Jan 14, 2011
By John Grimm

The Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded only to for those who are striving to end armed conflict. Winners include groups such as the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, and Amnesty International. Individuals who have been awarded the prize include Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel and Albert Schweitzer.
In 1964 an American hero who had become a world leader in the fight for justice and non-violence was awarded the prize. Chosen the Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was just 35 when he became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
He first earned national attention in Alabama in 1955. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. King, who was a pastor at a Baptist church in Montgomery organized a bus boycott. His house in Montgomery was bombed and his wife and child barely escaped injury but the boycott continued.
After a Supreme Court decision declared laws requiring segregated buses illegal, the boycott ended. On December 21, 1956 Dr. King and Rev. Glen Smiley, a white minister, shared the front seat of a public bus and blacks and whites rode the buses as equals.
Dr. King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. A Baptist preacher and an ardent follower of Mahatma Gandhi, he had become the symbolic leader of American blacks and remained the most influential American black leader until his death in 1968.