Richard Russell, Sr.

Richard Brevard Russell, Sr. (April 27, 1861 – December 3, 1938) was and American lawyer, legislator, jurist, and candidate for political office.

Early life, education and family

Russell was born in Marietta, Georgia in 1861. He attended the University of Georgia UGA in Athens, Georgia and graduated in 1879 with a Bachelor 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 the Phi 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 to Winder, Georgia in 1894 and then further east in 1902 to an area that would become eventually be designated by the Georgia General Assembly as Russell, Georgia. The Russell family home in that community is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Ina and Richard had fifteen children. Their oldest son, Richard B. Russell Jr., was a governor of Georgia and a long-serving and powerful member of the United States Senate. A younger son, Robert E. Lee Russell, served as a judge on the United 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 of Clarke 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 the Georgia 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

• Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 2002, Robert A. Caro, pp. 165-167,204 ISBN 978-0-394-72095-1
• New Georgia Encyclopedia entry for Richard B. Russell Sr.
• History of the University of Georgia by Thomas Walter Reed, Thomas Walter Reed, Imprint: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia, ca. 1949, pp. 1130-1135