King Receives Nobel Peace Prize

Date: October 14, 1964 • Location: Washington, United States

Martin Luther King Jr. receives the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister who was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He advanced civil rights in the United States through the use of nonviolence and sometimes civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination, which most commonly affected African Americans.