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> In the News > Articles > April 2006: Vanity Fair Magazine 
“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 l'm saying?
It was brutal."
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 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 Joues—and President George W. Bush—about
how "Martin and Coretta [had their] civil liberties...
violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping."
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 bas 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 front 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 un-timely"—though nonviolent—protest. With a few other dedicated foot soldiers, Jones among them, King hatched the idea of writing an open letter to clergymen of various denominations. In history books it is known as the landmark "Letter from Birmingham Jail." " I would take sheets front 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 front 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 speech-writer. It's a fellow named Hugh Morrow—he used to work for The Saturday Evening Post—who you'Il be hearing from.' Next thing I know I got a call from Morrow—'How, can I help?’” Jones replied, "Well, l'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. "l 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.'" 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 hint 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. 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. "l would take sheets from a legal pad and stuff them into my shirt [when visiting King in jail]. I'd sneak the pages out." 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—Iearned 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, be 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 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 inter-racial 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." "My response was just because some Negro preacher got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, it's not my problem.'" 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. 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 sir 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, be 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:
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 yen want me to leave for
Alabama?’" King nodded and hugged him. "Soon” is
all he said. "Very soon." Jones had become a "Movement
Man."
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 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 risquÈ 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 audio-taped 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.
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 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 ‘him 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 op 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 bouts 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 its 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 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 Èlan, "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. King and Jones had a history of
skirt chasing—
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." • © 2006. Vanity Fair Magazine. All rights reserved. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  |
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Now
75, Clarence Jones, the galvanizing lawyer who was Martin Luther
King Jr.'s trusted lieutenant between 1960 and 1968, has come
out from the shadows of civil-rights history.
In a ground-breaking interview, he shares his untold tale: the
secret missions, the F.B.I. wiretaps, and the "real" Martin
of those perilous, passionate years.
2006 © Nexos Capital Partners - All rights reserved