Listen to Rep. Pryor on the O’Neill Speaks podcast.
As a little girl in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Cherrish Pryor remembers watching her grandmother work as she looked on from the window of her grandparents’ pickup truck. Her grandmother would walk to a house with a voter registration form in hand, talk to whoever opened the door, then walk back to the truck.
Another Black voter registered. Then, it was on to another house and another door knock.
Pryor says she knew what her grandmother was doing was different than what most other women were doing at the time, but she didn’t fully grasp the importance as a child.
“I was just there for fun, just to get out the house—it was exciting to me,” Pryor admits. “But now, seeing and hearing her stories, what she did is just amazing to me.”
Her grandmother campaigned for candidates, helped secure wins for the first African American sheriff and first African American school superintendent in their area.
Even before Cherrish was born, her grandmother was part of the Civil Rights Movement and fought to integrate schools and secure transportation for Black students in Holly Springs.
“The buses would pick up the white kids but drove right past the Black homes and children,” she says. “So, my grandfather would take all the Black kids to school and my grandmother wrote to the state of Mississippi. The state wrote back and told the superintendent the buses had to also pick up the Black children.”
