Coordinating Committee claimed that Allen then instructed police to, "get them out of here, if you have to tear it down brick by brick," referring to their homes. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mayor Allen challenged members of Atlanta's prestigious Commerce Club to accept African American businessmen. When Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Allen helped organize a 1,500-person bi-racial banquet to honor him (Atlanta was King's hometown). Furthermore, he shamed many of the white leaders in the city into supporting the event beyond pragmatic grounds. Many attended the dinner, making it a turning point in Atlanta's race relations. Upon hearing that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis, Mayor Allen immediately rushed to the support of Dr. King's wife. Allen and his wife were with Mrs. King when it was confirmed that Dr. King was dead. Two days after Dr. King's assassination on April 4, 1968, he participated in a march across the west side of Atlanta, leading the way in a police car for the nearly four thousand black students walking in memory of Dr. King. Along with Atlanta's police chief, Herbert Jenkins, he visited every black neighborhood in Atlanta during the traumatic days between Dr. King's death and his funeral, walking up and down the streets and reassuring the black community. Mayor Allen went to great lengths to ensure the city remained peaceful when nearly two hundred thousand people gathered to mourn Dr. King's death. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, honored Allen with the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize in 1981. Testimony before Congress "I was convinced now that voluntary desegregation of public facilities, worked out on a local level, had gone as far as it was going to go in the South and much of the rest of the United States....", Allen wrote. "It was obvious that the President was going to have to push through a very plain and airtight law that would, once and for all, abolish the practice of segregation. And segregation, as I intended to say in my testimony, was 'the stepchild of slavery'". In 1963, President John F. Kennedy made a direct request asking Ivan Allen Jr. to testify before the U.S. Congress in support of a federal law mandating public accommodations for African Americans. This law, particularly directed at those [restaurants and hotels] in the South that continued to close their