Overview
- Jones’s family and his son confirmed that he died May 22 at an assisted living facility in Cupertino, California, and they said funeral and public celebration plans are being finalized.
- From 1960 to 1968 Jones served as Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal attorney, adviser and draft speechwriter, helping coordinate the 1963 March on Washington and drafting parts of the “I Have a Dream” speech.
- He smuggled pages of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out of a jail cell, helped secure bail for jailed protesters and was on the legal team in New York Times v. Sullivan, a Supreme Court case that reshaped U.S. libel law.
- After King’s assassination Jones moved into finance as the first Black allied member tied to a Wall Street brokerage, later taught at Stanford and the University of San Francisco, and co-founded USF’s Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice in 2018.
- In recent years Jones received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024, was the subject of an award‑winning Sundance documentary that will stream on Netflix later this year, and has drawn tributes from civil‑rights leaders and institutions that plan public remembrances.