Oliver Hill

Oliver Hill (born May 1, 1907, Richmond, Virginia, U.S.—died August 5, 2007, Richmond) was an African American attorney and prominent civil rights activist, best known for his outspoken advocacy of desegregation in public schools and his role in bringing to the U.S. Supreme Court the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), in which the Court ruled unanimously (9–0) that the racial segregation of public schools is unconstitutional. In a career spanning six decades, during which he acted as a lead attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Hill successfully battled racial discrimination and segregation in dozens of other groundbreaking court cases. He also worked to promote racial equality and to encourage African Americans to vote by repeatedly running for political office. In 1999 Hill was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the foremost civilian decoration in the United States.

Oliver Hill’s father, William Henry White, Jr., abandoned his wife, Olivia Lewis White, and their son soon after Oliver was born. After his mother remarried, Oliver was given the last name of his stepfather, Joseph C. Hill. Oliver Hill grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, and stayed with family friends while his parents worked at a resort near the border with West Virginia. In 1923 Hill joined his parents in Washington, D.C., where he attended Dunbar High School, a college preparatory school for Black students, and Howard University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1931 and a law degree in 1933. At Howard University Hill became friends with Thurgood Marshall (1908–93), who later (1967) became the first African American Supreme Court justice. (Hill graduated second in his law-school class, behind only Marshall.) Hill also met his future wife, Beresenia Ann Walker, at Howard; the couple were married in 1934.

Hill began to practice law in Roanoke before settling in Richmond in 1939. Early in his career he joined the Roanoke branch of the NAACP, and he later became closely involved with the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP, which organized voter registration drives and challenged discriminatory practices in the state’s public education system. Working with Marshall, Hill earned his first civil rights victory in federal court in 1940, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Alston v. School Board of City of Norfolk, overturned a federal district court’s decision, ruling that the inequity in pay between white teachers and similarly qualified Black teachers amounted to a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. As the leading attorney for the NAACP in Virginia, Hill contributed to the organization’s significant expansion in the state. Eventually he directed legal efforts to combat anti-Black discrimination in areas beyond public education, including voting rights and criminal justice.

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After serving in the U.S. Army (1943–45) during World War II, Hill returned to Richmond and his civil rights work. In May 1951 Hill and his colleagues, pursuing an alternative legal strategy that directly challenged school segregation itself rather than the existence of gross inequalities of resources between white schools and Black schools, initiated a lawsuit in federal district court in Virginia, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, in which they asked the court to declare that the segregation of white and Black students in the state was unconstitutional. After the court denied their request (instead ordering the state to immediately address inequalities between the schools), the case was appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear it in combination with three other similar class-action suits that had been filed by the NAACP in South Carolina, Delaware, and Kansas. In the consolidated case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Marshall, arguing on behalf of the plaintiffs, convinced the Court that the racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. The Court held that segregated schools were inherently unequal and thus in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, which prohibits any state from “deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” After the Supreme Court’s decision, Hill and his colleagues mounted several legal challenges in Virginia aimed at forcing state and local authorities to proceed with the desegregation of public schools.

Hill continued his struggle to protect the civil rights of African Americans through the rest of his career. He handled a great many additional civil rights cases and won a succession of them, including ones involving voting rights, jury service rights, and access to school buses for Black students. After some 60 years as a lawyer, Hill retired in 1998.

In addition to his legal career, Hill was involved in political work. In 1948 he was elected to the Richmond City Council, becoming the first African American to hold that position in some 50 years. In 1952 Pres. Harry S. Truman appointed Hill to the Committee on Government Contract Compliance, which monitored compliance with antidiscrimination provisions in federal government contracts. Hill also served on the national Democratic Party’s Biracial Committee on Civil Rights, which prepared civil rights provisions of the party’s platform for adoption at the Democratic National Convention in 1960. From 1961 to 1966 he served in the Federal Housing Administration, for which he promoted the fair-housing movement as an assistant for intergroup relations.

In 2003 the Virginia General Assembly named him Virginian of the Year. Two years later he was awarded the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s highest honour. Hill’s autobiography, The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond, was published in 2000.

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