Genzel: We must take action to honor local hero Clarence B. Jones

Bay Area civil rights hero Clarence B. Jones died last month at 95 in an assisted living facility in Cupertino.

Most coverage rightly focused on how he helped draft Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But reducing Jones to that single moment misses what his life represented. Yes, he was a witness to history, but so much more than that. He was a person who spent decades trying to force this country to live up to its promises.

Now, those promises are under attack again.

Jones smuggled the text of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out of King’s cell. He worked on the legal and political strategy of the civil rights movement and he was King’s personal lawyer. He helped shape the words that described America’s promise as a promissory note written to all its citizens. That line still cuts because it is still true:

“This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed to the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness… America has given its colored people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.'”

More than 60 years later, we are watching people in power try once again to declare that check invalid.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais may seem like an isolated technical ruling about maps or obscure details of redistricting. But it is part of a broader effort to weaken Black political representation and dismantle the gains of the civil rights movement. States moved almost immediately after the ruling to redraw districts to dilute Black voting power. The message is clear — some people are more deserving of votes and protection than others.

We have seen this before. Reconstruction brought Black political participation and representation on a scale almost unimaginable for its time. It was followed by violence, disenfranchisement, court decisions, intimidation and the construction of an apartheid system that lasted generations. Progress is never linear. Rights are won, defended, eroded and sometimes taken away entirely.

Dr. Jones understood better than most what it took to make this country move even one inch closer to justice. The civil rights movement was not inevitable. It was built by people who marched, organized, strategized, wrote, risked their lives and kept going even when victory seemed impossible.

Dr. Jones often quoted St. Augustine, “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

There is a temptation in moments like this to retreat into private life, to tune out, to convince ourselves that institutions will fix things. But many of the institutions we assumed would hold firm have not. Universities bend. Media organizations cave. Law firms capitulate. Courts dismantle protections that generations fought to build.

So the burden falls again on us, the ordinary people — on people willing to stay informed, support voting rights, show up, organize locally. Most importantly, people willing to refuse the normalization of authoritarianism and racial exclusion. Democracy is not self-sustaining. As another civil rights hero John Lewis said, it is an act.

To honor Dr. Jones, let’s not simply pay our respects to the heroic past. Let’s recognize the struggle he devoted his life to is not over and take action.

After all, the promissory note still has not been fulfilled.

Mariya Genzel is the founder of Blue Turn Indivisible and organizer of the 2025 Good Trouble Lives On event in Palo Alto that featured Dr. Clarence B. Jones.