MLK won Nobel Peace Prize on this day, 1964

When it was announced that 35-year old Martin Luther King, Jr. had won the Nobel Peace Prize 48 years ago, many in segregated Atlanta, his hometown, were not excited. Many Whites considered King a nuisance, a "rabble-rouser" and "lawbreaker," according to the Atlanta Journal Consitution newspaper.

Others viewed King's award as a turning point in race relations in Atlanta.

When King traveled to Oslo months later to receive the Prize, he was accompanied by 30 of his friends and family.  King was the youngest person and the first Georgian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Gunnar Jahn, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, stated that MLK "... is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races."

King died only four years after receiving his award. In its biography of King, The Nobel Committee stated that "On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated."

Photo credit:  Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Dick DeMarsico, staff photographer