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Tavis: Isaiah Washington, of course, stars on the hit ABC drama, "Grey's Anatomy.' The much-anticipated new season gets underway on Thursday, September 21. Isaiah Washington, nice to see you as always. Mr. Jones, an honor to have you with us.

Clarence B. Jones: Thank you so much.

Tavis: I said honor - Isaiah, do you mind if I start here?

Isaiah Washington: Please, by all means.

Tavis: I say an honor because this is a rarity. This was Dr. King's confidante and speechwriter. Just a quick story. The letter from the Birmingham jail that we all know, the letter that Dr. King wrote from the Birmingham jail. During that period, they wouldn't let King have access to pen and paper.

They were so rude and racist and mean-spirited toward him that his counsel, his lawyer at the time, Clarence B. Jones, had to sneak into the prison cell the pen and the paper for Dr. King to now write that letter known all around the world as the famous letter from the Birmingham jail. He snuck in the pen and paper into the prison cell to get that letter written by Dr. King and then snuck it out and got it published.

That's just one story of any number of stories I could tell about this man's relationship to, I believe, the greatest American we've ever produced, Dr. King. And he doesn't do interviews, so to have him come on the show, for me, is a high honor and I mean that. I'm glad to have you here.

Jones: Thank you so much, Tavis.

Tavis: Tell me right quick. I know it's a long story and I ain't got a lot of time, but tell me right quick how, when Dr. King first came to you - and I passed by that church the other day. You know, I live around the corner from it. You know the story - but when Dr. King first comes to you and asks you to work with him, you had the nerve to turn down Dr. King. What were you thinking?

Jones: I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I think I was thinking that it was just really inconvenient for me. But I do remember, God bless my wife now deceased, she was quite annoyed because he asked me to come down and work as a law clerk. He had been indicted by the state of Alabama for tax evasion. He had superb lawyers, Cooper Delaney, lawyers out of Chicago, the most experienced tax lawyers.

I was going to be a law clerk. I was living in Los Angeles at the time in Altadena. It was just not convenient. You know, when I said no and he left, I remember my wife saying to me, "I don't quite understand you. What is it that you're doing? I know you're just starting out your career." My retort to her, I said, "Hold on. Just because some Negro preacher got his hand caught in the cookie jar, that's not my problem."

Tavis: (Laughter) See, now you embarrass me. That wonderful story about working with Dr. King. He refers to King as a Negro preacher with his hand in the cookie jar (laughter).

Jones: I have had to live that down because that's what I said. I mean, you know, the Lord's not finished with me yet. I am still a work in progress.

Tavis: Just to get the other side of that, that's how the relationship starts. And when you look back on that friendship now, your viewpoint now is -

Jones: My viewpoint now is that America owes a great debt to Martin Luther King, Jr. He enabled America to find its soul. As I say in the book I'm writing, it's like America had been hooked or addicted on racism and injustice and he was able through nonviolent tough love to enable America to shake its addiction. In fact, the reason we owe such a great debt is because he, in the last half of the twentieth century, transformed America to reclaim its soul.

Tavis: Let me put you on the spot right quick. Do you happen to have that piece in your pocket or did you leave it in the green room?

Jones: No, the piece you're talking about?

Tavis: Yeah.

Jones: No, I don't have it in my pocket. You know the piece we're talking about?

Tavis: Yeah.

Jones: We're talking about the responsibilities of African American leadership and you know how it's extended. By the way, I've updated that.

Tavis: Let me explain what I'm talking about. Clarence Jones has a particular passage where King is talking about the kind of leaders we need in the world, leaders more in love with humanity than in love with money, leaders more in love with people than they are in love with publicity, one of the more powerful passages you've never heard from Dr. King.

I always laugh when people think that King only gave one speech in his life and the speech only had one line in it, "I want my children to live in a nation where they'll not be judged by the color of their skin, but by their content or their character.' He gave more than "I have a dream" and that speech had more than one line in it.

But Clarence Jones carries in his pocket almost everywhere he goes a passage of Dr. King talking about the challenge and the kind of leaders that we need, and you always have it with you?

Jones: Yes, I do, and the 2006 version of that is that I think the definition of a leader with integrity is where the exercise of that leadership results in no beneficial result or benefit to the person exercising leadership, where the exercise of leadership does not result in any beneficial result to the person or persons exercising leadership.

Tavis: See, King fit that standard.

Jones: Thank you.

Tavis: That's a high standard, that's a high standard.

Jones: I understand, but we're talking about Martin. I just want to segue here and say one of the reasons - this gentleman here? As you know so well, he is a part of the generation that Martin sought to inspire and I can't tell you - people who watch "Grey's Anatomy" could tell you better than I can - how powerful it is, the view of seeing this Black surgeon, how powerful it is for a young African American boy or girl to see this.

This brother is not just an actor saying lines, okay? I've come to know him, to know that, yes, he has to say his lines and he has to stand and do everything on cue, but his soul - this brother has got his deep inside of him and, had Martin lived, he would have been so proud of the Isaiah Washingtons and the persons in his generation.

