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Martin Luther King Jr. adviser on what it was like to hear him speak: 'It was spellbinding'

Name: Martin Luther King Jr. adviser on what it was like to hear him speak: 'It was spellbinding'
Uploaded: 2019-01-21T17:04:57+00:00
Description: Martin Luther King Jr.'s advisers and followers come together to reflect on his legacy in new video.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s advisers and followers come together to reflect on his legacy in new video.

Brittany Levine Beckman

on January 21, 2019

Martin Luther King Jr. adviser on what it was like to hear him speak: 'It was spellbinding'

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For Clarence Jones, legal adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and author of What would Martin Say?, hearing the civil rights leader speak was otherworldly.

"I never heard anybody speak like that before. It was spellbinding. It was mesmerizing," Jones says in a video reflecting on his friend's legacy and the lessons of the non-violent movement.

The video, produced by The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands in partnership with the Gandhi King Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice (which Jones founded), features several of King's contemporaries.

And they all came to the same conclusions: King transformed their feelings into empowering words and convinced them to make sacrifices, even put their lives on the line.

"He could probably get you to do anything," says J.T. Johnson, one of the civil rights leaders who jumped into a whites-only pool in 1964.

Topics Activism Social Good

Brittany Levine Beckman

Brittany Levine Beckman was Mashable's managing editor. She enjoys crafting feature ideas, learning new things, and party parrots. Before working at Mashable, she covered community news at the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register. That's how she met a zonkey and the tallest man in the world.