As soon as I became President of the University of South Carolina three years ago, I asked several African-American faculty and staff about the relationship USC had with the black community. I was told that it had been up and down, and that things could be much better. After meeting individually with several African-American community leaders to discuss these issues, I appointed a Community Advisory Committee consisting of representatives of the NAACP, the Urban League, local government, our black alumni association, and opinion leaders throughout the community. At the same time, I reached out to the larger African-American community, especially through churches and other organizations.

I was told early on that the Community Relations Council (CRC) was one of the most important organizations in the community, because its members are out in the community working to bring about positive change in the areas of fair and better housing, meaningful employment and mentoring programs for our at-risk youth. I want to congratulate the CRC on your 41 years of service to our community. Because of your hard work, your compassion and your commitment to creating a just society in order to bring about social change, Columbia is known as a place of opportunity, of harmony, of peaceful change, a city where leaders work side by side to discuss differences and seek solutions to problems .... where everyday folk reach out to one another. The CRC motto is "Race relations is everybody's business." Because all our businesses should be equal opportunity employers, support for the work of the CRC must come from every sector of the community, including government, business, other outreach agencies, faith communities, and grassroots activists.

It is ironic that this past month we have been bombarded in the media with stories about justice denied in the relentless pursuit of justice for all. Civil rights cases that remained unsolved for over 40 years are finally coming to trial once again, and justice -- at long last -- is being carried out as we approach the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Forty years ago, the struggle was about justice, freedom, and basic civil rights. The struggle was in the streets and this city was in the midst of that struggle. Former Mayor Lester Bates and Hyman Rubin were determined that Columbia was not going to become a hotbed of violence and hatred. They helped found the Columbia Luncheon Club, which held its first meeting on our university campus in November, 1963, and continues to meet on our campus to this day.

While we have not completely won the battle for justice, for freedom, and for civil rights, we have made huge gains during these past forty years. As we celebrate these successes, we need to remind ourselves that although the struggle is no longer in the streets, the battle has not yet been won. Recent data regarding the struggle for social mobility show that it is becoming increasingly difficult to move up. But we must not give up that fight. As we become an increasingly diverse nation, we must work to ensure equal opportunity for everyone ... in housing, in education, in the job market. We must continue to talk with each other and not at each other.

One of the most effective efforts to transcend racial barriers at our University has come from our student services office. We call service the great equalizer, because when our students are out in the community building a house, teaching adults to read, or tutoring young children, they connect with one another across racial, cultural and ethnic lines with a common goal of helping improve the life of others.

As a lifelong teacher, I firmly believe that education is the foundation for economic success. Therefore, I am pleased to report that preliminary numbers indicate that, along with our record number of students coming this fall, we will most likely have a record number of incoming African-American students. And that's great news. But what's even better is that, because Carolina was re-integrated more than 40 years ago, we are seeing legacy students ... the children of our black alumni starting their own academic careers at Carolina. All this is most heartening. But I also want to point out that we don't just recruit these students, we graduate them. According to the publication Black Issues in Higher Education, the University of South Carolina is a top producer of African-Americans with baccalaureate degrees.

The University of South Carolina, our state's flagship university, has an obligation to be accessible to all the people of South Carolina, not just the wealthiest or most academically gifted people in South Carolina, but all the people. Again this year as I carried my Bowtie Bus Tour to each and every one of the 46 counties in the Palmetto State, I made a point to visit many of the state's historically black high schools to encourage those students to consider enrolling at our University. To the best of my knowledge, I'm the only white president in the United States of a research university who began his academic career as faculty member in a historically black university. So I fully understand that students have a large number of alternatives for higher education. But irrespective of what their goals are, please encourage your grandchildren, your nieces, your nephews, and your neighbors to study harder and be more diligent in their homework habits, because the admission standards of many of our universities are on the rise. Grades and test scores that were good enough to get into Carolina yesterday are not good enough to get in tomorrow.

Just like the past 41 years, the next 41 years will indeed be critical ones, filled with challenges as we move into an era in which education is much more essential than it has been in the past. As we approach these decades, will we be divided, or will we stand together as one community, indivisible, working for opportunity for all? If we are to realize that dream, we must be committed to banding together -- black, white, and Latino; rich and poor -- through a combination of hard work, vision and, occasionally, compromise. One of the greatest goals of our society is to work toward harmonious race relations and a society where the color of a man's skin is no more predictive of what he will accomplish in his lifetime than the color of his eyes. I stand before you today knowing that as a nation, and as a community our collective success depends on what we as individuals do. The next 41 years will be filled with the challenges of empowering people to take responsibility, to revitalize our communities, to reinvigorate public education, to make morally sound decisions and broaden opportunities for all.

I'm going to give away my age by telling you about the best blues singer I have ever heard: Billie Holiday, whom we affectionately called "Lady Day." She did a lot of her singing in dimly lit, smoke-filled clubs. One of my favorite Lady Day ballads starts with these words: "You came a long way from St. Louie."

The Greater Columbia Community Relations Council has made enormous progress over the past 41 years. And you should feel good about that as we celebrate your progress. But listen carefully to the next line of that old blues song and imagine Lady Day crooning these plaintive words: "But you still got a long way to go." On all the causes we are valiantly fighting for, in education and in economic opportunity, "we still got a long way to go."

But if we heed the words of the prophet Isaiah, we shall find the courage, the tenacity, and the fortitude to go the whole distance. Hearken to this ancient admonition: "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength: they shall mount up with wings of eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." Allow me to close by fusing the opening phrase of the Negro National Anthem with the beginning words of the song that came to characterize the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Lift every voice and sing 'til earth and heaven ring, we shall overcome. We shall overcome."