Look, there are people in his generation who are not like him. I'm not going to say - you know, there are people who've made other kinds of choices, other kinds of things they want to do to "inspire" us. An artist without integrity is something we have to examine carefully.

Tavis: Doesn't get much better than that, Isaiah. That's a high compliment. You're too choked up to talk right now. I ask that because - I want to give you time to get your thoughts together here - speaking of your soul and your integrity, when you were last here, you were talking about this connection that you had experienced deeper than most of us with the Continent of Africa and to some places specifically on the Continent. Now here you are back here on this couch again having taken the next step, now talking about investing in Africa.

Washington: Thank you. The last time I was here about eight months ago, I strategically wanted to do this show to specifically talk about Africa. In doing so, I had an individual reach out to me and wanted to support me and actually had wanted to piggyback his interests in Africa. Once I was able to ascertain that that was not exactly where I wanted to go in terms of my humanitarian connection to the people that I found out I have a genetic link to, I found another gentleman that was in that circle.

He was a guy that walked me into Sierra Leone, put together a team of people, an architect, a plastic surgeon, a special agent out of Quantico, Virginia and others, and put a plan together with a cameraman and a sound man to go in and ask five questions. For those five questions, I received answers and now I have about fifty-five hours of footage showing that these people are not what we just hear when we hear about "blood diamonds" and we hear about the negative aspects of Sierra Leone. I gave them a voice and, in doing so, I actually was there long enough to become a Tribal Chief.

So now that I've come back, I'm working with Mr. Jones to advise me on business interests and investments, how to do it properly and transparently, and also to continue that movement that I've been reading so much about and going back peacefully and saying that we don't need to have donorship in this particular country anymore because what I am trying to exercise through my humanity and my spirit is that, if we get every African American connected to that country or from where they have their origin, that is a powerful statement to be able to reconnect and develop an economic base.

So that is the spirit in which I am doing. Also more importantly, I have the rights to this man's story to portray him in a major motion picture so he can let the world know who and what and why and now to understand why I am where I exist and, more importantly, here in this time in America, but even in Africa. So what I'm trying to do is book in a lot of time. As we used to say, to clear that debt.

Tavis: What's fascinating for those who are watching right now, they might have seen the piece I know that you and I both read in "Vanity Fair." Vanity Fair somehow got to this man and heard of his story that was in a Vanity Fair piece a few months ago.

So if you recall reading a big story in Vanity Fair about a guy named Clarence Jones who's the closest guy to King you've never heard of, this is the guy you read about in Vanity Fair. I just wanted to put that out right quick.

Let me come back to you, Isaiah. What's fascinating about your connection to the Continent is that it started the same way mine did. It starts with a visit. I raise that only because I wonder how much more connected we as Black folk would be if we could convince people that the flight from New York to Ghana is roughly the same length as the flight from New York to Los Angeles. If you save your pennies, you can get to West Africa, and the minute you get there and make that first trip, then everything else falls in place in terms of the connection.

Washington: Well, it goes back, again, to mankind and the beginning of mankind and people of color and our contributions to civilization. When I hear people say they were going to Africa to civilize us, that always makes it very laughable to me because, when you think of the word "civil,' you don't think of rape and torture and colonialism. They were able to say, on one hand, we want to come and civilize you with a bible in the other hand, but everything you were doing was not considered civilized.

My connection has always been very strong. I have now like Trump's "You've been fired,' the word DNA has memory, trademark, because I've been saying it so much. I got that because this man is very good at copyrighting things when no one thought they should have been copyrighted, like all of Martin Luther King's speeches.

So I've been working pretty much parallel with his spirit not because I've been reading so much, but it will be interesting to have Mr. Jones and yourself tested and now Sidney Poitier has agreed to take the test after doing somewhat of a debate about I know who I am, why do I have to know what part of my Africanness this is? I know who I am.

But now he's starting to understand that we have to go a little bit further than the West Indies. We have go a little bit further because, more importantly, what I found in Sierra Leone, the slave castle off the coast of Sierra Leone, Bunts Island, was the only island that was a designated island to send all of the slave labor to North America exclusively, period. So every slave from Ghana, from Nigeria, from Sierra Leone, everything that had to be sent to North America had to be processed off of my great country that I know I have ancestry with, through Bunts Island.

Bunts Island, through Ambassador Thomas Hull when I was there at the Embassy, has cited that as our Auschwitz for African Americans. So every African American on this continent that had to be brought to Charleston, South Carolina and Georgia to plant rice, which was the skill of my people, the Mende, have access to Sierra Leone because I've already made that connection.

Tavis: They say that you don't know where you're going until you know where you've been. They also say that the mark of a good conversation is to leave them wanting more.

Washington: (Laughter).

Tavis: I wish I had more time because I want more. Fortunately, I'll get a chance to talk to Isaiah and Mr. Jones off-camera, but I promise you when they get closer to getting this project off the ground that they're working on, I will have them back for a full show and talk about this in more detail. What an honor, always. Good to have you here.

Jones: Thank you so much.

Washington: Absolutely.

Tavis: Up next on this program, former Clinton speechwriter and now author, Eric Liu. Stay with us.