Soul of the Court: The Trailblazing Life of Judge William Benson Bryant Sr.
By Tonya Bolden | University Press of Mississippi, 2025
During the Great Depression, it made more sense for a Black man living in Washington, D.C., to take a menial government job than to attend Howard University School of Law.
A government job—no matter how lowly—meant a guaranteed paycheck. The life of a Black lawyer meant representing clients of color, most too poor to pay. William Benson Bryant Sr. took the foolish route, enrolling in Howard’s law school in 1933. Tonya Bolden’s Soul of the Court is the story of Bryant’s taking the road less traveled. A quarter century later that road led him to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he argued—and won—a landmark case for a man on death row.
In Mallory v. United States, Bryant represented Andrew Mallory, convicted of raping a woman in the building where they lived. When arrested, the evidence against Mallory was flimsy. Police strengthened their case by postponing Mallory’s arraignment until he confessed. In a unanimous decision, the high court reversed the conviction, holding that defendants must be arraigned without unnecessary delay. It was one of several cases from the Warren Court that paved the way for the Miranda decision nine years later.
Bryant’s life story began in the Jim Crow South. He was born in 1911 in Wetumpka, Alabama, where 10 years earlier a white mob had burned to death a teenage Black boy a mile outside town for allegedly attempting to “outrage” a white woman. It was not a hospitable environment for Bryant and his family, consisting of his mother, Alberta (abandoned by Bryant’s father), and his maternal grandparents, Lizzie (a washerwoman) and “Papa Charlie” Wood (operator of a general store). Papa Charlie slipped out of town in the dead of the night disguised in women’s clothing to avoid getting lynched for standing up to white boys harassing one of his daughters. Fleeing to Washington, D.C., he sent for his family when Bryant was one year old.
To help readers appreciate Bryant’s struggles, Bolden recounts the injustices suffered by his race. These ranged from humiliating insults to disruption of their livelihoods when President Wilson segregated the federal workforce, relegating Blacks mainly to jobs that involved a broom. And there was the ever-present threat of violence. Nonetheless, the nation’s capital was home to an elite and vibrant Black community during Bryant’s youth. U Street businesses thrived, the premier Dunbar High School accepted the race’s academically gifted, and the upscale LeDroit Park neighborhood was home to Howard’s professors.
As a Howard undergraduate, Bryant worked at a job that was once ubiquitous for men of color—elevator operator—and then entered law school. The dean was the stellar Charles Hamilton Houston, the architect of the legal strategy that prevailed in Brown v. Board of Education and ended the “separate but equal” doctrine. Bryant and Houston locked horns because Bryant worked full time as a night switchboard operator while in law school. Consequently, Bryant was denied the scholarship reserved for the top student in the first-year class. Still smarting two years later, Bryant boycotted graduation. “I sat on my front porch,” he said. In 1954, four years after Houston’s death, Bryant would join Houston’s prestigious firm.
Bryant began his legal career at the bottom—in a one-man practice in a two-room office in the shadow of the municipal courthouse, hustling for appointments to represent indigent clients charged with petty crimes.
Prosecutors were impressed with Bryant and urged him to join the U.S. Attorney’s Office, though Bryant could name only one Black person in the office, and that lawyer never went to court. Bryant became an assistant U.S. attorney in 1951; a year later he was prosecuting felonies in D.C. Municipal Court. Future Virginia Senator John Warner, who clerked for Judge E. Barrett Prettyman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, recalled meeting Bryant in 1953, saying that Bryant was a “magnet” for him and his fellow law clerks because of his courtroom skills.
Bryant did not always experience smooth sailing, however. When Judge Thomas J. Bailey, an old jurist from Tennessee, looked up from the bench and saw Bryant’s Black face, he snapped, “What are you doing here?” With strength and grace, Bryant replied, “Representing the government, Your Honor.”
On July 12, 1965, President Johnson nominated Bryant, then 53, to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the second Black lawyer appointed to that court. (Spottswood W. Robinson III was the first.) In 1977, Bryant became the court’s first Black chief judge, serving in that position until 1981 and then assuming senior status. He served until his death at 94 in 2005.
Among Bryant’s prominent cases were the Korean government bribery scandal involving former California congressman Richard Hanna; the trial of drug kingpin Linwood “Big Boy” Gray, the reputed boss of a $30 million heroin smuggling ring; and the two-month trial of high-ranking FBI agents W. Mark Felt (later revealed to be Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat”) and Edward Miller for illegal break-ins at the homes of friends of radical Weather Underground members. Bryant oversaw conditions in the D.C. Jail for more than 30 years pursuant to a pair of class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of prisoners.
Bryant could be controversial. For example, he called for the decriminalization of heroin possession as early as 1977, to the dismay of some of his colleagues. He was criticized for his lenient sentencing. In 1987, when Congress adopted mandatory Federal Sentencing Guidelines that increased prison terms, Bryant rebelled by refusing to handle criminal cases. (The guidelines became advisory in 2005 after being declared unconstitutional in United States v. Booker.)
Overall, Soul of the Court is a loving tribute to the man’s long, prestigious career, topped off by the construction of the William B. Bryant Annex to the U.S. Courthouse on Third Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., in 2006.
Diane Kiesel is a retired judge of the New York Supreme Court, adjunct professor of law, and author.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Washington Lawyer, the official publication of the District of Columbia Bar. Reprinted with permission.