The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands warmly congratulates civil rights leader Dr. Clarence Jones for his selection Friday as one of 19 people to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Jones, a personal attorney to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who helped write his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was instrumental in reuniting the luminaries of King’s inner circle at Sunnylands for a retreat in January 2019.

“Clarence Jones is a key figure in American history whose fight for the civil rights of all Americans helped change the world,” said Sunnylands President David Lane. “He is truly deserving of the nation’s gratitude as an honoree of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

President Joseph Biden’s White House announced Friday that Jones is among the 2024 class of Medal of Freedom recipients, along with the late civil rights icon Medgar Evers.   

As co-founder of the Gandhi King Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, Jones partnered with Sunnylands five years ago to gather some of King’s key advisers and friends at the Rancho Mirage estate of the late Ambassadors Walter and Leonore Annenberg. The participants, including folk singer Joan Baez and Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, reflected on the importance of the Civil Rights Movement and met with a new generation of activists committed to social justice causes. Several of the retreat participants shared their insights into King’s legacy in a video, Traveling with Dr. King, that was largely recorded at Sunnylands by film director Jesse Dylan.

Jones was King’s speechwriter and lawyer from 1960 to 1968. Known for smuggling King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to the public, he coordinated the legal defense of King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference against libel suits filed against them and The New York Times by Birmingham city officials.