He graduated from college in 1954, the same year the Supreme Court held segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.
[citation needed] After his tour of duty, Pryor attended Georgetown University Law Center and graduated in 1959 with good grades.
His first days on the bench were immediately after the 1968 Washington, D.C. riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and some of the defendants who appeared before him were schoolmates of his and others from a similar background.
I felt it was important to make a clear distinction: rioting and looting was not an expression of civil rights, nor was it an appropriate form of protest, it was criminal conduct.
[7] Judge Pryor died November 19, 2020, in an assisted living facility in Silver Spring, Md., from renal failure.