Wallace-era attorney general dies (Richmond Flowers)

[struggle4progress]

Source: Associated Press

By Phillip Rawls
The Associated Press

Former Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, a racial moderate who challenged segregationist Gov. George Wallace's dominance in 1966 but saw his political career end in an extortion case, has died. He was 88. ~snip~

~In 1965, Flowers prosecuted Lowndes County Deputy Sheriff T.L. Coleman for the murder of white civil right activist Jonathan Daniels, who was attempting to register blacks to vote. A local jury determined Coleman acted in self-defense and acquitted him.

Also that year, Flowers took over from local prosecutors the slaying case of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights worker from Detroit who was killed by gunshots from a car of Ku Klux Klan nightriders as she transported protesters after the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. An all-white jury acquitted four Klansmen, but they were later tried and convicted in federal court of violating Liuzzo's civil rights. ~snip~

Among Flowers' <1966> campaign pledges were to improve the school system and to fly the American flag from the state Capitol dome, where only the state and Confederate flags flew at the time. He called that "a gesture of defiance that must be put behind us." ~snip~

Read more: http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070811/NEWS02/708110337/1009

[NI4NI]

1. the "extortion conviction" sounds like a bogus frame

I find it very hard to believe that a man who had the guts to prosecute KKK killers and racist bigots in Alabama during the 60's, that included getting a conviction after appealling an earlier "not guilty" verdict would become an extortionist.

But, I do know that his son Richmond Jr, was a very good football player, and great track star at the Univ. of Tennessee where he (considered to be "the fastest white-boy alive") attended because his father was the most hated men in Alabama; Then after, he played for the Dallas Cowboys.

3 cheers for Jimmy Carter!