Our Daily Dead

NY Times
WASHINGTON, March 29 - Former Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, a conservative Democrat who supported civil rights legislation and was sometimes described as the conscience of the Senate, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Sheffield, Ala., near his home in Tuscumbia. He was 83.

His death was announced by his family.

Mr. Heflin, a large, bearlike man, was chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court before he was elected in 1978 to the Senate, where he served for 18 years.

Fellow senators often called him Judge Heflin, referring to his probity and his judicious approach to issues. For 13 years, he passed judgment on his colleagues as a senior member or chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.

Mr. Heflin voted against the nominations of Clarence Thomas and Robert H. Bork to the United States Supreme Court. He said Mr. Thomas’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee suggested “contradictions, lack of scholarship, lack of conviction and instability.”

In his farewell address on the Senate floor in September 1996, Mr. Heflin noted that he came from “an ancestral background deeply rooted in the old Confederacy.” He was a nephew of Senator James T. Heflin, known as Cotton Tom, a vehement segregationist.

But Howell Heflin said he was “exceedingly proud” of his own civil rights record.

“It has been publicly stated by black leaders that I was the first senator from my state who believed in and supported the civil rights movement,” Mr. Heflin said in his farewell speech. “I worked to secure the extension of the Voting Rights Act; to appoint African-Americans and women to the federal bench and other federal offices; to support historically black colleges; to ensure passage of the civil rights restoration bill; to help pass the fair housing bill; and to establish a national holiday honoring the late Martin Luther King Jr.”

On civil rights, as on many other issues, Mr. Heflin advocated “compassionate moderation.”

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