Pardoned protester won fight with racism, at cost of his roots

He left Georgia almost 40 years ago to protest the bigotry of a draft board and to avoid imprisonment for evading the draft. It took a presidential pardon to bring him back home.

"What you were is part of what you are. But if you can't see it, feel it - if you can't renew it, then you lose it," said Mr. King, who planned to arrive in Atlanta on Wednesday and attend his brother's funeral the next day.

The 63-year-old political science professor went into self-imposed exile after draft board officials in Georgia refused to address him as "mister" when they learned he was black.

To Mr. King, it was the equivalent of calling him "boy," and he refused to attend a U.S. Army physical until the all-white draft board addressed him as "mister," the common practice for whites. The board continued to call him by his first name. He was convicted of draft evasion in 1961.

Mr. King felt he would not be safe in jail. His father, the head of a local NAACP, posted $2,500 bail and advised his son to leave.

"This was not about draft-dodging, but about civil rights," Mr. King said. "I wanted them to use the same title as when they thought I was white."

Mr. King's odyssey and self-imposed exile took him to Africa, Australia and Britain. The soft-spoken man now seems more like a member of the British establishment. He is chairman of the political science department at an English university, and his daughter is a member of Parliament.

After leaving the United States in the early '60s, Mr. King took a job teaching political philosophy to U.S. airmen studying at an American satellite college in Britain. But the U.S. government informed British authorities that Mr. King's immigration status was invalid, and he was forced out of the United Kingdom. He found a teaching post in Ghana, but that West African country was also warned that his passport was to be revoked.

"They tried to force me into a position where I had nowhere else to go but return to the FBI," he said.

Mr. King handed over his passport and took certificates of identification from Ghana and the United Kingdom until he moved to a teaching post in Australia, where he eventually received an Australian passport.

During this time, he met with his family for reunions around the world, but he was never able to come home without risking jail - not even to attend the funerals of his mother and father. He became "rootless."

Mr. King does not describe himself as American, British, Ghanaian or Australian. "My attachment is to people rather than campuses or countries," he said.

The only connection between his home and Lancaster in northern England is the cotton that was once picked in the vast sun-filled fields of Georgia and shipped to the mills that populated this region in the 19th century.

He married in Britain, and his children live in London. His daughter, Oona King, is the second black woman to serve in Britain's Parliament, and his son is a photographer.

During his years in Britain, Mr. King said he found the racial climate there more relaxed than in the United States.

"Despite being colonial, it was not racially charged and, for me, that was liberating," Mr. King said. "There was no mythologizing over skin pigmentation."

Mr. King said before he was granted the pardon that he preferred that the court's guilty verdict was annulled.

"I didn't do anything wrong," he said. Instead, he said, he was naive in his challenge.

"It was a piece of youthful optimism, but I was confronting a cement wall of prejudice."

One of the key people who supported a pardon for Mr. King was the federal judge who presided over his conviction.

In a recent letter to President Clinton supporting the pardon, former Judge William Bootle wrote: "His court trial was, in form, for draft evasion, but there was an underlying issue of conscience-driven resistance to racial discrimination. . . . To lock him up today on this sentence or for this bond-jumping would amount to overkill."

After Mr. King was granted the pardon Monday, the retired judge said, "I think justice has been done. He's established himself as a good citizen."