Who Was MLK Jr's Speechwriter?
On Second and Third-Wave Differences
Have you heard of Clarence B. Jones? Do you know who he is? If you’re anything like me, the answer is no. Or was. Not until this past weekend anyway.
Which is odd. Because if you asked me who Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or Peggy McIntosh or Roxane Gay or Nikole Hannah-Jones or Claudia Gay or Michael Dyson or Marc Lamont Hill or Charles Blow or Ta-Nehisi Coates is, there’s a lot I wouldn’t know, but I would have something to say if I got thrown into a situation that required me to speak.
Likewise—and I put these people in a different category—if you wanted to talk about Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman or Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. DuBois or James Baldwin or Richard Wright or Malcolm X, I would at least be able contribute something off the cuff. I say I put this group in a different category than the first because I think their posture (this borrows from feminism, but I’m comfortable labeling them as First or Second-Wave-ish) was quite different from the Third-Wave-type folks I list above. Of the differences that could be emphasized, one of the most obvious is that the older group would have never dreamed of going after rigor as a valid answer to addressing inequality or of giving it over to “white supremacy.” As such, these men and women took little for granted, they did their homework, and they were full of substance. They moved strategically and argued with conviction rather than trying to carefully manipulate settings to silence or exclude people who might (god forbid!) disagree. Baldwin, for example, debated publicly with William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the conservative National Review. And to read or listen to King’s essays is to notice how wide his persuasive appeals were. He wanted to work with people he knew he needed, no matter how different from him they might have been.
Which leads to a second difference between what I’m calling Third-Wave activists and its predecessors: the older appeal was largely that a specific group be treated with dignity ultimately as part of a larger humanity rather than as an end unto itself. Here’s Malcolm X, writing in his autobiography: “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being—neither white, black, brown, or red.” This seems to cut directly against the Kendi view that “The remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Or here’s Baldwin: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
To push against the current direction another way, for all the properly-woke educational and non-profit spaces I have found myself in as an adult, the most racially-integrated one I frequent is—drumroll, please—a blue-collar poker league that I regularly play in. Where language is used freely and often vulgarly. Where if race or gender or sexuality is mentioned, it may be in the form of a joke that turns on a stereotype. And where conflicts, then, tend to be engaged either by gossip or directly, but almost never by accusations of prejudice. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t prejudice in the room; I’m sure there is! But prejudice is far from the only or even main reason why human beings fight. It’s probably more like: prejudice is one of the excuses people use to blame each other and to abuse power or to solve disputes about resources. To take the excuse away is not to solve the dispute, but it is to force a more-honest engagement.
I am not trying suggest that activists of old were somehow perfect people who ought only be idealized. There does seem to be enough smoke, for example, around Dr. King’s fairly-traditional gender expectation of his wife Coretta (one of the results of which was a kind of silencing her in the Civil Rights sphere); meanwhile he apparently had some propensity toward extramarital entanglements when away from his home. Now it is largely a Third Wave unwritten rule (though almost always inconsistently applied) that our cultural influences ought to be morally pure or something (and thus “cancelled” when they fail to meet the standard). I don’t think someone’s flaw or flaws is a valid reason to completely dismiss them on everything, but I do bring this up to say that stuff like King’s affairs shouldn’t be out-of-bounds when talking about him, though we also do well to remember that some of why we know about them is from an overbearing FBI surveillance campaign.
Notice, too, that I don’t view the problem and challenges of violence to necessarily be a crucial difference between Third-Wave types and First/Second ones. Malcolm X and King were, at least by the end, more allies than enemies, but there were disagreements along the way about the legitimacy of violence as a political strategy. Looking at history and the present, I don’t think we’ve figured out in any serious way how to rid humanity of violence, but I personally think if violence is going to be used strategically that it ought to be first of all protective and then perhaps aimed at disruption directly of an injustice at hand, and in a way that when masses of people witness the act that enough of the witnesses will sympathize with the needed change and not the status quo. Consider Tubman, for example, trekking across state lines with a gun in her hand with the aim of rescuing more enslaved people. Rather than, say, a senseless death of a black, former football star in my city of Indianapolis on a night of bashing windows downtown in the weeks following an incident in Minneapolis during which police ended the life of George Floyd. The connection between the original event and the reaction just isn’t coherent in the same way that Tubman’s action was.
Okay, let’s circle back: who in the world is Jones? I learned about him in an article over the weekend by Francesca Block in The Free Press, which is a publication that former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss started. Weiss is an interesting character in and of herself. She is, for example, both married to a woman (her wife, Nellie Bowles, writes for her publication) and previously married to a man. She wears her Jewish background and identity front and center. I believe she is passionately pro-choice, and also someone who is constantly pissing Democrats off for some reason or other. Her current publication aims at a heterodoxy of views, and there is some of that, but on matters pertaining to Israel and the Palestinians, she seems more pro-Israel than even some of the explicitly-Jewish publications like Commentary and Tablet that are sometimes worth reading.
I sense that Weiss may not have the best radar as to which battles are worth fighting and which ones are not. I wouldn’t consider Weiss to be a Second Wavers necessarily, but rather something more like a reaction, anti-woke, to the concerns and style of Third Wavers. I saw Weiss moderate an interview one time with a college president, for example, and I found most of the way she carried herself—almost immediately pushing agenda and seeking controversy—to be a turn-off. And yet, I do want to live in a country where she gets a say, and where you’re allowed to not be so easily categorizable into a political or religious camp.
At the New York Times, Weiss was often getting in trouble, but somehow avoided real cancellation (meaning she didn’t get fired from her job), though she did sort of cancel herself by dramatically publishing her resignation letter online. Now in her defense, again, I’m sure most mainstream publications like the Times have gotten to be pretty difficult places to work for those who have refused to bow down to the Third Wave (James Bennet’s recent essay, “When the New York Times lost its Way,” published in The Economist, was well worth my time), and it takes courage to be a woman in her thirties taking on our country’s “paper of record”; we shouldn’t miss that.
All of this brings me back, again, to Jones, who is Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter. A lawyer who King who initially convinced to move across the country to serve as his defense against tax evasion charges. And who eventually, yes, wrote the “I have a dream” speech, though he makes it clear that that line, specifically, was an edit from King himself.
Here’s a primer of what I learned about Jones from Block’s article. It is obvious to Jones that there has been tremendous racial progress in the United States. He is, apparently, very grateful to Jewish allies in particular for their role in some of the Civil Rights victories he participated in. Therefore, he seems concerned about the degree to which contemporary Jews are being cheaply lumped into an oppressor category. Like King was, Jones is passionately anti-violence. He was unimpressed with Kendi’s book, Stamped from the Beginning. Still, he doesn’t, as I don’t, think that “colorblindness” is quite the right term or approach, even if you’re trying to get to equality under the law. And he is on the record as having recently opposed his own state’s, and California governor Gavin Newsom’s, ethnic studies curriculum. His views on affirmative action are nuanced: well-intentioned but have to stop somewhere. As for the advice he would offer to “young black Americans,” Block quotes Jones as saying, “Commit yourself irredeemably to the pursuit of personal excellence.”
All of this made me want to know more, both about the man himself and who he has become, but also about why Jones—a Second Waver who outlived most of the Second Wavers—is such a background figure. Why is he so ignored by Third Wavers? Maybe it’s because he’s, well…a little inconvenient. Embarrassingly old-fashioned. ‘Hello, why would we ever, you know, want to milk the time we have left and the lessons learned from MLK Jr.’s speechwriter?’