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GREENSBORO — In Rabbi Harry Sky’s heyday, he marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., preached from Jewish and Christian pulpits about social equality, and pushed for fair hiring and housing practices.

The 87-year-old civil rights veteran from Maine says he’s too old to launch campaigns or start social-justice organizations now.

But he thinks about issues of equality all the time. He still wants to inspire people to fight for a “level playing field” for all people, regardless of their race, physical ability or sexual preference.

“That’s what I pray about,” said Sky, who moved to Greensboro last year. “I ask God all the time, 'Open my eyes. Let me see what I can do next.’”

People across the country will gather today at churches and civic centers to remember the life of King, America’s greatest civil rights leader. Sky, an accomplished speaker and scholar, is one of the relative few who risked his life alongside King to advocate for human rights.

Then rabbi of Temple Beth El in Portland, Maine, Sky was among a group from that state to ride a bus to participate in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He said he listened to King’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech from just a few feet away on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Sky returned to Maine and helped re-establish the state’s NAACP chapter. He later marched with King and others in Selma, Ala., in 1965. He saw people attacked and taunted; a bystander spit on his shoulder.

His daughter, Rina Wolfgang of Greensboro, recalled how her mother cried all the way home to Portland after dropping her father off in Boston for his bus trip to Alabama. And Wolfgang remembers a note-covered rock shattering the front window of their home during a Passover Seder meal. Three people were sent to the hospital but, hours later, her father resumed the ritual feast.

“He was not going to let hatred win,” said Wolfgang, who was 11 at the time. “Passover is a holiday of freedom, and he was making a point.”

Sky’s activism was simply the living out of his Jewish faith. And he doesn’t hesitate to share those experiences with anyone who will ask.

“They were the essence of my life,” Sky said. “When I sit down at night and I’m kind of lonely and I think, 'Oh, I could have done this or I should have done that,’ what comes to my head usually is one of those incidents. And I’m reminded of a Hebrew phase: 'Whoever rescues or turns around one person, it’s as if he’s done it to the world.’”

Last week, he visited B’Nai Shalom Day School to talk with middle-school students as part of their King remembrance program.

He had plenty of stories: the non-Jewish youth who wore kippahs, or skull caps, as a symbol of the activism they considered sacred; the conversations he had with King during the march in Alabama.

Wolfgang said her father faced a difficult transition moving to Greensboro after living in Maine for 50 years and advocating for various causes. Sky now lives in a retirement community in north Greensboro and attends Beth David Synagogue off West Friendly Avenue.

“He’s one of those people who can’t sit still,” she said. “He needs challenges to think about and he needs causes.”

Contact Morgan Josey Glover at 373-7078 or morgan.josey@news-record.com