Clarence Jones, scholar-in-residence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, will receive the 2012 John Thompson Jr. Legacy of a Dream Award from Georgetown University and the Kennedy Center. The award, named after the legendary Georgetown basketball coach, will be given out on January 16.
Jones is the former adviser of, and speech writer for, Martin Luther King Jr. He is credited with assisting Dr. King in writing his “I Have a Dream” speech. Jones also smuggled out King’s famous “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”
Jones is the author of What Would Martin Say? (HarperCollins, 2008) and coauthor of Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
