Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ wouldn’t be the same without a ‘bad dude’ from North Philly

It’s clear that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence movement benefited from Clarence B. Jones’ North Philly swag.

Jones’ gravelly voice narrates The Baddest Speechwriter of All, Steph Curry and Academy Award winning director Ben Proudfoot’s 30-minute documentary which won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize.

It rises and falls to the crescendo of the film’s emotional jazz riffs, matching the gravity of the Civil Rights struggle.

Proudfoot drops a cadre of never-before-seen black and white images of lawyer Jones’ backing King up, a display of Jones’ behind-the-scenes prowess. He was a speech writer and close friend of King’s.

But it’s the directors’ deft use of Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson’s (Autism Goes to College) watercolor animations that brings a tenderness to Jones’ sometimes cynical, always cut-to-the-chase personality.

You see, Jones is that cat who, back in the day, stayed casket clean in sharp three-piece suits and sparkling Rolex watches. He’s that uncle who dared white men to tell him he didn’t belong; that educated Black man who didn’t have time for racism. And it’s for that reason, King kept him in the background, but also in his ear.

“I told Martin straight up,” Jones says in Baddest, answering Curry, who is making his directorial debut with the film. “Don’t put me near any demonstration … If a white man puts his hands on me, they are going down.”

Three thousand watercolor images move seamlessly through Baddest narrating Jones’ life in a slow, jazzy rhythm. We watch his plot civil rights strategies with King and a coalition of like-minded Jewish people.

We are with Jones the night he matter-of-factly writes the first seven paragraphs of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably one of the world’s most important speeches. We watch King give the speech as Jones looks from the wings, surprised and in awe.

“I didn’t know he was going to read my words word-for-word,” Jones, 95, told The Inquirer in a recent video chat.

He closes his eyes often as he talks, punctuating his speech every so often with a well-placed, “You hear me?” or “You understand me?”

His hair is a short white Afro. Soft and defiant.

Jones was the only child of domestic workers, born at 1300 Master Street, where Temple University’s sports complex stands today. Shortly after, his parents found work as live-in helps at the Riverton, NJ country estate of Edgar and Eleanora Lippincott, a Quaker family and part owners of a prosperous 19th century Philadelphia-based clothing firm.

“I lived there [with the Lippincotts] until they sent me to a Catholic Boarding School [The sisters of the Blessed Sacrament],” Jones said. “I was raised by Catholic nuns who told me, ‘Master Jones, you are a good boy, Jesus loves you. You are beautiful.’”

The positive reinforcement turned Jones into a force, at a time when Black people’s education and career options were limited by racism. He finished Palmyra High School, the current home of the Clarence B. Jones Institute of Social Advocacy, at the top of his class. He attended Juilliard and studied clarinet. There he fine-tuned the musical ear which, he said, aided him in writing King’s speeches.

He graduated from Columbia University, did a brief stint in the Army, and graduated from Boston University Law School. By the late 1950s, he was working as an entertainment lawyer for Revue Studios, now known as Universal.

Jones was at home one evening in 1960 when his mentor and former New York judge Hubert T. Delany asked him to defend King, then a young preacher and budding Civil Rights leader, against an alleged tax evasion charge in Montgomery, Ala.

Jones said no.

“I wondered whether he [King] was real,” Jones said. “Cause I’m saying he [King] comes from a middle class Black family. He didn’t have to do this. I come from the kitchen.”

Yet, he agreed after hearing King preach at a church in neighboring Baldwin Hills. Jones was struck by his sermon imploring educated Black people not to turn their backs on the struggle.

He joined the team of attorneys who successfully convinced an Alabama jury to acquit King of tax evasion and perjury, and stayed on as his personal attorney.

In 1963, King was jailed again. This time in for leading demonstrations, marches, and sit-ins against racial segregation in Birmingham, Ala. Jones smuggled notes King wrote to his fellow clergymen while incarcerated, and compiled the missives into King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

That same year Jones worked with singer Harry Belafonte to secure $100,000 from the Rockefellers to bail Birmingham protesters out of jail. The Rockefellers asked him to sign a promissory note, that they later tore up. Jones references that promissory note in his draft of King’s speech.

“I was sharing a room with King in Albany, Ga.,” Jones told the Inquirer. “And he said, ‘Anybody can walk with me in the warm sunlight of an August summer. But only a wintertime soldier walks with me at midnight in the alpine chill of winter. You Clarence, are my wintertime soldier.’”

Proudfoot and Curry met through a mutual friend in the late twenty-teens. A few years later Curry helped produce Proudfoot’s 2022 Oscar-winning documentary The Queen of Basketball, the story of women’s basketball pioneer Luisa Harris.

Curry met Jones in 2022 when Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr invited Jones to speak to the team. He was intrigued with the elder statesmen’s stories and asked Proudfoot if he would be interested in working on a documentary about Jones’ life.

“As a storyteller, I’m always interested in approaching well-known pieces of history through a fresh perspective,” said Proudfoot, a 35-year-old Nova Scotia native and two-time Academy Award winner. (Proudfoot’s credits also include the 2024 Netflix documentary The Turn Around, about Phillies superfan John McCann.)

“Clarence wasn’t just sitting there waiting for Dr. King to call him,” Proudfoot said. “He was a reluctant participant. He made a decision to live in comfort or live with purpose.”

Between Curry’s busy NBA schedule and detailed animation, it took three years to complete Baddest. In February, Netflix announced Baddest will premiere on its streaming platform in 2026.

Jones was King’s attorney until his assassination in 1968. In the late 1960s he became a partner of Carter, Berlind & Weill (Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt) making him the first African American partner at a Wall Street investment banking firm. During that time he also became the first Black person to become an allied member of the New York Stock Exchange.

During the 1970s, Jones served as the chairman of the New York-based Inner City Broadcasting, where he and Percy Sutton — once Malcolm X’s attorney — founded New York’s WBLS, the blueprint for today’s R&B radio stations. There, he also had a hand in developing the long-running variety show, "Showtime at the Apollo." From 1971 to 1974, Jones was editor and publisher of the New York Amsterdam News.

“I’m telling you,” Jones said as a sly grin crawled across his face. “I was a bad man.”

In recent years, Jones has enjoyed a renewed spotlight.

He was featured in a 2024 Super Bowl commercial paid for by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. “I’d remind people that all hate thrives on one thing, silence,” he says, urging viewers to stand up to Jewish hate. President Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian honor — in May that same year.

Days after the death of Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jones remembered Jackson as a leader in the struggle. “I looked upon Jesse Jackson as someone who was a warrior in the battle who has fallen,” Jones said. “I regard him with great love and affection.”

At a time when the historical civil rights language Jones had a hand in drafting is seen by this presidential administration as racist toward white Americans, Jones is reflective.

If people would focus more on love, perhaps America would be a better place.

“King’s work was about love,” he said. “The love he had for his work, for his people … the love he had for me.”