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Senator James Lankford will join a handful of Senators for a reading on the Senate floor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

In April 1963 Dr. King penned the letter from his cell at the Birmingham Jail, where he and other protestors were detained for leading a series of nonviolent protests and boycotts in Birmingham to put pressure on the business community to end discriminatory hiring practices. Dr. King wrote passionately in response to an open letter led by eight white clergymen from Alabama urging him to abandon his efforts in Birmingham, calling his protests “unwise and untimely” and criticizing him for being an outsider coming in to agitate in Birmingham.

Dr. King rejected the notion that African Americans should remain patient in the struggle to shed the bonds of oppression and daily indignities inflicted by Jim Crow laws in the South. In his letter he famously responded to their criticisms writing, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”