell resigned his S.C.L.C. position. But the joke was on us. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the
F.B.I. was monitoring me daily."

With the bureau and the segregationists out for his scalp, King trusted fewer and fewer people.
Correctly fearing bugs and wiretaps, he started relying on Jones more and more. They devised a
private code for discussing key figures: Hoover being "the other person," and Levison referred to

9
only as "our friend." Instead of Levison, Jones was now charged with helping to oversee the Why
We Can't Wait project-King's personal memoir of the Birmingham campaign, which writer
Alfred Duckett had been commissioned to ghostwrite. Stepping into the wordsmith void, Jones
started drafting King's speeches, learning how to put memorable phrases into the mouth of
America's greatest orator. "I had listened to King speak so often that I could hear his cadence in
my head and ears," says Jones. "If I was stuck I would call Stanley and meet him, and we would
complete the material together."

As the stresses of 1963 started to wear King down, Jones offered to let the reverend stay with him
in Riverdale for a few weeks in August. With its lavish grounds and spectacular view, Jones's
home afforded King, his wife, Coretta, and the children a secluded retreat. During the day the
Kings would sightsee; in the evening King made notes for his upcoming March on Washington
speech or improved the latest draft of Why We Can't Wait. Unfortunately, the F.B.I. was listening
in and caught King speaking to people in a salty, midnight manner. "Martin rarely cursed," Jones
maintains. "Sometimes he'd get risque when describing various women. Not curse words, mind
you, but silly things like 'She really knows how to trot.'"

The civil-rights struggle, in truth, was not altogether grim. Laughs were plentiful and high jinks
were par for the course. King and Jones, though both were married, had a history of skirt chasing-
a late-night activity sometimes audiotaped by Hoover's agents. While charges of womanizing may
have dimmed King's legacy in the intervening years, the subject still brings a wide smile to Jones's
face.

And then there were the deadpan put-downs, which the men traded routinely. Jones, for example,
recalls the time his wife, Anne, commented to King that he had a gift for saving lost souls. King
responded teasingly: "Clarence, as you know, has a lot of devil in him. He may be beyond
redemption." (Anne, who would have four children with Jones, was prone to depression and died
at age 48 in March 1977, under mysterious circumstances.)

On the Saturday before the historic march, several of King's confidants, such as Roy Wilkins,
James Farmer, and John Lewis, joined him at Jones's home to discuss logistics and formulate ideas
for King's speech. According to Jones, some of the activists thought King should speak for only
five minutes; any more, they believed, would be grandstanding. Jones remembers that during the
give-and-take he exploded over the attempt to limit King's oratory with an egg timer. "I don't care
if they speak for five minutes, that's fine," Jones said to King with everybody listening. "You are
going to take as much time as you need."

When King headed to Atlanta just days before the march, Jones and Levison stayed in New York
to craft the speech. They titled it "Normalcy-Never Again." After three drafts, they got a copy to
King, who made crucial substantive changes. Then, on the evening before the event, they all
rendezvoused at the Willard Hotel, in Washington, D.C. King, in essence, held court in the lobby

10
and listened to all of his key advisers' suggestions. "Martin kept saying, 'Clarence, are you taking
notes?'" Jones recalls. "And I said, 'Yes.' We both kinda rolled our eyes at each other. The other
leaders were determined to tell Martin what to say and how to say it."

After listening for 90 minutes to the recommendations of Walter Fauntroy, Bayard Rustin, and
Ralph Abernathy, among others, Jones took the draft to a quiet corner and incorporated various
ideas into the text. "I brought it back," Jones continues. "When I started reading it aloud,
everybody started jumping on me, and Martin said, 'Hush. Let 'im finish.' I had tried to
incorporate not only what this group had recommended but also what Stanley and I had written
in Riverdale." A bout of bickering ensued, and King wisely excused himself. "All right,
gentlemen," Jones recalls him saying. "I thank you very much. Now I am going to go upstairs and
counsel with the Lord. Clarence and I are going to finish this speech."

"I visited Martin in his hotel suite that evening," Andrew Young remembers. "Martin was
working away, editing the speech text, desperate to find the exact right word for every sentence.
Clarence was coming and going, giving Martin encouragement and ideas." Exhausted, they all
went to bed, leaving Dora McDonald to type up a clean copy in the wee hours. By five a.m.,
King's speech had been mimeographed and was being passed out to the press. When informed
two hours later of the document's dissemination, Jones put an immediate halt to it. "I called
Martin in his room and said, 'You know, this could be a major speech, and I'm concerned that
you are protective of the ownership of this. So we've got to be sure it's not published.... Don't give
up the copyright.' Little did I anticipate that my act of moderate wisdom would be deemed as the
most prescient service I rendered for King."

Jones roots around his office and eventually produces the original 1963 copyright application for
the "I Have a Dream" address. Jones had ensured that the speech would not become part of the
public domain but would instead belong to King and, eventually, his heirs. "Whenever oral
recordings or republications of the speech are sold without permission from the King Estate,"
Jones boasts, "a lawsuit occurs."

As a quarter of a million people converged on the National Mall on August 28, Harry Belafonte
welcomed the celebrities. Early on, he had enlisted Marlon Brando. Building on Brando's
commitment, he conscripted other Hollywood luminaries, such as Paul Newman and Burt
Lancaster. "Clarence," says Belafonte, "was in charge of making sure the stars were both visible
and safe."

