Insight
True political alliances enable honest mutual criticism without bad-faith accusations
“If I am a black person, totally committed to the, an alliance with the Jewish community, does not mean that I have lost my ability to criticize. Ok. But the difference is, you see, someone like me, I know it. When Jewish people hear me, if I say something, wel…”
Opinion
Jones: MLK's Birmingham Jail letter and anti-Vietnam speech are his best
“If I had to bookend Martin King's life, I'd bookend them with two things. The letter from the Birmingham jail, And the speech he gave opposing the war in Vietnam. Time to break the silence. Those are the two most powerful.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jones: MLK had unparalleled knowledge of the Jewish Talmud
“Was to me, the first and only, I haven't met a black preacher, ok, that had, as a commanding knowledge, Of the Talmud, as Dr. King had.”
Insight
Jones: Colorblindness is a myth; the real issue is attached prejudices
“There's no such thing as colorblind. You need to see color. Seeing color is the most beautiful thing in the world. It's what we attach to that color.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Apr 1963
Jones smuggled MLK's Birmingham Jail drafts out under his shirt
“Twice a day in the morning, and in the afternoon, I would take what he had written, put it under my shirt, and then I would take the blank sheets of paper that he needed and give it to him, and then the following, that afternoon, or if it was the afternoon nex…”
Assertion Supported
Nelson and David Rockefeller provided $100,000 in cash for MLK's 1963 bail
“So I go into the Chase Bank, and there was Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of the state of New York... David Rockefeller was the president and CEO... Grab the bag of money, a 100,000 dollars... I signed this promissory note. It was a promising note on demand.…”
Insight
Jones used his Juilliard training to draft speeches matching MLK's cadence
“The advantage I had to Dr. King, that I could write Words, and I could hear how they would sound when he spoke them, because I had an ear that was attuned to what the words would sound like.”
Insight
White supremacy was developed as an intellectual rationale to justify slavery
“And as part of that historical institution of slavery, they developed a companion ideology to justify that system. And that companion ideology has some explicit words, but the words are real. They're called white supremacy because they had to justify how can y…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jones: Jewish contributions to the Black civil rights movement are often forgotten
“The history is that two or five percent of the population, what they've been able to do, not only in the contribution to this country, but to enabling us to be free is often forgotten.”
Assertion Partly supported
MLK recruited Dr. Clarence Jones in person at his California home
“One day in the second week of February, Martin Luther King, Jr., and someone who traveled with Bernard Lee, they showed up at my door at 27 51 Highview Avenue, an altitude of California.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
MLK adapted a Langston Hughes poem during a sermon to recruit Jones
“He took an actual poem by Langston Hughes. Life ain't been no crystal stair. He took that poem, only he changed the lyrics in the poem to make it sound as if my mother was a person in the poem.”
Disclosure
1960s civil rights leaders never expected to live past age 50
“We had to externalize the reality because none of us, including myself, Ok. I'm 93 years old. Ok. I never expected to live beyond the age of 50.”
Assertion Partly supported
An assembly of rabbis sang 'We Shall Overcome' in Hebrew for MLK
“Dr. King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, conservative rabbinical scholar from Poland, they were invited to come to the Catskills. It was Rabbi Heschel's 65th birthday. He's a conservative rabbi. So they go to the Catskill Mountains, and they go into this ass…”
Insight
Jones: The historical Black pursuit of excellence transcends race and ethnicity
“From the heritage, if you look at the history of the so-called black experience, going back to Ida B. Wells, going back to Frederick Douglass, going back to giants of literature and history, there's a common line, and that common line is a commitment to the pu…”
Dr. Clarence Jones