Pryor's Priors

Pryor was no boy scout; he once told an interviewer, "I come from criminal people." He grew up in Peoria, Ill., in a whorehouse operated by his grandmother. His mother was a prostitute, and at the age of 6 a neighborhood bully forced him to perform oral sex. As an adult, Pryor was abusive physically to a string of wives and girlfriends.

In addition to the arrests described below, Pryor's history of criminal violence included participation in the group beating and stabbing of a white soldier with whom Pryor was stationed on an Army base in Germany. Pryor did time in a military jail. Pryor and several other black soldiers fell on the white soldier for mocking Douglas Sirk's 1959 film, Imitation of Life, which depicts sympathetically the lives of a black woman who works as a maid and her daughter, who passes for white.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

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