Richmond McDavid Flowers Sr. was the Attorney General of the U.S. state of Alabama from 1963 to 1967, best known for his opposition to then Governor George C. Wallace's policy of racial segregation.
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 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 conservativeRepublican U.S. Representative James D. Martin of Gadsden and in doing so captured a majority of the black vote. 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.
Conviction
In 1968, Flowers and two others were indicted on federal charges of a conspiracy to extort payments from life insurance companies that sought licenses to conduct business in Alabama. The three were convicted the following year, and Flowers was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was paroled in 1973 after serving 16 months. Flowers maintained that the prosecution was politically motivated by opponents of his anti-segregation stance, but the appeals courts affirmed the conviction. The portion of the Hobbs Act under which Flowers was convicted was later struck down as unconstitutionally vague. President Jimmy Carter granted him a pardon in 1978, after which Flowers' license to practice law was restored.
In his later years, Flowers taught criminal justice and U.S. history at Wallace Community College in Dothan, formerly the George C. Wallace State Community College, named for the father of 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. Flowers Jr. is the subject of a 1989 CBS television docudrama entitled Unconquered, with screenplay by Pat Conroy.
