In 1951, he successfully appeared before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the Alabama Public Service Commission, and the court reversed a lower federal court's ruling that had allowed the Southern Railway Company to discontinue much local service in the state, deciding such was a state rather than federal matter. Rives served as president of both the Montgomery County and state bar associations. He directed the 1942 gubernatorial campaign of Bibb Graves, who died before the election. In 1919 Rives returned to private practice in Montgomery after his World War I service, and became involved in politics and the Democratic Party during the New Deal. After his wife's death in 1973, Rives in 1976 married Martha Blake Thigpen Frazer, but they had no children. Based on his own reading and discussions with African American soldiers hospitalized with him, the younger Rives determined to confront issues involved in what many Southerners called "the race question." He also went to the University of Michigan Law school, advised his father to read Gunnar Myrdal's treatise and planned to join the family law firm, but died in an auto accident in 1949. His son had attended the University of Exeter in England and Harvard University in Massachusetts, then become severely ill while serving in the Pacific theater during World War II. (1922-1949) would later greatly affect his attitudes toward racial discrimination. Rives's relationship with his son and namesake Richard Rives Jr. They married soon after he left the Army, and would have four children, although two died as infants.
While stationed in Macon, Georgia, Rives met Jessie H. During World War I, Rives joined the Alabama National Guard, then served in the United States Army (1916 to 1919 commissioned a first lieutenant in 1917). He was in private practice in Montgomery, Alabama from 1914 to 1916. Early career, military service and family life Īfter reading law, Rives passed the Alabama bar examination in 1914, although just 19 years old. Rives would later receive honorary degrees from the University of Notre Dame in 1966 and Cumberland Law School at Samford University in 1975. However, Rives also had to borrow money for living expenses from his sister, so he withdrew from the university after a year and began working for Wiley Hill, an attorney practicing in Montgomery whose family plantation had shared a border with the Rives' plantation before the American Civil War.
He then won a tuition scholarship and began studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Rives attended the public high school in Montgomery and graduated as valedictorian of his class. Both sides of his family had operated large plantations using enslaved labor before the American Civil War. Three of his great-great-great-great grandfathers had served in the American Revolutionary War: Captain William Sanford (1734-1806) had carried dispatches to France before settling in Georgia, Major John Mason (1716-1785) had acted as Justice of Sussex County, Virginia during that time, and Private James McLemore (1718-1800) had also served the Revolutionary cause in Granville County, North Carolina. A maternal great-great-grandfather had served as the first Baptist minister in Montgomery. Early and family life īorn in Montgomery, Montgomery County, Alabama on January 15, 1895, to William Henry Rives (1854-1922) and his wife, the former Alice Bloodworth Taylor (1856-1943), Rives had five siblings. He is a descendant of Robert Ryves (Reve) of Dorset. At that time, the Fifth Circuit included not only Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas (its current jurisdiction), but also Alabama, Georgia, and Florida (which were subsequently split off into the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit), and the Panama Canal Zone.
#RICHARD RIVE SERIES#
A native of Alabama, he was the sole Democrat among the " Fifth Circuit Four," four United States circuit judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the 1950s and 1960s that issued a series of decisions crucial in advancing the civil and political rights of African-Americans. Richard Taylor Rives (Janu– October 27, 1982) was an American lawyer and judge.
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