At 35, King became the youngest man to that point to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, honored for his leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his philosophy of nonviolent resistance drawn from Gandhi. He donated the $54,000 prize money to the civil rights movement. The award came a year after his 'I Have a Dream' speech and amid escalating violence against activists across the American South.
King learned of the award from a phone call while recovering in an Atlanta hospital from exhaustion, and he reportedly wept upon hearing the news. The Nobel Committee's choice was pointed: it came just months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and amid brutal white resistance to desegregation, including the murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi that same summer.
In his acceptance speech delivered in Oslo that December, King insisted that nonviolence was not passive submission but 'a powerful and just weapon' capable of transforming both the oppressed and the oppressor. He used the prize as a platform to link the American civil rights struggle to global movements against colonialism and poverty.
King gave every cent of the prize money to the movement, keeping nothing for himself. Critics, including J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, intensified surveillance and smear campaigns against him in the prize's aftermath, but the Nobel honor cemented King's stature as a moral authority recognized far beyond America's borders, just four years before his assassination.