Gun violence challenges King's legacy, adviser says

A week after what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.'s 85th birthday, the last surviving member of his inner circle of advisers told an audience at the Show Me Center it takes more than lip service to honor the slain civil-rights leader's life and work.

"Martin Luther King Jr. was the 20th century's quintessential apostle of nonviolence," said Clarence Jones, 83, speaking Wednesday night at Southeast Missouri State University's annual dinner celebrating King's life and legacy. " ... I tell you that the threat to that legacy is the 24/7 existential threat of gun violence."

Celebrations of King's life and work are pointless if participants are content to carry on with "business as usual," Jones said.

"The issue is not a Second Amendment question. The issue is a Sixth [Commandment] question: 'Thou shalt not kill,'" he said. "You want to honor Martin Luther King Jr.? That's how you honor him."

Jones was just beginning his career as an entertainment lawyer in 1960 when he received a call from a judge he knew, asking him to help defend King on tax evasion charges.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Dinner on Wednesday at the Show Me Center. (Fred Lynch)

Jones, who lived in California, was reluctant to travel to Alabama to defend the preacher, but King wouldn't take no for an answer. After a visit to Jones' home failed to persuade him, King invited him to a nearby church where he was preaching.

The subject of King's sermon was the obligation of young black professionals to help fight for equal rights in the South, and Jones became Exhibit A in his argument.

King concluded his sermon by alluding to Langston Hughes' poem "From Mother to Son," in which a domestic servant tells her young son, "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair."

"When he began reciting that poem, a visual image of my mother ... began to come up in my mind, and tears began to roll down my cheeks," said Jones, whose parents were both domestic servants.

Jones became one of King's closest advisers, eventually helping him draft his landmark "I Have a Dream" speech and coordinating the defense of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference against libel suits filed against them by Birmingham, Ala., officials.

Jones said as the last living member of King's inner circle, he feels "a great weight and moral responsibility" to tell his story.

"If the surviving lions don't tell their stories, the hunters will get all the credit," he said, referring to one of Aesop's fables.

King may have done more to advance equality in the United States than anyone in history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, Jones said.

"If you were fortunate enough to be alive from 1956 to April 4, 1968, and you went outside at midnight, and you looked up at the sky, and you saw in the sky a constellation of stars, and across that midnight sky, you saw a shooting star of such incandescent brightness, brighter than any shooting star in the heavens, that, my friends, was Martin Luther King Jr.," he said. "We will never, ever, ever, ever see that shooting star again."

Jones said the best way to honor King's legacy is to continue his work, especially in the areas of nonviolence and economic injustice.

"Violence lies like molten lava beneath the surface of this society, just waiting to erupt," Jones said.

More than 50 years after "I Have a Dream," vast economic disparities persist between white and black Americans, Jones said.

"Has the dream been realized? Has the dream been deferred? Has the dream been converted to a nightmare?" he asked. "The jury is still out."

epriddy@semissourian.com

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Pertinent address:

Show Me Center, Cape Girardeau, Mo.