A photo of Martin Luther King Jr. from the 1965 march on Selma shows the iconic civil rights leader wearing a garland near a white man with a beard and a thick shock of wavy hair. Last week, on Jan. 11, it was the birthday of that man: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the writer, theologian and scholar who marched next to King on that historic day. The previous week, Dec. 23, was his 50th yahrzeit.

A civil rights campaigner who was firmly against the war in Vietnam, he was held in deep respect by King, and in turn upheld King’s mission in talks he gave across the country.

Heschel, a professor at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, was a regular visitor to the Bay Area. In 1961, we carried this notice: “Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel, recognized as an outstanding theologian and ethical teacher, will lecture Sunday, Feb. 12 at 8 p.m. at Temple Emanu-El, taking for his subject, ‘Man’s Quest for God.’”

In 1966 he was back, with the message “Man’s quest for God is actually man’s quest for humanity; a challenge for man to be human, compassionate, understanding and appreciative.”

His topics ranged from civil rights to the generational warfare of the 1960s.

“He calls attention to a wonderful generation of young people seeking guidance not only about existence in a trying age but identification as Jews,” we wrote in 1966. “All that many are receiving, Rabbi Heschel declares, is infantile conceptions, stereotypes and cliches. The time has come, he declares, to destroy the myth that the accumulation of wealth and the achievement of comfort are man’s principal vocations and aspirations.”

Heschel was also instrumental in discussions that led to the Catholic church in 1965 officially establishing a new and better relationship with Jews.

In 2006, the daughters of both King and Heschel spoke to a Bay Area audience.

“There’s a natural human desire for heroic figures who inspire us,” Susannah Heschel, herself a noted Jewish scholar, told J. at the time. “A lot of Jews were inspired by my father. But what worries me now is, I have the feeling that not all Americans got the right lessons. I’m concerned about what happened since our fathers’ deaths.”