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By: Ilana Siyance
A Martin Luther King, Jr. aide lauded Jewish Americans, saying their efforts were vital to the civil rights movement in the US. He also said he supports their current effort to fight today’s rampant anti-Semitism.
Clarence Jones, 93, who had been 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 said during a videotaped interview for Queens College’s documentary series on the 60th anniversary of the “Freedom Summer” for civil rights in Mississippi.
As reported by the NY Post, Jones also spoke about the current rise in anti-Semitism, and said he understands Jews’ anger and pain after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7. He says the Jewish State’s aggressive response and the ongoing war in Gaza is understandable. “They really believe, `Never Again’” Jones said. “I may not agree with everything they’re doing but I understand the anger from whence it comes,” Jones said. He said that especially from families who survived the Holocaust he understands that it’s a fight for survival. “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.
Jones brought up a conversation from the 1960s when he had asked the young white Jewish New Yorkers why they joined the march for the cause of equal rights for Blacks 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.
Per the Post, Jones said he recalled conversations with King about strengthening the alliance between 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 recalled telling King. King had indeed worked to establish strong bonds with Jewish leaders, including with the late Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, whom had supported black Americans who were facing discrimination and domestic terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said it is no surprise that Jews would sympathize with and march in support of the Blacks when they were being persecuted. “What happened to us should never happen to anyone,” Potasnik said.
