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For King's Adviser, Fulfilling The Dream 'Cannot Wait'


Clarence B. Jones, legal adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., takes notes behind King at a press conference regarding in Birmingham, Ala., in February 1963.
For the month of August, Morning Edition and The Race Card Project are looking back at a seminal moment in civil rights history: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream Speech" Aug. 28, 1963. Approximately 250,000 people descended on the nation's capital from all over the country for the mass demonstration.
Through The Race Card Project's six-word stories, we'll meet some of the people who witnessed that history and hear their memories and reflections on race relations in America today.
This is the second in a two-part report about Clarence B. Jones and the March on Washington.
Aug. 28, 1963, was a tense day for Clarence B. Jones. As the longtime attorney and adviser for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Jones had a long list of worries as people started to fill the streets around the monuments on the National Mall. Were the right permits filed? Would the speakers veer off script? Would enough people show up?
"I had this feeling that we were going to throw a big party and nobody comes," Jones recalls.
But people did come — at least 250,000 of them. Still, Jones also worried that the crowd might also include agitators, "some of what I called 'agent provocateurs' — white as well as black," Jones says. "I didn't know whether some of the black nationalists who were opposed to Dr. King's non-violence, or whether some of the people from the right wing, the Klan ... would provoke something."
Read more - Npr.org

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