"Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere:" Senator Reverend Warnock Reads Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail on Senate Floor, Urges Colleagues to Recommit to Bipartisan Unity and Progress

Press Release

Today, U.S. Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-GA) led his colleagues in a bipartisan reading of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail on the floor of the Senate amid mass voter suppression proposals sweeping the nation. Senator Warnock--who, like Dr. King, is a Georgia native, graduate of Morehouse College and leader of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church--shared the opening paragraphs of Dr. King's famous open letter, highlighting the urgent need for bipartisan unity to protect voting rights and address the nation's greatest challenges. Senator Warnock was joined in the third annual reading by U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Alex Padilla (D-CA).

"I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states," Senator Warnock read, in part, from Dr. King's letter. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…[a]nyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

In April 1963, Dr. King penned the open letter from his cell at the Birmingham Jail, where he and other protestors were detained for leading a series of nonviolent anti-racial discrimination protests and boycotts in Birmingham. He wrote the letter as a response to criticisms that called the protests "unwise and untimely," rejecting the notion that marginalized communities should remain patient in the face of being denied fundamental rights; as Dr. King famously stated in the letter, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

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