"My job was to make sure the cameras saw all of the famous faces around the Lincoln Memorial,"
Jones says. "Believe it or not, Charlton Heston-yes, the N.R.A. man-was co-chair. And I had with
me Steve McQueen, James Garner, Diahann Carroll, Marlon Brando, Shelley Winters, Judy
Garland, and many others. We circulated amongst everyday people, and I positioned the stars
near the stage. Many of the celebrities were white, and we wanted the message to be that the

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March on Washington was an integrated event. So Brando and Poitier standing together
cheering, for example, was the kind of visual I tried to choreograph."

Clearly the highlight of King's 17-minute oration consisted of the various "dream" sequences
aimed at confronting corrosive racism in America. "I have a dream," King proclaimed with high-
Baptist elan, "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." Watching from 15 yards
away, Jones shook his head in utter wonderment. King seemed almost biblically possessed, hitting
feverish notes Jones had never before imagined. His rhetoric soared, crescendoed, inspired.

"I have a dream," King continued, "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where
they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

When King finished the speech, he came over and shook his cohort's hand. "You was smoking," a
euphoric Jones told him. "The words was so hot they was just burning off the page!"

The success of the speech, however, only intensified the F.B.I.'s determination to discredit King's
32-year- old attorney. As evidenced in hundreds of newly released transcripts chronicling many of
the bureau's eavesdropping sessions from 1963 to 1968, the government had as many as six agents
listening in on Jones, Levison, and King. In late 1963, for example, the F.B.I. overheard a
conversation between Jones and novelist James Baldwin. The fact that Baldwin blamed Hoover
personally for violence against civil-rights workers in Alabama clearly worried Justice Department
officials.

The transcripts also reveal that the Feds were concerned by Jones's comments that liberal New
York attorney William vanden Heuvel-an associate of Robert Kennedy's-was willing to help Jones
procure nearly $2 million to purchase the Amsterdam News, fearing King would use it as a media
vehicle to denounce the Vietnam War. A gleeful Hoover, in fact, feeling justified in his wiretaps,
reported first to R.F.K. and then to his successors, Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark, that
Jones had metamorphosed into not only a chief King speechwriter but also a leading S.C.L.C.
opponent of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

"Preparation of Martin's first public speech on Vietnam was the only time that Levison and I had
a major policy disagreement," Jones admits. "He thought the movement had to stand by L.B.J.
because we owed him. I answered that Martin had a moral obligation to denounce an immoral
war." King endorsed this view, and Andrew Young, with input from others, including a significant
draft from Jones, helped pull together the famous Riverside Church speech King gave on April 4,
1967. "The Johnson administration went ballistic," says Jones. "Exactly one year [later], to the
day, King was killed in Memphis."

After the "I Have a Dream" speech, Jones began worrying about possible assassination attempts
against King and others in the movement. And for good reason. Violence and retribution were in

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the air. After one caucus in Brooklyn on February 20, 1965, Malcolm X offered Jones a ride
home to Riverdale in his armored car. "Malcolm opened up his car trunk and handed out two
shotguns to his driver and bodyguard," Jones recalls. "I remember him urging me to meet him at
the Audubon Ballroom the next afternoon, saying, 'When you come tomorrow, I'm going to
introduce you to the African Unity Movement to let them know that even the so-called Negro
professionals, if you don't mind me calling you that, want to join our organization.'"

Jones capitulated, even though he realized he was being tweaked by Malcolm X. "I promised
Malcolm I would attend. So I'm driving the next afternoon, just coming off the West Side
Highway at 158th Street, headed for the [theater], when the radio announced that Malcolm had
been shot. I look out my window and see people pouring out of the Audubon Ballroom. Malcolm
dead? I was just with him last night. It was awful. As Ossie Davis said, 'Malcolm was our Black
Prince.'"

Even now, at the rueful age of 75, Jones thinks about King daily. He recalls the horror of the civil-
rights leader's assassination in Memphis in 1968, and the pain and drama of the funeral in
Atlanta. Before the memorial service, Jones says, he escorted Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the
slain president, to a private meeting with Coretta Scott King. "It may be that me taking Mrs.
Kennedy to the home of Mrs. King triggered bad memories," Jones recalls. "She was in great
anguish. It wasn't so much what the widows said to one another that lingers, but their physical
action. The way they immediately embraced and held each other. You're talking chills."

Over a dinner in New York, he confesses that he plans on writing a memoir, tentatively titled The
King and Me. Once a week, he says, he has been going to the Schomburg Center, in Harlem, to
read declassified transcripts of his bugged conversations. "If the F.B.I. could monitor my activities
around the clock," a perplexed Jones asks me, his forehead as furrowed as a washboard, "why
didn't they monitor the activities of [King's assassin] James Earl Ray and [his associates]?"
Although he can't prove it, Jones believes the bureau was somehow involved. "Essentially the
F.B.I. had declared open season on Martin," he exclaims. "They have blood on their hands."

Some months after my dinner with Jones, Coretta Scott King, suffering from ovarian cancer,
passed away at the age of 78 from complications following a stroke. That week, Jones called his
daughter Alexia Norton Jones. "When I talked to Dad," she recalls, he acknowledged the passing
of an age. With a wistful finality, she says, her father told her, "I know Martin's gone now."

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