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Although my schedule does not permit me to be with you today, please know that my spirit is with all of you. In the spirit of community, friendship and unity, let me share these few thoughts with you.

First, I congratulate the Swain County Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday Celebration Committee for bringing to the citizens of Swain and surrounding counties, memorable ways to memorialize Dr. King. As a native of Bryson City, I feel especially close to the area.

Allow me to offer these two or three points as remarks I would have made.

First, Dr. King had a vision of America as the central place where the beloved community, as he would phrase it, could and should be realized. Founded upon the principles of justice and equality in the crucible of democracy, America possessed the best hope for the realization of community characterized by love, agape love, and a love that was motivated by the need, care, and benefit others.

Second, Dr. King prompted all of us to use a new way of making love real: the way of nonviolence. Let us be mindful that nonviolence was deeply rooted in love and its physical expression was the actualization, the realization of the inward character. In other words, nonviolence elicited, called for, the best within us, and invited the same from those outside of us. Nonviolence, then, was not motivated by fear, but overcame fear by the implementation of love-in-action.

When love and nonviolence combine, they become the foundation upon which community can be established.

As America today continues to deal with itself and others, love and nonviolence must continue to be our guideposts, our moral compass. Even in the peace of the Great Smoky Mountains, love and nonviolence must continue to prevail. As a young teenager in Bryson City, just months after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an attempt to actualize love through nonviolence was initated with the first attempt in the state of North Carolina to desegregate a public school. While the physical act of desegregation did not come immediately, the act, the seed of change had been planted, and it would become a reality later. In part because I was privileged to be a part of that act, I am here (would be physically) today. Rather than fostering hatred, it instilled determination to elevate in spite of the odds. I am glad to have a home in Bryson City, and I come here as often as my schedule permits. Why? Because unlike Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, I can come home.

When I heard of this impending celebration, my heart leaped with a joy. This was a joy borne of expectation now realized. I knew all along that the spirit of the people of Bryson City was fundamentally good, even in 1955-56 when some acted out of tradition and feeling rather than a desire for equality and justice, for I saw not with physical eyes only but the eyes of potential. Today, an event that started me on a trajectory of hope and has carried me from here to China, Latin America, and other parts of the world, now returns me to my roots.

Thank you for all that you have done. I am grateful indeed to be a part of this historic occasion. The Promised Land is over the horizon. See it; expect it; work for it; occupy it. As Dr. King has said, 'My eyes have seen the glory of the Coming of the Lord...I may not get to the Promised Land, but we (as a people, as a nation) will get to the Promised Land.' (paraphrased).

Herman E. Thomas, Ph.D.
Vice President for Academic Affairs
Shaw University

Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus
UNC Charlotte

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