Alabama AG Who Challenged Segregation And The Klan Dies
Richmond M. Flowers, Alabama's White attorney general in the early 1960s who challenged the segregationist policies of Gov. George C. Wallace and prosecuted Ku Klux Klansmen in the killings of civil rights workers, died Thursday at his home in Dothan, Ala from Parkinson's disease. Mr. Flowers, who later served a prison term for bribery, was 88.
“I am unalterably for segregation,” Mr. Flowers declared during his 1962 campaign, promising to “defend our time-honored customs.”
But by June 1963, after after his friend Wallace had made his famous “schoolhouse door” stand to bar Blacks from the University of Alabama, Mr. Flowers was criticizing the governor for defying federal desegregation orders.In a report he issued in October 1965, Mr. Flowers said that dynamite had become the Klan’s chief instrument of terror in Alabama; that 40 of the 45 bombings in Birmingham since 1961 were “believed to have been carried out by individuals or groups associated with the Klan,” and that the governor had done nothing to curb the Klan.
On March 25, 1965, Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker from Detroit, was shot to death as she and a young Black man were driving after the Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March. The gunshots were fired from a passing car carrying members of the Klan.
When the Liuzzo case was tried on the state level, Mr. Flowers asked the Alabama Supreme Court to purge avowed racists from the jury, then personally took over the case. While state courts acquitted the three defendants, a federal jury eventually convicted them.
Six months after the shooting of Mrs. Liuzzo, a deputy sheriff, Thomas L. Coleman, killed Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian who had come to Alabama to register Black voters. The shotgun blast nearly tore Mr. Daniel’s body in two. A second blast struck the Rev. Richard Morrisroe, a Roman Catholic priest, leaving him critically wounded. Mr. Coleman said he had believed that Mr. Daniels had a knife and that Father Morrisroe had a gun.
Outraged that a grand jury had indicted Mr. Coleman on a manslaughter charge rather than murder, Mr. Flowers took over that prosecution as well. But he was thwarted by the trial judge. When Mr. Flowers sought to delay the trial until Father Morrisroe could testify, the judge refused, then removed Mr. Flowers from the case. It took the jury two hours to find Mr. Coleman not guilty.“The members of the jury are just as guilty as the man who pulled the trigger,” Mr. Flowers said after the verdict.
Besides his wife Mary Catherine Russell, he is survived by three children, 10 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.
After his stint as AG, he would later be 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 after serving 16 months in prison and was later pardoned by President Jimmy Carter. Mr. Flowers maintained that he had been set up on the extortion charges because of his stance on segregation.
“I know what I stand for will one day be the Alabama way,” he told The Birmingham News in December 1965. “I may be the front man — the fall guy — but I know my way will be the way.”
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