In 1963, former Central Kitsap High School and Olympic High School teacher Cherry Rachal heard Martin Luther King Jr. give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. as more than 200,000 people of all colors and races gathered for the March on Washington.

Forty-six years later, Rachal returned to Washington D.C. to see President Barack Obama’s inauguration as he became the nation’s first black president on Jan. 20.

“I saw the dreamer and the dream,” Rachal told a group of CKHS students Wednesday as she gave students a firsthand view of what life was like in the Jim Crow South, growing up in Oklahoma City.

During her childhood and on into her early adult life, everything from schools to grocery stores to hospitals and even churches were segregated, she said.

“If you were white, you went to one hospital. If you were black, you went to the other one, and it didn’t matter where you were,” she said.

Read more about Rachal’s presentation in the March 13 edition of the Central Kitsap Reporter.