On this day, October 14, 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy and leadership in using nonviolent civil disobedience to protest racial segregation in America. At 35, King was the youngest person to have been honored with the award to that date.
The prize money, amounting to $54,000, was re-distributed in its entirety to the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Urban League, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to an educational fund.
This mural featuring King and other figures that held significance to the cause of the Black Freedom Movement is from a series of murals painted by artists Richard Watson (1946 -) and Walter Edmonds (1938-2011) between 1973 and 1976 at Philadelphia's Church of the Advocate.
Our image of the mural comes from The People's Art: Black Murals, 1967-1978, an exhibition booklet for an exhibit on community murals at the African American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibit featured murals by black artists in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Hartford, and San Francisco. This booklet is f Pam 2001.501 in the Hagley Library's Trade Catalogs and Pamphlets collection. You can view it online in our Digital Archives by clicking here.