- Richard Russell, Sr.
Richard Brevard Russell, Sr. (
April 27 ,1861 –December 3 ,1938 ) was and Americanlawyer ,legislator ,jurist , and candidate forpolitical office .Early life, education and family
Russell was born in
Marietta, Georgia in 1861. He attended theUniversity of Georgia UGA inAthens, Georgia and graduated in 1879 with aBachelor of Arts degree at the age of eighteen and with a Bachelor of Laws degree from the UGA School of Law the following year. While at UGA, he was a member of thePhi Kappa Literary Society .Russell's first wife was Marie Louise Tyler. They married in 1883; however, Marie died three years later during the delivery of a stillbirth. In 1891, Russell wed a second time to Ina Dillard from
Athens, Georgia . The couple moved toWinder, Georgia in 1894 and then further east in 1902 to an area that would become eventually be designated by theGeorgia General Assembly asRussell, Georgia . The Russell family home in that community is now on theNational Register of Historic Places . Ina and Richard had fifteen children. Their oldest son,Richard B. Russell Jr. , was agovernor of Georgia and a long-serving and powerful member of theUnited States Senate . A younger son, Robert E. Lee Russell, served as a judge on theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit .Public service
At age twenty-one, Russell was elected to the
Georgia House of Representatives (1882) as a representative ofClarke County, Georgia . He was elected at age twenty-seven to the position of solicitor general for the Western Circuit of the Superior Courts of Georgia, a seven-county judicial circuit. Russell was subsequently elected to judicial positions in numerous Georgia counts including theGeorgia Court of Appeals (elected in 1907 and chief justice of that court from 1913 to 1916) and the Supreme Court of Georgia on which he served as Chief Justice for his entire sixteen year career (1922 to 1938) in that position. As of 2006, Russell was the only person to have served on both the Georgia Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of Georgia.Russell ran multiple unsuccessful gubernatorial and United States congressional campaigns: two Georgia gubernatorial elections (1906 and 1911), a U.S. House of Representatives election (1916), and a U.S. Senate election (1926).
Death
Richard B. Russell Sr. died in 1938 of a heart attack and was buried in the Russell family plot behind their house in the Russell Community.
References
*, 2002,
Robert A. Caro , pp. 165-167,204 ISBN 978-0-394-72095-1
* [http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3234 New Georgia Encyclopedia entry for Richard B. Russell Sr.]
* [http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/cgi-bin/ebind2html.pl/reed_c09?seq=85 "History of the University of Georgia by Thomas Walter Reed", Thomas Walter Reed, Imprint: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia, ca. 1949, pp. 1130-1135]
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