On this day in 1964, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. HISTORY.com says he won for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America. The site says the Georgia-born minister was 35 years old.

The official Nobel Prize website states that King was honored for his non-violent struggle for civil rights, and it lists him as the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the time.

The recognition followed years of organizing: HISTORY.com says King organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, the first major protest of the civil rights movement, and that he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to racial segregation, influenced by Mohandas Gandhi. The Nobel site also notes his debt to Gandhi.

In 1963 King led the March on Washington, and the Nobel site says 250,000 people marched to the Lincoln Memorial, where he gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. HISTORY.com says the movement won two major goals in 1964: the end of the poll tax and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

HISTORY.com says King donated the prize money, valued at $54,600, to the civil rights movement, while the Nobel site notes that he also had powerful opponents, reporting that the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had him watched as a suspected communist.

According to the Nobel site, King was murdered in April 1968, four years after receiving the Peace Prize, and he died in Memphis, Tennessee.

What we know: King was named the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner at age 35.
What we don't: The cited pages do not describe how King first learned that he had won.