I could not have dreamed it while attending the urban, turbulent Woodward High School in Cincinnati during the 1960s—a microcosm of the racially-charged, painfully transitional America. Finding myself enthralled with the Civil Rights Movement and realizing that black people are America’s Hebrews, I would read and watch (on television) men like Clarence Jones and Rev. C.T. Vivian—top lieutenants of M. L. King.
Recently, at the March on Washington Film Festival, I mingled with these two friends and mentors of mine (among other civil rights icons); my 2014 book, ‘DANGEROUS FRIENDSHIP: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers’ was a featured work at this year’s gathering of scholars and veterans of the movement. The book is an account of the egregious FBI surveillance and harassment of King and his closest white friend, Levison—a longtime Marxist who nonetheless was a key facilitator of and adviser to King and whose role has long been unjustly overlooked or shrouded.
Rev. Vivian (on the far left) gave of his very blood and flesh, endured jarring blows and prison stays, to make it possible for all Americans to have the ballot—in other words, to share in what we take for granted as a model democracy. Due to his selfless efforts, and his willingness to directly confront—and be beaten by Southern police brutes and KKK cowards—the 1965 Voting Rights Act signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson was further enabled.
“C.T.,” now a sprightly 92, is not a large man, physically. His largeness is in his incredible humility. Unlike too many of the other immediate associates of Dr. King, he did not seek nor covet King’s fame and celebrity. He just craved freedom; his unyielding conviction was about the fact that one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, people in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia were being denied access to the voting booths—by state laws, craven qualification tests that did not apply to white people, and just plain ugly racism.
My research and work on ‘DANGEROUS FRIENDSHIP’ was primarily built around an ongoing series of interviews, in person, by phone, and in writing with Clarence Jones. The relationship has grown into a personal friendship and a series of collaborations. Dr. Jones, who is a professor at both Stanford and the University of San Francisco, was the personal attorney to Martin Luther King Jr. and an unparalleled witness to, and sage of, the King chronicles. He is a man of tremendous erudition and moral outrage who co-drafted the immortal “I Have A Dream” preachment.
Jones was also the individual who, at great personal risk, smuggled in scraps of paper to King while the preacher was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. This enabled King to covertly write the famed Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, which earned King the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.
In Washington recently, sitting and schmoozing with such historical figures, listening to their stories about King and of days that readjusted America’s moral compass, and lamenting together about the current incendiary relapse into racism and hatred that are poisoning our country, I thanked God in my heart that our nation still remembers the men and women who simply said, “No more!”
Let their work not have been in vain. Their physical wounds from the 20th century have been replaced by a 21st century inner anguish that has nothing to do with their unconditional love for the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever known.