His grandfather, Onan Beverly Riley (1844-1945), was a Confederate veteran.

Riley taught in the Orangeburg city schools 1915–1917, and at Clemson Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1917 and 1918.

After the war, he engaged in the real estate and insurance business in Sumter, South Carolina from 1919 to 1945, and served as secretary of a building and loan association from 1923 to 1945.

Riley served as delegate to the Democratic State conventions from 1928 to 1944.

He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.