A sense of awe and respect permeated the Dennis Flyer Theater at Camden County College as Dr. Clarence B. Jones came on stage signing a soulful, spiritual song about freedom.
Soon, the nearly 200 people in attendance sang with him.
“I am so delighted to be back home. As a little boy in Cinnaminson Township, I remember succotash, sweet corn and fresh tomatoes,” said Dr. Jones, a famous leader in the Civil Rights movement who co-authored with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the famous “I Have a Dream” speech delivered during the March on Washington in 1963.
The Palmyra High School Class of 1949 valedictorian, Dr. Jones’ parents were domestic servants working as a chauffeur and maid for the Lippincott family in Riverton.
His parents sent him to a boarding school in Philadelphia from ages 6 to 14, an experience “that defined who I am,” he said.
Every day the Irish Catholic nuns told him, “Be a good boy. We love you. Jesus loves you. You are beautiful,” Dr. Jones said. “The implanted the sense that I am somebody deep into my spine.”
When he returned home and attended Palmyra High School, it was 70 percent white. “I was voted president of the Honor Society and Most Likely to Succeed by the students.”
He credited the nuns for encouraging him be educated, and went on to graduate from Columbia College and then earned his law degree from Boston University.
He moved to California and became a renowned copyright attorney, helping songwriters who claimed their music was stolen by other artists. One day a friend asked him to help Dr. King in 1960 fight a tax evasion charge filed by the state of Alabama.
Dr. Jones wondered why he should help him “just because he got his hand stuck in the candy jar.” Then Dr. King came to his door.
“I turned him down. Then he asked me to come hear him speak at the largest Baptist Church in Los Angeles. It was like the Black version of Beverly Hills,” Jones said.
“I was mesmerized. What does this Baptist preacher know about the Magna Carta,” said Dr. Jones, who said Dr. King then changed a poem by Langston Hughes and “put the words in my mother’s mouth. I started crying.”
After the service, I said, “Dr. King, when to you want me to go to Montgomery?” From that point on, they became great friends and leaders in the Civil Rights movement.
While working side by side with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to eventually mobilize large, non-violent protests in place like Birmingham and Selma in Alabama, Dr. Jones learned that his father had died. He went back home for the funeral at Mt. Zion AME Church in Riverton.
Someone came into the church and said, “Dr. Jones, Martin Luther King Jr. is here and he wants to speak.”
“I said he doesn’t know my father.”
Yet, Dr. King did speak at the funeral, saying “I know my friend Brother Clarence is probably surprised that I am here. I did not know the deceased, his father, Goldsborough Benjamin Jones, but I know his son.”
“I was dumbfounded,” Dr. Jones said as he wiped a tear away at the memory, adding that Dr. King went on to praise his work fighting for civil rights. “You never said all those nice things about me before,” he told Dr. King after the service.
As for speechwriting, it is important to have “the ability to retain the sound of the voice of the person making the speech,” Dr. Jones said.
And on Aug. 28, 1983, during the March on Washington and in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the voice of Dr. King delivered one of the best speeches ever.
“I have a dream 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.
“When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
As for the future Dr. Jones, who is 92 years young, said, “I live in California, but this is my home. I am leaving Stanford University soon and coming home to South Jersey.”
Meanwhile he is promoting his newest book, “Last of the Lions,” and he is concerned about the gun violence in the United States.
“My belief is that the most current existential threat to the progress of our people is 24/7 non-stop gun violence in cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco and Birmingham. There is so much wasted talent,” Dr. Jones said, using the term Black killing fields. “We collectively have a fundamental question. Are we going to die in violence or live in peace?”
For 92 plus years Dr. Jones has chosen peace and non-violence.
