Because Bill Pryor has a civil rights record that very few can equal, it is no wonder that African-American leaders who know and have worked with him... support his nomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Courtesy of the Mobile Register 2003 © All rights reserved
Reprinted with permission

Civil rights guardian, outstanding nominee

By WILLIE J. HUNTLEY JR.
Special to the Register

The Washington-headquartered, liberal witch-hunt against President Bush's federal judicial nominees has targeted its next victim, and it is one of our own: Bill Pryor, the attorney general of Alabama.

Among those leading the charge against Pryor is the mis-named group People For the American Way. This should be no surprise; PFAW has led vicious attacks against Attorney General John Ashcroft, Justice Clarence Thomas, Priscilla Owen, Miguel Estrada and numerous other Republican nominees.

PFAW is a radical leftist group that has supported broad court protection for child pornography, burning the American flag, and publicly funded art portraying the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung. Most recently, PFAW helped coordinate protests against the war in Iraq -- the war in which some Alabamians gave their lives for their country.

PFAW is funded by the pornography industry and Hollywood radicals, including Playboy magazine, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Center for Alternative Media & Culture. (And they call Bill Pryor an extremist.)

PFAW asserts that Pryor's appointment would devastate civil rights. What its people don't say is that after about 100 years of inaction by other leaders, Bill Pryor led a coalition that included the NAACP to rid the Alabama Constitution of its racist ban on inter-racial marriage.

Pryor then defended the repeal against a court challenge by a so-called Confederate heritage organization.

Our attorney general also took the side of the NAACP in successfully defending majority-minority voting districts -- all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court -- against a challenge by white Alabama Republicans.

Bill Pryor further opposed a white Republican redistricting proposal that would have hurt African-American voters. He did not back down to criticism from his own party -- not one inch.

He then played a key role in the successful prosecution of former Ku Klux Klansmen Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton Jr. for the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In fact, he will personally argue to uphold Blanton's murder conviction before the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals later this month.

Pryor started a mentoring program for at-risk kids, and regularly goes to Montgomery public schools to teach African-American kids to read.

Because Bill Pryor has a civil rights record that very few can equal, it is no wonder that African-American leaders who know and have worked with him -- like Artur Davis, Joe Reed, Cleo Thomas and Alvin Holmes -- support his nomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ignoring Pryor's defense of voting rights for African-Americans, PFAW charges that he opposes the landmark Voting Rights Act. The truth is, he has dutifully enforced all of the Voting Rights Act every time a case has come up.

Pryor has simply stated that a procedural part of the Voting Rights Act -- Section 5 -- has problems that Congress should fix. Section 5 requires federal officials in Washington to approve even minor changes in voting practices that have nothing to do with discrimination.

For example, last year, Pryor issued an opinion that required a white replacement candidate for a deceased white state legislator to get Washington approval under Section 5 to use stickers to put his name on the ballot over the name of the deceased candidate.

Thurbert Baker, the African-American Democratic attorney general of Georgia, has voiced similar concerns about Section 5 before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Undeterred, PFAW and its allies also charge that Pryor believes in "states' rights" -- their code words for racism. The truth is that he believes in the Constitution. He has fought to protect the state's treasury from lawsuits that would have taken our tax dollars away from the state -- away from salaries for teachers and medical care for poor people.

It is the job of an attorney general to defend his client -- the state. In fact, the key Supreme Court case on defending a state from lawsuits was won not by Pryor, but by Democratic Attorney General Bob Butterworth of Florida.

Democratic attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer of New York, Jim Doyle of Wisconsin and others have all made the same arguments to defend their state budgets. I guess they are all "right-wing extremists," too.

PFAW and its allies have also attacked Pryor for being extremist on abortion rights. As a dedicated Roman Catholic, Bill Pryor loves kids and is against abortion, no doubt about it.

But even though he disagrees with abortion, he instructed Alabama's district attorneys to apply Alabama's partial-birth abortion law in a moderate way that was consistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Again, he was criticized by Republicans; pro-life activists accused him of gutting the statute. Again, he didn't back down.

Not surprisingly, PFAW and its allies have attacked Pryor for supporting the display of the Ten Commandments in courthouses. But Pryor simply took the position that if a representation of the Ten Commandments can be carved into the wall of the U.S. Supreme Court's courtroom, it can be placed in an Alabama courtroom.

PFAW also has attacked Pryor for the position he took in the Alexander vs. Sandoval case, in which a person who didn't speak English sued to force Alabama to spend its money on printing driver's license tests in foreign languages.

As broke as our state is, there are better things to spend our money on -- like teaching kids to read English so they can take the test and read road signs, and also paving the roads for them to drive on. Pryor fought this attempt to drain our state budget, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with him.

The truth and the record show that Bill Pryor has fought for the civil rights and voting rights of African-Americans in Alabama when PFAW was nowhere to be found. Now that President Bush has nominated Pryor to a federal judgeship, PFAW assumes that it can come here and attack him.

I, for one, suggest that PFAW pack up its pro-pornography, flag-burning, anti-religious, attack-dog tactics and go back to Hollywood and Washington.

We who actually know Bill Pryor support him 100 percent.

Willie Huntley is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. An African-American, he now has a private law practice in Mobile. This article originally ran in the May 20, 2003 edition of the Mobile Register.

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