Clarence B. Jones, an adviser and speechwriter to Martin Luther King Jr. who spent the past two decades in the Bay Area as an educator at Stanford and the University of San Francisco, died Friday, May 22, at an assisted living facility in Cupertino, his family said. He was 95.
Jones had once been set on conquering Hollywood as a high-powered entertainment lawyer. That all changed when Martin Luther King Jr. showed up on the doorstep of his Southern California home.
The year was 1960, and King was fighting felony tax fraud charges in Alabama, Jones recalled in his 2011 book “Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation.”…