Howell Heflin was born in June 1921 in Poland, Georgia, and raised in Alabama by a Methodist minister father and a schoolteacher mother, in a family that included his great uncle, Representative Robert Stell Heflin, and his uncle, Senator James Thomas Heflin, a vocal champion of white supremacy. He joined the Marine Corps in 1942, fought in the Pacific at Bougainville and Guam, and earned the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1948, he spent two decades as a law professor and attorney in Tuscumbia, then served as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court from 1971 to 1977. In 1978 he beat Walter Flowers in the Senate primary and faced no Republican in the general election after James D. Martin switched to another Senate race.

In the Senate Heflin opposed abortion rights and gun control, backed school prayer and the Gulf War authorization, and was one of two Democrats to vote against the Family and Medical Leave Act, while also opposing NAFTA, GATT and tort reform. He chaired the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, where he pursued a rules case against a fellow Democrat, and he voted against Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, citing Thomas’s short time as a federal judge. In 1993 he backed Senator Carol Moseley Braun’s effort to deny renewal of a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy that featured the Confederate flag, arguing that national healing had to come first. He retired in 1996, was succeeded by Jeff Sessions, and died in Tuscumbia in 2005 at 83.

• The New York Times called him the conscience of the Senate.
• In 1981, with the Supreme Court granting only 289 of more than 4,200 petitions, he proposed a new National Court of Appeals.
• He contrasted the swift handling of the attackers of Pope John Paul II and Anwar Sadat with the 14 months before John Hinckley Jr. went to trial, and called for a bipartisan crime caucus.
• He was the last Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama until Doug Jones, a former Heflin aide, won a 2017 special election.
• The Howell Heflin Lock and Dam and a conference room at the University of Alabama School of Law carry his name.