On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, D-AL, joined a bipartisan contingent of Senate colleagues in a commemorative reading of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on the floor of the Senate.

“It’s our civic duty – I believe our moral obligation – to remember Dr. King’s words and his deeds, to tell his story, to appreciate that 1963 was not all that long ago, to reflect on how many things have changed and how many have not,” Jones said during his opening remarks. “I urge the rest of our colleagues and anyone in the gallery and anyone watching on television at home that we might still learn today from this powerful message about justice and freedom from oppression – and the indifference of people who stand idly by when their fellow Americans are persecuted.”

Among those who joined in commemorating King’s historic letter were Senators Lamar Alexander, R-TN, Ted Cruz, R-TX, Kamala Harris, D-CA, Tim Kaine, D-VA, and Lisa Murkowski, R-AK.

Martin Luther King III, the oldest son of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference President and CEO Charles Steele, Jr. were also in attendance for the event.

“I was so glad to be able to hear my father’s words read on the Senate floor yesterday afternoon,” King’s son said after the reading. “The ideas in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ are still so important — perhaps even more so today.”

Dr. King penned his famous letter in April 1963 from a cell in Birmingham Jail, where he and other protestors were detained for leading nonviolent protests and boycotts in Birmingham to pressure the local business community to end discriminatory hiring practices.

The letter was a response to eight, white Alabama clergymen who called the protests “unwise and untimely” and called on Dr. King to abandon his efforts, simultaneously criticizing him for being an outsider and meddling in Birmingham affairs.

In his letter, Dr. King rejected the notions that African-Americans should employ patience in overcoming the oppression caused by the South’s “Jim Crow” laws and drafted what would become one of his most enduring statements: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“We cannot stand idly by when we see a reemergence of hateful rhetoric in our public discourse,” Jones said in his closing remarks. “We’ve seen it before. We’ve seen it before in Birmingham and elsewhere. We’ve seen before the devastating violence that can follow and it lives with us today. It lives with us today in tragedies like Charleston and Charlottesville and Pittsburgh and now in New Zealand. We need to strive not just for civility, but to make sure we live in a country that does not hold each other in contempt.”