Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul Page B

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    “Why’d they kick me out of school? What did I do?” he asked Marie, devastated. “Nothing, baby,” Marie replied. “Some people just don’t know right from wrong, even though they think they wrote the book.”
    A s Richard struggled in school, his elders were facing a stiff headwind of their own. Just as the politics of wartime Peoria had favored the expansion of the brothel business, so the politics of postwar Peoria favored its contraction. To survive, the family would have to improvise: the 300 block of North Washington Street, which the Pryors called home, would soon be demolished, and the heart of the red-light district would go with it.
    The reversal of fortune began in February 1945, when Peoria’slongtime mayor was defeated by a reform candidate in an election where the middle-class bluffs outvoted the working-class valley by 15 percent. Shortly thereafter, the new mayor cleared out the city’s slot machines and started putting the squeeze on casino gambling. Then, in July 1948, the reformers picked up more steam when the head of a local syndicate was murdered outside his favorite tavern by a sharpshooter hiding in some nearby underbrush. The gangster’s widow avenged his death by releasing a bombshell to the press: a recording of an emissary from the county attorney’s office in the process of extorting a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe from her late husband. Suddenly, the “bad morals” of Peoria were everywhere, impossible to ignore. After the county attorney was indicted by a grand jury, Illinois’s attorney general launched a sweeping investigation into gambling and prostitution in Peoria, aiming to eliminate organized vice root and branch. Although a rump of gamblers resisted—the home of the new county attorney was bombed a year after his predecessor’s indictment—the casino world, which had been the most profitable sector of Peoria’s underground economy, soon became a ghost of its former self.
    With gambling out of the way, the reformers targeted prostitution as the next social evil to be scrubbed from the valley. Their cause was joined by a large number of ex-GIs returning to Peoria with hopes of raising families there. Seasoned by their military experience, these men became, collectively, a powerful force for reform: they felt it was their patriotic duty to serve their city by cleaning it up. They won seats on the city council and the county board of supervisors, breaking the hammerlock that an older generation had long held on local politics. They longed to put madams like China Bee and Marie Pryor on notice: when the reformers finally captured city hall in full in 1953, within its first few months in office the new administration made a point of launching thirty-five raids on established brothels.
    Before that moment of complete electoral triumph, the reformers hit upon a less explicit strategy for destroying the red-light district: they could help the government build an interstate highway throughit. Since the early 1940s, Peorians had been clamoring for the construction of a second bridge connecting Peoria to East Peoria. In 1951, the State Highway Division recommended that the project begin at North Washington Street on the Peoria side. The Pryors and their fellow residents of the 300 block, the black-oriented portion of the red-light district, found themselves at the very center of construction. Fourteen buildings, all within the vicinity of the district, were demolished in the initial phase, and no one seems to have paused with the bulldozer. Richard’s block was “blight.” Three-quarters of its dwellings lacked a private bathroom or were deemed dilapidated by the 1950 U.S. Census; one in six had no running water.
    For the underground entrepreneurs of 300 North Washington Street, the construction of the bridge meant the end of their neighborhood. In late 1951, Marie and her family left behind her brothels at 313 and 317 North Washington Street, a few steps ahead of