African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.

The cause of death was listed as an accidental drowning. In contradiction to King's statement however University of Cambridge historian David Garrow stated in a Salon profile of Alveda King regarding Martin Luther King: "King was not only not a Republican he was well to the left of the Democratic Party of the 1960s [.

and his wife Naomi Barber King. D. William King Sr.