Keep The Spirit Alive Martin Luther King’s Dream Was To Make The World A Better Place

Mary Ellen Whelan was 4 years old when she watched a black man enter a Sandpoint restaurant and not get served.

It was 1949. Whelan and her family had just finished eating. They were leaving the all-white cafe when the man walked in. The restaurant clerk shook his head twice and refused to seat him, Whelan recalls.

“I was very much ashamed,” says Whelan, 51, now a medical technologist at Bonner General Hospital in Sandpoint. She remembers pressing her cheeks up against the window of her father’s car, watching the man walk away. “He just had this look on his face like, ‘Where will I eat?”’

Forty-seven years later, the restaurant is gone. So is the man, Whelan suspects.

Today, when Martin Luther King’s birthday is commemorated around the nation, Whelan thinks of that occasion and the progress in civil rights - however slow - since then. And she hopes others will think of King too.

“This is the land of the ‘American Dream’ - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - ” Whelan says, “and unless everyone can dream it and live it, this land is a lie.”

For Teri Munger, a technical sergeant at Fairchild Air Force Base, Martin Luther King Jr. Day means many things. It’s the nation’s only official holiday honoring a person of color, a day to celebrate the dreamer and the dream.

“America needs to realize that we all have these different cultures and diversities,” Munger said. “We have to at least take the opportunity to learn about people who are different from us. That’s what he would have wanted.”

Munger says she’s fortunate to live and work at the Air Force base, where she says her supervisors don’t tolerate discrimination of any sort.

For Jim Williams, the day is a reminder of a dream deferred but not dead.

“Racism is still the most challenging issue confronting this nation,” Williams says. “For many people, not just African Americans, America is essentially a dream that is yet to be fulfilled.”

Change is difficult and slow, but possible, says Williams, the first black president of Spokane Community College.

And the dream, it’s still there, among us and within us, Williams says. Just look inside.

“People are looking around for the next Martin Luther King rather than looking within themselves,” Williams says.

To continue the legacy. To fulfill the dream. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo