Oliver Hill

Oliver White Hill was born on the first of May 1907 at Richmond, Virginia, the only child of William Henry White and Olivia Lewis White. His parents separated when he was an infant. His mother remarried Joseph C. Hill, who adopted the child and gave him his surname. The Hill family moved to Roanoke when he was five and to Washington when he was eleven. He was educated at the Dunbar High School of Washington — the segregated college-preparatory school whose 1923 cohort was the same as Thurgood Marshall's (placed in this archive) at Frederick Douglass in Baltimore — and at Howard University, taking the bachelor's in 1931. He completed the LL.B. at Howard Law School in 1933, ranking second in his class behind Marshall.

He returned to Roanoke in 1933 and from 1935 to private practice at Richmond, where he would across the next sixty years be the principal civil-rights lawyer of the State of Virginia. He took as his principal trial partner the lawyer Spottswood Robinson III (placed in this archive) from 1939. The Hill-Robinson partnership across the following two decades brought before the federal courts the principal Virginia civil-rights litigation: the 1940 Alston v. Norfolk School Board case that equalised Black and white teacher salaries in Virginia; the 1949 case desegregating the trains of the Atlantic Coast Line; and from 1951 the systematic challenge to segregation in Virginia public schools that produced the Prince Edward County case Davis v. County School Board.

The Davis case — initiated by a 1951 student strike at the Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville led by the sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns — became one of the five state cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education. Hill argued the Virginia portion of Brown alongside Marshall before the Supreme Court in December 1952 and December 1953. Following the 1954 decision, the Virginia General Assembly responded with the Massive Resistance programme of state-financed segregation; Hill spent the following decade in the federal courts dismantling each successive Virginia statute.

He was elected to the Richmond City Council in 1948 — the first African American to hold elective office in Richmond since Reconstruction. He served the Eisenhower administration on the Federal Housing Commission from 1961 and the Carter administration on a series of civil-rights advisory panels through the late 1970s. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.

He died at Richmond on the fifth of August 2007, at one hundred.

He is honored here as the senior civil-rights attorney of the State of Virginia.