And a remarkable homecoming: After thirty-nine years of exile in Britain, Australia and Africa, Preston King finally woke up in America. King was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in the early 1960s, when the draft board in Albany, Georgia, after learning that he was black, stopped referring to him as Mr. King and began addressing him as Preston. King said at the time he was willing to serve in the military, as long as the board called him by the same respectful title it used in correspondence when it assumed he was white. The board refused, and King was convicted of draft evasion by an all-white jury and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

While on bail, he fled to Britain, where he enrolled at the London School of Economics. King could not return to the United States until President Clinton issued a pardon this past Monday. Even though President Jimmy Carter, a fellow Georgian and political ally of the King family, issued a blanket pardon in 1977 for all draft evaders, it extended back only to ’64 and did not cover King’s 1961 conviction. The kind of action that King took is a family tradition. His brother, whose funeral he attended when he returned home, Clennon W. King, Jr., was briefly committed to an insane asylum because he had tried to enroll in the all-white University of Mississippi in the 1950s.