Fifty years ago today, a man was murdered. When you kill a man out of hate, you create a martyr that lasts forever.

Tonight we raise a glass for equality, and a nation that has walked a long, difficult road, to not view, treat, or judge things through race-tinted glasses.

It’s not a perfect standard, we’re still not there yet, but this was a country put in motion by framers that set to create a more perfect union – recognizing in their own actions, that it was far from perfect. Fifty years ago, when that trajectory was put into peril by a sniper’s bullet, the nation didn’t turn to violence, it turned to peace. Right and left, black and white – and everything in between.

It’s up to us to keep that going in the right direction. We can only hope that Martin Luther King Jr. would be happy with how far we’ve come.