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USF professor Dr. Clarence Jones led a June 17 Zoom conversation on the national crisis on race relations sparked by the killing of George Floyd May 25 in a police encounter in Minneapolis. Dr. Jones served as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s lawyer, strategic advisor and speechwriter before his assassination in 1968.
June 24, 2020Christina Gray
Catholic San Francisco
The man who helped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. draft his historic “I’ve Got A Dream” speech in 1963 called George Floyd’s killing a “tipping point,” but said racial injustice will not be healed without acknowledgement and accountability.
“Part of the process of reconciliation is agreeing to a set of facts,” Clarence Jones said June 17 in a Zoom webinar offered by the University of San Francisco. “You can’t have reconciliation around a set of facts that are in dispute or challenge. It’s just not possible.”
Jones, 89, is a faculty member at the Jesuit-run university and director of the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice. He teaches a course called “From Slavery to Obama.”
“The problem we are experiencing today is precisely because we have been unable or unwilling to face the facts that are required for reconciliation,” he said.
Jones said the “simple facts” are that America was founded on the institution of slavery and the “pernicious ideological legacy of white supremacy.”
White supremacy has “passed on through the institutional veins from generation to generation” despite the “magnificent words” of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, he said.
More than 500 people registered for the event, which continued a conversation that started at a campus-wide vigil for Floyd shortly after his killing in an encounter with police in Minneapolis May 25.
“In my life, I have seen great horrors and great achievements,” said Jones, who served as King’s lawyer, strategic adviser and speechwriter from 1960 until King’s assassination on April 4, 1968.
“In the nine decades I have lived, I have never seen a crisis as urgent and grave as the crisis facing our nation today,” he said.
He called King “America’s preeminent apostle of love, nonviolence and commitment to the pursuit of personal excellence and social justice.”
Despite calls from some activists to defund police, Jones said he is not a proponent. However, he said police budgets should be reviewed to see if they are “rational” given the other needs in African American communities.
“There is nothing in my work and legacy working with Dr. King that would suggest we don’t want police,” Jones said.
“Let’s get sensible and real,” he continued. “The African American community, we need the police. I’m not against the police. I want the police to be in our communities. I just don’t want them kneeling on our neck for 8:46 seconds and killing us.”
He said police officers should live in and have a relationship to the communities they serve, but they often don’t.
“They come into the African American community and don’t see themselves as an occupying army,” he said. “But they act like they are.”
Jones challenged individuals and institutions – even Jesuit-run institutions like USF – to acknowledge unchecked, insidious racism.
“We cannot forget that our commitment to living a ‘faith that does justice’ is rooted in narratives of liberation of the oppressed,” wrote USF President Jesuit Father Paul J. Fitzgerald in a June 10 open letter addressed to “Black-identified students, faculty, staff, alumni and their allies.”
The school acknowledged its own failure at times to “support or actively respond” to members of the school community who have called out racist policies and practices or who engaged in anti-racist activism. It promised “new ways of living, learning and working together as a community.”
“We recognize that our Black colleagues, Black students, and Black alumni may have lived with high levels of uncertainty and anxiety at the hands of our silence, our complicity, and our exclusion,” he said. “We have heard this, yet our responses need to be different.”
On June 12, the members of the Loyola House Jesuit community on the USF campus issued a statement condemning systemic racism and pledging “self-examination, transformative listening, communal discernment, and the funding of scholarships.”
“The racism that caused [Floyd’s] death is systemic, as it is for the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Dominique Clayton, and Ahmaud Arbery,” the community said. “Sadly, the list goes on and on. Racism was present from the founding of the first European colonies in North America."
“As Jesuits, we are not absolved from this original sin and acknowledge our own sinful history. … We stand in solidarity with those fighting for an end toracism and white supremacy.”