A 1993 study found Bryant was reversed 17 percent of the time by appellate judges -- the average reversal rate for the trial court.
Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan presented the proposal to name the annex after Bryant to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) earlier this year, and they are now trying to get Congress to approve the naming this fall. One member, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), has tried to block it, with his staff pointing to a D.C. policy that buildings not be named after living people.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, above, hopes that a new annex to the U.S. courthouse in Washington will be named after William Bryant, the nation's first black chief judge on a federal bench.
(James M. Thresher -- The Washington Post)
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Norton said numerous courts around the country have been named in honor of living judges, and she said she looks forward to meeting with Inhofe in person to convince him of the wisdom of naming this building, designed by renowned architect Michael Graves, after a barrier-breaking judge.
"This is no ordinary naming," she said. "This is a truly great African American judge whose accomplishments are singular. First African American assistant U.S. attorney. First African American chief judge."
E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., the son of the jurist for whom the federal courthouse in Washington is named, also applauds the proposed annex naming. He said his father "admired Judge Bryant tremendously" and would have endorsed it, too.
"Whenever it's discussed, people brighten right up and think it's a great idea," said Prettyman, himself a former president of the D.C. Bar Association. "I'm sorry it's hit this snag. . . . If you were going to have an exception, my personal opinion is you could not have a better exception than for Judge Bryant."
William Benson Bryant is hailed as a true product of Washington. Though he was born in a rural town in Alabama, he moved to the city soon after turning 1. His grandfather, fleeing a white lynch mob, relocated the extended family here, including Bryant's father, a railroad porter, and his mother, a housewife. They all made their first home on Benning Road, which was then a dirt path hugging the eastern shore of the Anacostia River.
Bryant attended D.C. public schools when the city's black children were taught in separate and grossly substandard facilities. Still he flourished, studying politics at the city's premier black high school, Dunbar, then going on to Howard University. While working at night as an elevator operator, he studied law and met his future wife, Astaire. They were married for 60 years, until her death in 1997.
He and his law classmates -- the future civil rights movement's intellectual warriors -- worked at their dreams in the basement office of their law professor, Charles Houston. Houston promised the group, which included the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and appellate judge Spottswood Robinson, that lawyers armed with quick minds and the Constitution could end segregated schools and unjust convictions of innocent black men.
"I kind of got fascinated by that," he said. "We all did."
But when Bryant graduated first in his class from Howard's law school, there were no jobs for a black lawyer. He became a chief research assistant to Ralph Bunche, an African American diplomat who later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, on a landmark study of American race relations; he then fought in World War II and was discharged from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 1947.
His first step was to take the bar exam, then hang out a shingle as a criminal defense lawyer in 1948. His skills soon drew the attention of prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office, who liked him even though they kept losing cases to him, and they recommended that their boss hire him. During a job interview, Bryant made a request of George Fay, then the U.S. attorney: "Mr. Fay, if I cut the mustard in municipal court, can I go over to the big court like the other guys?"
No black prosecutor had ever practiced in the federal court -- or "big court," as it was called -- but Fay agreed. Bryant signed on in 1951 and was handling grand jury indictments in the new federal courthouse the next year.
Bryant vividly recalls a case from that time involving an apartment building caretaker who was on trial on charges of raping the babysitter of one tenant's family.
