U.S. Scholar’s Passport Home Is a Pardon

LONDON — Thirty-eight years in exile is a steep price to pay for demanding to be treated with the same respect afforded a white man in the segregated South.

Preston King had no idea the cost would be so high when he took a stand in Albany, Ga., in 1961, refusing to attend an Army physical until an all-white draft board addressed him as “Mister,” as they did white draftees.

The board insisted on calling him Preston. A white jury convicted King of dodging the draft, and a white judge sentenced him to 18 months in jail. He left the country and has not been back since.

King has no regrets about his decision. You make tough choices at difficult moments and hope that they are right, he says. He would make the same choice again, even knowing the consequences.

“Your own self-respect matters more than people think,” said King, a professor of political philosophy. “I have never had occasion, at least in this regard, to have disrespect for myself.”

But at 63, King wants to go home. He is asking President Clinton for a full and unconditional pardon so that he might reclaim his U.S. passport and travel to the United States without threat of jail.

The now racially mixed Albany City Council agrees that King should be granted a pardon, as does the Atlanta Constitution newspaper and the NAACP. Even retired U.S. District Judge William Bootle, who presided over King’s case, acknowledges that King was acting out of a moral and conscientious conviction and was the victim of racism.

“I think that enough water has gone under the bridge,” Bootle said on NBC-TV’s “Today” show last month. “It’s perfectly all right with me if they want to wipe the slate clean and let him come back home.”

A Question of Basic Civil Rights

King’s daughter, Oona, 31, a member of the British Parliament from the governing Labor Party, is optimistic that the pardon will be granted. King, however, clearly does not want to get his hopes up. He and some of his friends are concerned that the controversy surrounding Clinton’s recent decision to grant clemency to 16 Puerto Rican separatists may discourage the president from issuing another pardon.

They also fear that Clinton, who has been accused of avoiding the draft, may be reluctant to pardon someone for what could be portrayed as a decision to escape military service.

But the draft was never an issue for King, who saw his older brothers in Army and Navy uniforms. For him it was a question of basic civil rights.

King was the youngest of seven brothers in a prominent black family from what was then a rural community in Georgia. His father, who prospered in the real estate business, headed the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and made sure that all his sons had a college education.

Student Deferrals Came to Abrupt End

His eldest brother, Clennon, was declared insane in 1958 for having the temerity to apply to the all-white University of Mississippi. Another brother, C.B. King, became a civil rights lawyer--one of three black attorneys outside Atlanta in the early 1960s--who secured his brother’s release from an asylum and defended maids, field hands and other Southern blacks against the white establishment.

King graduated magna cum laude from the all-black Fisk University in Nashville in 1956 and headed for the London School of Economics to pursue a master’s degree, having received a student deferral from military service.

But King said the draft board’s attitude toward him changed after he appeared in person one day in 1958 and the panel discovered that he was black. His student deferrals came to an abrupt end, as did correspondence addressing him as Mr. King. Suddenly he was Preston and was ordered to show up for a physical without delay.

“They saw I belonged to an alien clan, refused to grant me a deferment and were racially abusive in the process,” King said.

Those were the days of the civil rights movement, only three years after Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., sparking a black bus boycott. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (no relation) and an army of civil rights workers were fighting segregation across the South.

‘They Never Called a Black “Mister” ’

King was not an activist, but he was also not one to be pushed around.

“My position was: That far and no further,” King said. “I have not the slightest doubt that you are drafting me because you want to deny me further education. But you are not going to add insult to injury. I will obey your draft orders when you address me properly.”

King returned home for Christmas in 1960, and two federal police officers showed up at his front door to arrest him. He told the court in April 1961 that he was more than willing to report for his physical and to serve in the Army--when the board addressed him as Mr. King.

It may seem like a minor point now, King says, but back then titles were part of the segregationist regime.

“They never called a black ‘Mister’ or ‘Missus’ because it suggested they were human beings. Blacks were always ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ or ‘auntie.’ To deny this right was a crucial part of keeping blacks in a place of subjugation. Then even these things you have to oppose,” King said.

After his conviction, King remained free on bail while appealing his case in federal court. But members of his family were convinced that they were being “taught a lesson” for their civil rights work and that King would not receive justice.

“My father’s view, which I shared, was that anything could happen to a black man in a federal prison in the South. There was nothing more to be gained, and I should get out,” he said.

So he did. King lived in Britain, Africa and Australia before settling in 1986 at the University of Lancaster in northwestern England.

Since leaving the United States, King has missed the funerals of three brothers and his parents, the births of many nieces and nephews and the opportunity to collect an honorary degree from his alma mater, Fisk. His daughter accepted it on his behalf this year.

“Naturally, I am proud of my father’s achievements and the recognition he received. But I feel like we are in a medieval soap opera and can’t believe that, three months before the millennium, someone is still suffering from Jim Crow laws or the aftereffects,” Oona King said.

Former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N.Y.) is leading the drive to erase King’s conviction and restore his passport. She said a memo has been submitted to the Justice Department outlining “why the conviction was fatally flawed, how blacks were systematically excluded from the jury, and racial issues affected the case from beginning to end.”

The government has been asked “to do the right thing,” she said, and recommend a presidential pardon.

“It’s as if Rosa Parks were still being punished today for saying she would not go to the back of the bus,” Holtzman said.

The Justice Department says only that it is reviewing the case and will take action if it is deemed appropriate.

King, meanwhile, appears both philosophical and pragmatic about his situation--but not bitter. Speaking with a slight British cadence that betrays his many years in England, he says he is amazed that exiles from Hungary and other former East Bloc countries have been able to return home, while he is still considered a fugitive.

“I never had any intellectual respect for racism and segregationism and had interacted with too many people to believe it could survive so lustily for so long. I had assumed it wouldn’t be too long before the forces of good would prevail,” King said.

“But life doesn’t work like that. People move a half-inch and compromise,” he said.

His desire to return home is practical.

“I need access. I have tons of nephews, nieces, spaces, graves, universities, colleagues to visit,” he said. Besides, “I am American.”