Old Saybrook ― The message that David Addams had for about 50 people gathered here on Martin Luther King Jr. Day was that “we tend to think of Dr. King in a very limited way” but his legacy spanned many issues.

Addams, executive director of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund and a civil rights attorney, spoke Monday to a crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside Penny Lane Pub. The crowd then migrated to the mural on Seaside Wine & Spirits, to hear more from artist Jasmine Oyola.

Public Art for Racial Justice Education (PARJE) and Old Saybrook March for Justice sponsored the event.

“Dr. King’s legacy is much richer than we often give him credit for,” Addams said. “We tend to try to put him in a box, and even that box is very, very, very important, very powerful, but Dr. King is so much bigger than the box that we’ve tended to put him in.”

While people are familiar with the “I Have a Dream” speech, Addams quoted from a lesser-known speech: King’s August 1967 address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“One day we must ask the question: Why are there 40 million poor people in America?” King said. “And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”

King said “an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring,” and a nation that will keep a people in slavery for 244 years will exploit them and poor people generally.

Addams said if King were alive today and looking at Connecticut, King would ask about the holdup in the CT Baby Bonds program, a racial equity initiative that would deposit money into a trust for babies born into low-income families; what we’re doing about affordable housing; and what we’re doing about the childcare crisis.

“Peace is not just the absence of violence,” Addams said. “And so, Dr. King was truly a man of peace but not just an anti-war activist ― not just someone who believed that no, we should not have this massive military might all over the world ― but that we should be creating peace in every way possible, from the time these young people are born.”

Artist discusses newest PARJE mural

A block away from Penny Lane Pub is the fifth and newest mural funded and developed by the PARJE Sister Murals Project.

On one side of the wine store’s door are the faces of Ann Petry, Katharine Hepburn and Anna Louise James, with “GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?” written above and “THREE BOLD WOMEN” underneath.

Old Saybrook native Ann Petry was a writer whose 1946 debut novel “The Street” became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies. Her aunt Anna Louisa James operated the James Pharmacy in Old Saybrook for 50 years and was the first African-American female pharmacist in Connecticut. Hepburn starred in the 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” which was filmed while interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states.

Artist Jasmine Oyola recalled watching the movie as a young girl and it resonating, as her parents are Black and Puerto Rican and Italian ― and she is now in an interracial marriage as well.

On the other side of the shop door is a Native American landscape featuring a woman dancing, a wigwam and an osprey, with the title “HONORING OUR INDIGENOUS CULTURE” and an outline of sage at the top.

Maryam Elahi, an Old Saybrook resident who organized March for Justice and is president of the Community Foundation of Eastern Connecticut, said there will be an official launch event for the mural in the spring.

e.moser@theday.com