We at The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands are deeply saddened at the passing of Clarence B. Jones, a key advisor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was instrumental in bringing members of King’s inner circle to Sunnylands in 2019.
Mr. Jones, a lawyer who died Friday, May 22, in Cupertino, Calif., was often at the center of King’s legal strategy to advance civil rights protections in the 1960s and helped draft his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. He was 95 years old.
In 2024, then-President Joseph Biden awarded Jones the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. “Dr. Clarence B. Jones wielded a pen as a sword and gave words to the movement that generated freedom for thousands of people,” Biden said at the awards ceremony.
The gathering of King’s former friends and advisors that Jones helped convene at Sunnylands in January 2019 was truly extraordinary. As co-founder of the Gandhi King Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, Jones partnered with Sunnylands to reunite some of the luminaries of the civil rights movement, along with noted historians and scholars.
Participants included Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador; Joan Baez, the renowned folk singer and activist; Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957; and Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.
Several of the retreat participants, including Jones, 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.