'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere'

During the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, I had the privilege of hosting and honoring Dr. Clarence Jones, who co-wrote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. 

Dr. Jones lived right here in Riverdale in that fateful year of 1963.   

When Dr. King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, for protesting segregation, Dr. Jones was the one who smuggled out Dr. King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Not only did Dr. Jones reside in Riverdale in 1963, but he also arranged for Dr. King to move into his Riverdale home, which came to be known as Dr. King’s “Command Post North.” 

As a lawyer, Dr. Jones not only practiced law, he transformed it. As a civil rights leader, he not only had a dream, he realized it. Above all, Dr. Jones labored for the greatest cause in American history: equal rights, equal justice, and equal protection under the law.

America has lived through two reconstructions. Whereas the first largely failed at the hands of Jim Crow, the second has largely succeeded on the strength of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, in spite of all the challenges confronting America, there can be no denying how far we have come and how high Dr. Jones and Dr. King have lifted us all.

Dr. Jones and Dr. King were American revolutionaries in their own time who inspired fundamental change where it matters the most — in the very soul of America. Their legacy — which includes nothing less than the liberation of a people and the reconstruction of a nation — remains with us 60 years later. 

As one of the few surviving members of Dr. King’s innermost circle, Dr. Jones has been described as the last of the lions. At 92, he has dedicated the final chapter of his life to a new cause: Building solidarity between Black Americans and Jewish Americans.   

The least we can do to honor memory of these civil rights icons is to model here in Riverdale the multiracial democracy for which both Dr. King and Dr. Jones so valiantly fought.

The moral lesson of the Civil Rights Movement is that we’re all in this together, bound by a common humanity that transcends the particulars of race and religion, color and creed.

Dr. King put it best: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” There is no one in America who knows this self-evident truth more deeply in his mind, who feels it more deeply in his soul, and who has lived it more faithfully in his life for nearly a century than Riverdale’s very own, Dr. Clarence Jones.

The author is a congressman representing the greater Riverdale area