On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, McNair's 11-year-old daughter, Denise, was in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham when a bomb exploded killing her and three other girls. It was one of the most heart-wrenching crimes in U.S. history.
Yet, justice was too long denied. It wasn't until 1977 that the first killer was convicted, and it took until 2001 and 2002 to bring his surviving accomplices to trial.
McNair credits Pryor for being passionately committed to the conviction of these terrorists and for naming former Clinton administration U.S. Attorney Doug Jones as a special prosecutor. "Bill Pryor's record on civil rights is being distorted," he said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch.
"I felt that he did some things that he did not have to do, being a Republican, and being a young conservative," McNair told me.
"He's come here to my place, and we've sat down and talked," said McNair. "And I've got to be honest with you, I'm impressed with him."
In Washington, Durbin challenged Pryor to explain his views on church-state issues.
"I have said that this nation was founded on a Christian perspective of the nature of man," said Pryor, "that we derive our rights from God and not from government. And part of that perspective is that every individual enjoys human rights without regard to what the majority wants."
That sounds like something Martin Luther King Jr. wrote 40 years ago in the Birmingham jail. "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God," wrote King, citing St. Thomas Aquinas.
It is this philosophy that leads men like Pryor to a true vision of civil rights: All men deserve equal protection of the law, whether white or black, born or unborn.
Chris McNair, like Alvin Holmes, is a Democrat who disagrees with Pryor on many issues. But when I asked him what he would say to liberals such as Schumer, Kennedy and Durbin who oppose Pryor, he said: "They don't know the man. That's what I would say to them."