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Thousands of people visit Greensboro every year — stopping by Stephanie’s or Stamey’s, a nationally recognized children’s museum, one of the busiest coliseums on the East Coast, and a rejuvenated downtown that includes the waterfalls of Center City Park.

They aren’t just A&T alumni coming to homecoming or the thousands of attendees at the Marketplace America meeting. They are tattoo artists converging on the Koury Convention Center and Special Olympic athletes competing at local colleges. They are furniture industry buyers and Baptist messengers and ACC basketball fans.

They not only put money in our pockets, they make us feel good about all the community has to offer.

This weekend, a regional gathering of neo-Nazis, the National Socialist Movement, is headed to the city that I, a transplant, have come to love.

I am the first to say that they have a right to both their opinions and their desire to meet here.

And the gathering is so uncharacteristic of who we are that their presence here may actually have a benefit. More on that later.

Ours is a city where myriad faiths and ethnicities have taken hold — a tapestry that includes Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, along with Asians, Africans and Hispanics. In fact, more than 100 countries are represented in the Guilford County school system.

This diversity has its roots in Guilford County’s history.

Quakers gathered in 1816 at Centre Friends Meeting in southern Guilford to organize the North Carolina Manumission Society, an anti-slavery movement before and during the Civil War. Quakers also organized stops here for the Underground Railroad.

Ever notice the Star of David etched in a highly visible glass pane at First Presbyterian Church? That decades-old pane with the universal symbol of Judaism faces the old Temple Emanuel synagogue across Greene Street.

Granted, it is not all a celebratory history.

This is a city that still struggles with the aftermath of Nov. 3, 1979, when five Communist Workers Party protesters were shot and killed by Klan members and Nazis. But Greensboro is also poised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins at the downtown Woolworthwith a multimillion-dollar museum.

Even as a high-profile discrimination complaint has dogged the city’s police department for years, two of the last three chiefs of police, including the current leader, have been black. Incidentally, while the majority population of Guilford County is white, the mayor of Greensboro, chairman of the county Board of Commissioners and the school superintendent are black, as is the man who is about to be hired as city manager.

We may be the fourth smokiest city and the fourth emptiest based on vacancy rates in the country, according to ranking methods that often leave us scratching our heads. But here’s another ranking: Our community gives more and volunteers better than others our size, according to a survey commissioned by the Community Foundation.

Here’s my hope: Our neo-Nazi visitors will notice all the colorful ribbons being worn this weekend as a show of support for diversity. They will take in all of the history, the religions and the colors that make Greensboro the city I love.

And maybe — just maybe — they will go back home with a new appreciation of the value of people different from them.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com