Richmond Flowers, Sr.

Richmond McDavid Flowers, Sr. (November 11, 1918 – August 9, 2007) was from 1963 to 1967 the Attorney General of the U.S. state of Alabama, best known for his opposition to then Governor George C. Wallace's policy of racial segregation.^[1]

Background

Flowers was born in 1918 on World War I Armistice Day in Dothan in Houston County in southeastern Alabama. After graduating from Dothan High School, he attended Auburn University in Auburn and the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa.

Flowers enlisted in 1942 in the United States Army, in which he attained the rank of captain. He was a member of General Douglas MacArthur's special Staff during the occupation of Japan and was honorably discharged in 1946.

Thereafter, he returned to Dothan where he worked for the Dothan Bank and Trust Company and co-founded Flowers Insurance Agency.

Political career

Flowers was elected to the Alabama State Senate in 1954 and became the floor leader, having served until 1962, when he was chosen attorney general in the same election that Wallace won the first of four non-consecutive terms as governor.

As an intraparty opponent of Wallace, Flowers was invited to speak at the Yale Law School in the fall of 1965, a venue that had previously booed Wallace from that same stage. Instead of echoing the then-popular (in the North) criticisms of Wallace, Flowers began his speech with a lengthy, withering, and completely unexpected indictment of his hosts' poor manners for their refusal to have listened earlier to Wallace. In his ensuing remarks, Flowers discussed not only the importance of civil rights but the need for civil discourse and honoring the fundamental principles of the First Amendment.

During his tenure as attorney general, Flowers won two landmark voting rights cases, Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, before the United States Supreme Court. He also was instrumental in allowing women to serve on juries in Alabama.

In 1966, Flowers ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in an effort to succeed the term-limited George Wallace. He faced former U.S. Representative Carl Elliott of Jasper, two former governors, James Folsom and John Malcolm Patterson, and Lurleen Burns Wallace, Wallace's first wife and his then surrogate candidate. Flowers sought African American support in his campaign. Mrs. Wallace easily won the Democratic nomination and then handily defeated the conservative Republican U.S. Representative James D. Martin of Gadsden and in doing so captured a majority of the black vote.^[2]

Flowers prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan and fought for school desegregation. He reported that crosses were burned in his yard, and bricks were thrown through his windows.^[3]

Later years

In 1969, Flowers was sentenced to eight years in prison for conspiring to extort payments from companies seeking licenses to do business in Alabama while he was in office. He was paroled in 1973 after serving 16 months in a federal prison and was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. Mr. Flowers maintained that he had been set up on the extortion charges because of his stance on segregation.^[4]

Because of the trouble in Alabama, his son, Richmond Flowers, Jr., declined an offer from University of Alabama football coach Paul W. Bryant to play football at Alabama. Flowers, Jr., had been an athlete in Alabama but played college football at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and was instrumental, scoring the game winning touchdown, in defeating Alabama and Coach Bryant during his senior season. At the time, his father watched from the stands in Neyland Stadium in handcuffs. Flowers, Jr., was also a member of the University of Tennessee track team. He was a world-class hurdler and played in the National Football League with the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants.

The third generation Richmond Flowers, III, is a former wide receiver at Duke University, who transferred to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He was drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars but was cut from the team. He also tried out with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League.^[1] He now is an assistant coach for the Washington Redskins.

Flowers, Sr., is the subject of a 1989 CBS television docudrama entitled "Unconquered."^[5]

In his later years, Flowers, Sr., taught criminal justice and U.S. history at Wallace Community College in Dothan, formerly the George C. Wallace State Community College, oddly named for his longstanding political rival. He was a legal advisor to Flowers Hospital. A member of First United Methodist Church, he taught the Men's Bible Class for twenty-five years.

References

External links

• Alabama's Attorneys General: Richmond Flowers - Official State Biography