A close associate of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his support for the American Jewish community in light of the outbreak of antisemitism that followed the Hamas massacre of October 7, the New York Post reported.

Clarence Jones discussed the Jews who joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s during an interview he gave in January as part of a recently published Queens College documentary series on the 60th anniversary of the 'Freedom Summer,' a campaign to register as many African Americans to vote as possible in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.

During the interview, Jones, who served as King's attorney and speechwriter, said that while he does not "agree 100%" with everything Israel is doing, he understands the anger Jewish people feel following the massacre of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of 250 more by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

“They really believe, `Never Again,'" Jones said. “I don’t agree with everything my Jewish brothers and sisters are doing in Israel. But that’s not the issue whether I 100% agree with them. I may not agree with everything they’re doing but I understand the anger from whence it comes."

He added, “There’s no person I know of the generation of Jews that I have come up with that are going to take that risk. They’re not going to take that risk."

Jones recalled how when he asked young Jews who joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s why they supported King's work, they replied that they believed this is what their family members who were murdered during the Holocaust would have wanted them to do.

After being told this, he says he told King, “There’s a group of white people out here who self-identify themselves as Jews. They’re very special and we have to get to understand them."

In February of this year, Jones participated together with Jewish philanthropist Robert Kraft in a Superbowl ad produced by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism on the antisemitic wave that has embroiled the US since October 7.

Martin Luther King Jr. cultivated close relationships with Jewish leaders who supported the civil rights movement, among them Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Joachim Prinz.

King was a supporter of Zionism. In 1968, shortly before his assassination, King responded to a student at Cambridge who criticized the State of Israel by saying, "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking antisemitism."