The 1964 Nobel Peace prize
was given to Martin Luther King, Jr., who was, after Ralph Bunche,
the second black American to win the award. Chairman Jahn of the
Nobel committee said, “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”.
In an interview King said:
“I do not consider this merely an honour to me personally, but a
tribute to the disciplined, wise restraint and majestic courage of
gallant Negro and white persons of goodwill who have followed a
non-violent course in seeking to establish a reign of justice and a
rule of love across this nation of ours”.
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| Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta meet Ralph Bunche at the United Nations in New York City, December 4, 1964 |
King was a Baptist
minister who rose to prominence as a civil rights leader in 1955,
when he was chosen to lead the a boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama,
bus system in support of Rosa Parks. He was a founder of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, which led non-violent protests in
support of desegregation and black voting rights. In 1963 he gave his
most famous speech at Washington’s National Mall, declaring, “I
have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the
true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident
— that all men are created equal.’”
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| Martin Luther King, Jr.with his wife Coretta |
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