An aide to Martin Luther King, Jr. said Jewish Americans were vital to the civil rights movement in the US — and he understands their mentality to stomp out rampant antisemitism today.
Clarence Jones, who was King’s personal attorney, strategic advisor and speech writer, got emotional while discussing the young Jews who marched alongside black activists in the south during the 1960s.
“I got to tell you. When I talk now it makes me cry. I just burst into tears,” Jones, 93, said during a videotaped interview in January for Queens College’s documentary series on the 60th anniversary of the “Freedom Summer” for civil rights in Mississippi.
He said he understands the anger and anguish of Jews after Hamas’ sneak attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and the Jewish State’s aggressive retaliation against their attackers in Gaza amid the ongoing war amid rising hatred against Jews, he said.
“They really believe, `Never Again’ …They’re not going to take that risk,” Jones said.
Jones recalled asking the young white New Yorkers and others who self-identified as Jewish why they were marching for the cause of equal rights for black folks in the segregated south.
“`Well, attorney Jones. You go back and tell your Dr. King, we respect him….. but we’re not really doing it for him,”Jones said one of the Jewish civil rights activists told him.
“I would be perplexed and said, `I don’t understand,’” he responded.
“`You should understand. Go back and tell your Dr. King that my grandpa and grandma, they died in a Holocaust and I know this is what they would want me to do,’” said Jones.
He and King talked about the importance of strengthening the alliance of Jews and black Christians.
“There’s a group of white people out here who self identify themselves as Jews. They’re very special and we have to get to understand them,” he remembers telling King.
King established strong ties with Jewish leaders — among them Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Joachim Prinz — who supported black Americans who suffered from discrimination and domestic terrorism from the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. Prinz was pictured appearing with King at the White House with then-President John F. Kennedy and other civil rights leaders.
Jones also discussed the three men who were brutally killed by the KKK in Mississippi in 1964 — James Chaney, who was black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were Jewish New Yorkers. He mentioned the unspeakable grief expressed by Goodman’s mom when he met the family at their Upper West Side home following the slaying.
He tied the role of the civil rights movement to what’s happening today, with rising hatred against Jews and the Israel-Hamas war.
“I don’t agree with everything my Jewish brothers and sisters are doing in Israel. But that’s not the issue whether I 100% agree with them. I may not agree with everything they’re doing but I understand the anger from whence it comes,” Jones said.
“They really believe, ‘Never Again.’ I say to my friends, `You can disagree or not disagree. That’s not the issue.’”
For Jews — especially those whose families were touched by the genocide of the Holocaust during the Nazi reign — it’s about survival, he said.
“There’s no person I know of the generation of Jews that I have come up with that are going to take that risk. They’re not going to take that risk,” said Jones, who got choked up.
Mayor Eric Adams praised Jones when he met with him in January.
“Dr. Clarence Jones wrote the lyrics and Dr. King sang the music. An attorney and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he is a living legend, a connection to our important civil rights history whose wisdom is still relevant today,” Adams said.
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said it should come as no surprise that Jews — long persecuted through history — would sympathize with and march in support of black men and women who were enslaved and later terrorized and treated like second class citizens in America.
“What happened to us should never happen to anyone,” Potasnik said..
“We know what it’s like to stand alone. Martin Luther King Jr. supported the Jewish people and the state of Israel,” he said.
