Equal before the law
A low wall surrounds the granite patio in front of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. It bears the following quote, etched in gold: “All citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”
It’s a statement worthy of golden embossing, taken from the lone dissenting opinion of Justice John Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of “Separate but Equal.”
Seventy-two years after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Plessy, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed William C. Pryor, a black man, to the D.C. Court of General Sessions (now the D.C. Superior Court). You can’t find much about Judge Pryor on the Internet, just a DC Bar Interview from 1995 and a variety of professional references. Yet, despite a lack of public recognition of his many accomplishments, the former Chief Justice of the D.C. Court of Appeals seems content. “When people get to be my age, they start talking about everything they’ve done... I brag about my mistakes,” he says.
Judge Pryor and I are sitting in the court’s main deliberation room. His arms are crossed on the end of a long mahogany table. I find myself thinking he’s probably been sitting like that, at tables like this, for twice as long as I’ve been alive. I want to ask him about presiding over trials of race rioters and about meeting presidents, but Judge Pryor is more interested in explaining what it’s like to deliberate on a court case. These explanations are also twice my age.
Bill Pryor was born and raised in a black working class neighborhood of D.C. called Le Droit Park, near Howard University. He finished high school on a scholarship at the prestigious Northfield Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Mass., and in 1950 began college at Dartmouth on a ROTC scholarship. He went on to Georgetown Law School after a brief stint in the U.S. Army, and then to a position at the Department of
Justice.
There is another quote etched into the D.C. Court’s stone walls, the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Bill Pryor, like Dr. King, started with his own neighborhood.
When Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, Washington erupted into violent, incendiary race riots. It was the height of racial discord at any time since the Civil War, unrest centuries in the making. Judge Pryor, who had been on the bench for about a week, was recalled from vacation to preside over the subsequent trials. In some cases the defendants were childhood friends.
I find this incredible, but when I finally asked him what it was like to sit in judgment over his peers, his answer seems understated. “I understood them,” he says. I have a sense Judge Pryor knows but for his own good fortune, he could have been in front of the dais instead of on it.
We’ve been walking through the courthouse and are now standing in the special sessions courtroom. I ask Judge Pryor to tell me about a favorite case and he proudly explains a decision on the difference between psychological and drug induced insanity. In the former instance, the defendant may be acquitted, in the latter, probably not.
As he explains the legal issues at play, there is remorse in his voice; what can one man do to help human suffering in a big city? Here at Colby, a place not unlike Dartmouth or Northfield, it seems quite natural to see Judge Pryor in historical terms. In class you might argue he is an unsung heroes of the civil rights movement or an example of what can happen with affirmative action and a little gumption. We study people like him exactly because of their proximity to history and long resumes.
Yet in a sense, this misses the point. In a city like D.C., drug and social violence are real issues that impact more people than anyone cares to admit. For Judge Pryor, what connects race riots to drug addicts is not some grandiose sense of history, but a simple desire to make life better for the members of his community. History has a habit of romanticizing great citizens, and often it obfuscates their most basic contributions to society. When we put individuals on a pedestal, especially in an academic setting, we forget that our heroes were ordinary people.
If there is one thing we can learn from Judge Pryor, or Justice Harlan or even MLK, it is to be fair and patient with the members of our communities.
“The social conditions were very different here in Washington than they were in New England, where I went to school. I was struck by the fact that I was living in two different worlds. That was very unsettling,” Judge Pryor told the DC Bar Journal in 1995.
To an extent, Judge Pryor bespeaks the friction between home and college that all students experience. It’s normal to feel strung between the world of Colby and the conditions at home, especially when there is disparity between the two.
Let us be like our heroes by making this a source of inspiration rather than frustration. By being decent and understanding people, we can reduce inequities between these worlds. By being decent long enough, we too might end up sitting in mahogany splendor, bragging about our mistakes.
