Early Life
Pruden was born in 1936 in Little Rock, Arkansas, his family having lived in the state for several generations. Pruden's father, James Wesley Pruden, Sr., was a Southern Baptist minister and president of the Little Rock chapter of the White Citizens' Council, a segregationist group that battled integration throughout the 1950s and 1960s. When President Dwight Eisenhower sent Army troops to protect nine black teenagers attempting to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, Pruden Sr. reportedly told an assembled mob, "That's what we gotta fight, niggers, Communists and cops."
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