Richard Taylor Rives (January 15, 1895 – October 27, 1982) was an American lawyer and judge. 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. 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.
Ancestry
He is a descendant of Robert Ryves (Reve) of Dorset.
Early and family life
Born 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. A maternal great-great-grandfather had served as the first Baptist minister in Montgomery. 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. Both sides of his family had operated large plantations using enslaved labor before the American Civil War.
Rives attended the Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery and graduated as valedictorian of his class. He then won a tuition scholarship and began studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. 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. Rives would later receive honorary degrees from the University of Notre Dame in 1966 and Cumberland Law School at Samford University in 1975.
Early career, military service and family life
After reading law, Rives passed the Alabama bar examination in 1914 at 19 years old. He was in private practice in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1914 to 1916. 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).
Rives was inducted into the Alabama Lawyers' Hall of Fame in 2022.
See also
Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1981.