Speaking before a crowd of thousands on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge marking the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” and the historic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery today, President Obama noted the progress made in the fight for racial and LGBT equality and the similarities between those two civil rights movements.

Said Obama:

We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past fifty years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.

Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the “race card” for their own purposes. We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true. We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character – requires admitting as much.

Later, Obama invoked the Stonewall riots saying “we are the gay Americans whose blood ran on the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge.”

Read the full transcript of Obama’s speech HERE.