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.”
Those were the stories Pryor grew up hearing—how grassroots, community-centered change made a difference in people’s lives. At the time, she had no idea the profound impact those stories and the many drives in that pickup truck would have on her.
But now, as she sits in her office at the Indiana Statehouse, she connects dots she never expected to form her future.
Her own work has delivered on the O’Neill School’s motto of Making a Difference, and earned her this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award. Nominated by a friend she made while in school at Indiana University, Pryor says she never saw the award coming.
That’s partly because, she confesses, she never planned to be where she is today—a state representative serving Indianapolis’ northwest side, the House Democratic Floor Leader, or a member of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus.
Pryor says her original plan was to work on a different side of the law. After moving to Indiana as a teen, she attended Indiana University in Bloomington and earned her criminal justice degree, with intentions of going to law school.
But she also had taken an interest in policy and started working on her graduate certificate.
“I knew I could start out with a certificate program and explore the different areas of public policy,” she says. “The certificate program opened the door to my master’s degree. It was a great place to start and really opened my eyes.”
She was volunteering with the NAACP when her mentor took her to a meeting where she met former Indiana State Representative William Crawford. That meeting led to an internship. It was her first stop at the Indiana Statehouse, but not her last.
During that internship, a seat became available—ironically, the seat she now holds—and Rep. Crawford encouraged her to run for it.
“I said no,” she laughs. “I was not going to put my education in jeopardy. I was laser focused on finishing my graduate degree, and that was my goal at that time.”
She accomplished that goal, earning her Master of Public Affairs degree through O’Neill in 1995. And she says it’s made a world of difference.
“If you’re wanting to serve or give back to your community, an O’Neill MPA is the perfect degree,” she says. “The program gives you a good understanding of public policy and how policy affects people’s everyday lives.”
For current students, she says the many options available to O’Neill graduates means they won’t be “pigeon-holed” into only one area but will instead have the ability to explore many different careers.
“I don’t know of any degree that has that much versatility as an O’Neill degree,” she stresses. “There are so many paths you can take with the degree, and it opens so many doors to opportunities.”
For Pryor, those opportunities have included stops at the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, Commission for Higher Education, the Indianapolis-Marion County City-County Council, and a return trip to the Indiana Statehouse when the same seat she turned down years earlier opened up again.
“The seed had been planted in my mind from Representative Crawford that I should run,” she says. “This time, I thought ‘I’m done with graduate school—now is the time.’ Everything just lined up.”
It was another dot connected, linking her present to her past.
“My grandmother rubbed off in a way that I never would have expected,” Pryor admits, proudly. “I never thought that I was going to be an elected official. I never thought that would rub off on me when I was just a little kid sitting in the truck waiting for her to knock on these people’s doors and ask them if they were registered to vote.”
Pryor still travels back to Mississippi to visit her family—most recently to celebrate her grandmother hitting the century mark for her 100th birthday.
“She is still a force,” Pryor says with a smile. “I always tell my grandmother, she’s the reason why I’m in the politics, because I literally saw her work.”
Her grandmother’s advocacy was the starting point for her path into politics and policy. But her experience and education helped close the loop. She says the O’Neill School can do the same for any student who wants to have an impact and make a difference whether it’s in their hometown or around the globe.
“The world needs O’Neill students because government, public policy, public affairs, and public management affect all of our lives,” she stresses. “We need good, competent, qualified individuals who understand what policy is and how things work and how they work together. That’s what you get from an O’Neill student.”
