 Richards was known as a highly valued mentor and friend to students, faculty, and colleagues, including a very supportive approach to women and African–Americans, according to Jim Staros.His colleague George D. Rose wrote that Richards' lectures were insightful, delivered with clarity and humor, and often deliberately provocative, and that Richards worked to improve the scientific community in general.For instance, in the late 1980s, he was the primary author, and the first of many signers, of a widely circulated letter that successfully urged a policy of depositing 3D atomic coordinates on scientific journals, on the NIH, and on individual crystallographers.