Clarence Benjamin Jones (born January 8, 1931) is an American lawyer and the former personal counsel, advisor, draft speech writer and close friend of Martin Luther King Jr.

He was raised in a foster home and brought up in the Catholic religion; he attended a Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament boarding school in New England, as did his mother.

[7] Following his graduation he was drafted into the United States Army in 1953 and spent nearly two years at Fort Dix when he declined to sign a loyalty oath.

He urged King to make a statement because "your status as a leader requires that you not be silent about an event and issues so decisive to the world" (Jones, 1 November 1962).

Jones accompanied King, Wyatt Tee Walker, Stanley Levison, Jack O'Dell, and others to the SCLC training facility in Dorchester, Georgia, for an early January 1963 strategy meeting to plan the Birmingham Campaign.

After King's death, Jones served as one of the negotiators during the 1971 prison riot at Attica, and was editor and part owner of the New York Amsterdam News from 1971 to 1974.

"[4][12]In 2018 Jones and Jonathan D. Greenberg co-founded the University of San Francisco (USF) Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice to disseminate the teachings of King and Mahatma Gandhi.

Gavin Newsom and the state's Instructional Quality Commission) called the ESMC a "perversion of history" for providing material referring to non-violent Black leaders as "passive" and "docile".