Charles K. Pringle

Charles Kistner Pringle, Sr. (born 1931), is an attorney in Biloxi, Mississippi, who was one of the first two Republicans to serve in the Mississippi House of Representatives since Reconstruction.

Background

Pringle graduated in 1949 from Biloxi High School.^[1] He graduated in 1951, at the age of twenty, from the University of Mississippi at Oxford^[2] and in 1954 from the University of Mississippi School of Law.^[3]

He practices law with the firm Pringle & Roemer in Biloxi, which specializes in Commercial Law, Domestic Relations, Estate Planning and Probate, General Practice, and Real Estate.^[4]

Pringle has three children, a son, Dr. Charles K. Pringle, Jr. (born c. 1962), a radiologist in Jackson and a graduate of the University of Tennessee,^[5] as well as another son, Rives, and daughter, Caroline.

Political life

In 1963, at the age of thirty-two, Pringle ran for state representative in Biloxi on the Republican ticket headed by gubernatorial nominee Rubel Phillips of Corinth and Jackson, Mississippi and the candidate for lieutenant governor, Stanford Morse, an outgoing state senator and lawyer from Gulfport, the neighboring city of Biloxi on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Democratic Governor Ross Barnett was term-limited in the 1963 election. While Phillips and Morse, both former Democrats, were defeated by the Democrats Paul B. Johnson, Jr., and Carroll Gartin, respectively, Pringle won his state House race.^[6]

In 1967, Paul Johnson was ineligible to seek reelection as governor, a provision that has since been changed in the Mississippi state constitution. Rubel Phillips again carried the Republican nomination for governor, but he was handily defeated by the Democrat U.S. Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi's 3rd congressional district. By this time, Clarke Reed of Greenville had replaced the original chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, Wirt Yerger, an insurance agent in Jackson, under whom Pringle had been elected to the House. Pringle lost his House seat after a single term, as did two other freshmen Republican members of the legislature, Representative Lewis Leslie McAllister, Jr., a businessman from Meridian and later, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who served from 1962 to 1968, and State Senator Seelig Wise, who represented Coahoma, Tunica, and Quitman counties near Clarksdale in northwestern Mississippi from 1964 to 1968.^[6]

References