Jones helped craft Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence address at Riverside Church and played a pivotal role in key civil rights moments, including smuggling pages of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail out of prison.

In 1960 he joined King’s legal team, moved to New York City to work as King’s adviser and writer, and later served on the legal team for New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).

Clarence B. Jones, a longtime confidante, legal adviser, and speechwriter for King, died at the age of 95 in Cupertino, California.

His later accolades include a Sundance Award for a related project, and funeral and public memorial plans are being finalized.

Steve Kerr, the Golden State Warriors coach, introduced Jones to Stephen Curry, inspiring a documentary project.

Jones’s public life included scholarly work at Stanford’s King Institute and ongoing contributions to civil rights discourse, including a Curry-backed documentary and a Netflix streaming project about his life that won a Sundance award.

In 2023, Jones published Last of the Lions: An African American Journey in Memoir; in 2024 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden, and he publicly appeared with Stephen Curry at a Giants game.

A Sundance-winning project titled The Baddest Speechwriter of All is set to stream on Netflix, highlighting his legacy.

Between 2024 and 2025, he appeared publicly with Stephen Curry at a San Francisco Giants game, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024; a Netflix/film project related to him was noted as Sundance-winning and forthcoming.

The documentary The Baddest Speechwriter in the World profiles Jones as a strategist, lawyer, author, and philanthropist, linked to Stephen Curry and Ben Proudfoot.

The documentary team and Jones’s family emphasize his central role in the civil rights movement and lifelong commitment to racial justice, sacrifice, and public service.

Jones’s family describes his life as a testament to conscience and the power of ideas influencing civil rights and antiwar advocacy, including a 2023 memoir.