He attended local public schools and Hinds Junior College before earning a bachelor's degree at the University of Mississippi and a graduate degree from the Nashville YMCA Night Law School.

[1] After living in Tennessee and North Carolina, he returned to Mississippi in 1947, moving to Cleveland.

[3] King worked variously as a schoolteacher, social worker, concrete inspector, and cannery manager[1][4] before being hired by the Mississippi State Department of Audit in 1953 as a field auditor.

[1] King ran for the office of State Auditor in 1963, defeating Dewey Mark Norton in the Democratic primary.

[8] At the time he left the auditorship, the office was delinquent for 581 fiscal years worth of audits.