Participants in the Martin Luther King Day march travel along Main Street in Waterville Monday. About 30 people took part in the march. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

WATERVILLE — It was cold Monday morning, with temperatures well below freezing. But about 25 people braved the cold for a march to deliver clothes to the homeless in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Bundled in scarves and parkas, the crowd marched to the Waterville Area Soup Kitchen to deliver boxes of socks, gloves and clothes to those in need.

Elizabeth Leonard, an author and a retired Colby professor, organized the march. She was inspired by King’s own community activism to make the event double as a community clothes drive.

“It’s a movement to try to organize from the bottom up, the people who are suffering most from these intertwining systems of injustice,” Leonard said. “It’s continuing the work of Martin Luther King to end racism, systemic poverty, militarism, religious nationalism and ecological devastation.”

Waterville Area Soup Kitchen dining room manager Jessica Beedy wipes tears after receiving donated hats, gloves and socks from participants in the Martin Luther King Day March in Waterville Monday. “People are so generous,” said Beedy. About 30 people took part in the march. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

Leonard is an activist with the Poor People’s Campaign, a modern iteration of a political movement King helped found in the late 1960s that advocated for sweeping anti-poverty measures. She says Monday’s march is part of a broader effort to continue King’s activism from decades ago.

The crowd of about two dozen trudged through sidewalks laden with five inches of unshoveled snow to the soup kitchen. Their donations of hats, gloves and scarves filled several large produce boxes.

“People are so generous,” the soup kitchen’s dining room manager, Jessica Beedy, said through tears.

Leonard was wearing a thin, high-visibility vest that she said was about 60 years old. It originally belonged to her father, Richard Leonard, who wore it as he marched with King from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. One marcher carried a large photograph of the elder Leonard from that march in 1965.

On the shoulder of the vest, the word “Freedom” is scribbled in pencil.  Elizabeth said it was written by a young boy at the march who couldn’t spell his own name, but had learned how to write the word that day.

“I was in elementary school, and at the time, I remembered that my dad missed my birthday because he was somewhere doing something,” Elizabeth recalls. “Well, that’s what he was doing. He was down in Selma. So I forgive him.”

Participants in the Martin Luther King Day March respond Monday as Elizabeth Leonard, bottom left, reads from King’s “I’ve been to the mountain top” speech at Waterville City Hall. The speech, which King delivered April 3, 1968, was his last, given the day before he was assassinated. About 30 people took part in the march. (Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel) Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

Leonard gave a speech before the group marched through downtown Waterville, pulling quotes from King’s final speech which he delivered April 3, 1968, one day before he was assassinated.

“He said on that night: ‘The world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion is all around,'” Leonard quoted. “‘But only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars. We have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men and women have been trying to grapple with throughout history.'”

MLK Jr. Day was established in 1983 and first observed three years later in honor of King’s birthday on Jan. 15, 1929. The holiday must be observed on a Monday because of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act signed in 1968.

As the crowd braved the cold in Waterville for MLK Jr. Day, Leonard urged them to use King’s words and the movement he led as an inspiration amid today’s political climate.

“We have to change people’s hearts and minds, but we also have to change the laws and policies to govern the way we live our lives,” she said.