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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Interfaith Breakfast Offers Food For Thought Kootenai County Task Force Still Has ‘Work Cut Out For Us’

Breakfast, as the Rev. Grant McLean pointed out, is a good time to consider a dream.

That’s what about 70 people did Monday at the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations’ interfaith breakfast at The Coeur d’Alene Resort.

The dream: Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous vision that someday the world would be free of bigotry.

“We’re all children of the dream, and we have our work cut out for us,” said McLean, of Faith Presbyterian Church in Hayden.

Also Monday, the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force held an evening celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Organizers collected dozens of donated candles for a candlelight vigil.

“The idea was to have a bunch of different shapes, sizes and colors of candles,” said organizer Marcy Peterson, an Americorps national service worker.

At the Coeur d’Alene breakfast, the Rev. Mike Bullard of Coeur d’Alene’s First Presbyterian Church said he believes King’s dream slowly is becoming reality.

“Just a couple of centuries ago - and that’s not a long time in world history - every place in the world, people owned people as slaves,” Bullard said.

Bullard, a Florida native who is white, said he has watched the change in his own family.

As a boy, he said, he tried drinking from a “colored” water fountain - he wanted to see if the water was different. He got in trouble.

When the government decreed that public schools would be integrated, Bullard said, his father piled the family into the car. The family drove through the black section of town, with Bullard’s father ranting about how bad things were going to be.

Yet, when Bullard’s father died, his casket was carried by his six best friends. Three were black.

“There was a huge change in his life,” Bullard recalled. “I think that dream comes ever, ever closer.”

Boise Rabbi Laura Rappaport compared King’s dream to a jigsaw puzzle: Just because society can picture racial harmony doesn’t mean it will be easy to build, she said.

“None of us may live long enough to see the puzzle completed,” she said. “But if we put in place a few more pieces, we’ll make it easier to see the whole picture.”

Her husband, Rabbi Daniel Fink, urged listeners to speak out and try to heal societal divisions. Jewish people must support American Indian, gay and lesbian struggles, he said.

“Individually, we’re all small,” Fink said. “But together, we’re large.”

Similarly, he said, people must speak out against “the quiet complicity” of the neutral.

“Neutrality on human rights is not an option,” he said. “Our obligation is to speak out for our rights - and those of our neighbors.”

In Sandpoint, the keynote speaker was historian Arthur Hart.

“Everyone came here from somewhere else, including the so-called Native Americans who came across the Bering Strait from Asia,” Hart said last week in a telephone interview. “People came here from everywhere and made a distinct contribution.”

He said that in 1870, for example, there were more Chinese miners in Idaho than whites. Japanese workers helped build railroads in southern Idaho, and Chinese built much of the Northern Pacific Railroad that crosses the Panhandle.

In 1914, Idaho elected the nation’s first Jewish governor, Moses Alexander. Alexander, a Democrat, served two terms.

In the past decade, North Idaho gained notoriety over the Hayden Lake Aryan Nations compound and militia groups. But Hart said there is nothing in Idaho’s history to suggest that the state is inherently racist.

“I think we’re much more ethnically diverse than people realize,” he said. “You only have to look in the phone book of any large Idaho town to see Vietnamese and Cambodian names.

“The United States has always operated on the motto ‘e pluribus unum’ (‘out of many, one,’)” said Hart. “We should continue that, instead of becoming Yugoslavia.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo