Preston Theodore King is an African-American academic and civil rights activist from Albany, GA. The son of Clennon Washington King, Sr., who served as Booker T. Washington’s chauffeur and co-founder of the Albany GA NAACP, Preston King fled to the UK in 1961 from charges of draft evasion at home for refusing to report for his conscription until an all-white draft board addressed him as “Mr.”, the same way that it addressed white draftees.

While in exile, he married Mureil Hazel Stern, a Jewish-British social justice activist and had two children, Oona King (Baroness King of Bow, formerly member of parliament) and Slater King (named after Preston’s brother Slater King, the vice-president of the Albany Movement). He later divorced Stern and, after an escapade with the children to Nairobi which ended with Stern retrieving the children back to London, King moved to Australia to teach at the University of New South Wales in the 1970s and marry a woman of Lebanese descent.