Earthquake in Alaska

The Great Alaskan earthquake, the second-most powerful known (and the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history) at a magnitude of 9.2, struck Southcentral Alaska, killing 125 people and inflicting massive damage to the city of Anchorage on March 27 (Good Friday).

Gemini I Launched

 

The Americans launch Gemini 1, the first unmanned test of the 2-man spacecraft, on April 7

Nobel Prize for Peace Martin Luther King

The Nobel Peace Prize 1964 was awarded to the Afro-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. "for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population."

Born in Atlanta in 1929, he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

King adhered to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. In 1955 he began his struggle to persuade the US Government to declare the policy of racial discrimination in the southern states unlawful. The racists responded with violence to the black people's nonviolent initiatives.

In 1963, 250,000 demonstrators marched to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, where King gave his famous "I have a dream" speech. The following year, President Johnson got a law passed prohibiting all racial discrimination.

But King had powerful opponents. The head of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover, had him placed under surveillance as a communist, and when King opposed the administration's policy in Vietnam, he fell into disfavour with the President. It has still not been ascertained whether King's murderer acted on his own or was part of a conspiracy.

Nobel Prize for Literature Jean-Paul Sartre

The 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age."

Sartre declined the prize, saying that he never accepted any official honours and that he did not want the writer to become an institution. The Swedish Academy said in announcement: "It will be recalled that the laureate has made it known that he did not wish to accept the prize. The fact that he has declined this distinction does not in the least modify the validity of the award. Under the circumstances, however, the Academy can only state that the presentation of the prize cannot take place." It is the only known occasion when a Laureate has voluntarily declined to accept the Nobel Prize in literature.