By Stacey Patton

As a 30 year-old student of the civil rights movement and professional historian of the African American past, I often hear the names of historical giants such as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks.  Of famous civil rights attorneys, I hear of lions such as Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston.  On the national level, the name Oliver White Hill is not as well-known to most Americans.  And yet the work that Hill, a lawyer and co-architect of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, accomplished during the era of Jim Crow has directly improved all areas of American civic life.

I recently discovered the life and work of Oliver Hill while reading a few books tucked away here in the Legal Defense Fund’s Library, particularly Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice, former LDF director-counsel Jack Greenberg’s Crusaders in the Courts, former LDF general counsel Robert Carter’s memoir A Matter of Law, and Mark Tushnet’s Making Civil Rights Law.  I was surprised to discover that during Jim Crow Hill’s legal team had filed more suits in Virginia than were filed in any other southern state, and that at one point his team had 75 cases pending.  The team was also responsible for winning more than $50 million in higher pay, new buses and better schools for black teachers and students.

Thus, in this premier issue of The Defenders Online, it is fitting for us to pay tribute to Oliver White Hill, Sr., a man who spent nearly a century fighting for equality and justice for all.  He died last August in his Richmond home at age 100.

“The Mistake”

Oliver W. Hill, Sr. was born on May 1, 1907 in a segregated Richmond, Virginia.  Like most black children growing up in the South during the Jim Crow era, Hill realized early on the limitations and stifling realities of life along the color line.  But he didn’t allow himself to become consumed by bitterness or the self-loathing that had replaced the notion of possibility from many black children’s lives.  Instead, young Hill studied a copy of the Constitution and law books that his favorite uncle left him when he died.  The boy was determined to grow up and “correct the mistake made in 1896.”

The “mistake,” that Hill often plainly referred to during interviews in his later years, was the Supreme Court’s 7-1 ruling in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case.

On June 7, 1892, fifteen years before Hill was born, Homer Plessy, a light-skinned Negro who was “seven-eighths Caucasian” took a seat in the “whites only” section of an East Louisiana Railway train en route from New Orleans to Covington just north of the Mississippi border.  Plessy’s testing segregation was part of a deliberate strategy of the activist segment of New Orleans’ black population. When a conductor asked Plessy to move to a rail car reserved for “colored” passengers he refused and was arrested and jailed.  Plessy took his case to the Supreme Court in 1896, arguing that that his constitutional rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been denied.  Those amendments specified that African Americans were citizens entitled to constitutional rights and equal protection under the law.

The Justices, with the exception of one, did not agree.  They declared that Plessy’s argument, which they held was based on the “assumption” that legal segregation stamped the entire black race with a badge of inferiority, not because of segregation itself, but because blacks chose to see it that way.  Writing in 1960, Charles L. Black, Jr., the great constitutional scholar, characterized Plessy as a decision in which “the curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.” The Supreme Court’s decision cemented the legal foundation for the doctrine of “separate-but-equal” and helped legitimize a multitude of discriminatory laws and social practices that plagued Hill’s boyhood and shaped his legal journey for much of the 20^th century.

Racial Baptism

The novelist Richard Wright, who was a year younger than Hill, used the term “racial baptism” to describe the moment when he and other children came to understand the harsh meanings of what it meant to be black in America.  That moment often involved some kind of violent or degrading confrontation with whites that would shape the rest of their lives. Hill recalled two such moments during his boyhood.

In a 1993 interview with The Roanoke Times, Hill described an incident when he was nine and found himself being chased by a group of grown white men while returning bottles for deposit at a local distillery.  One man shouted, “Catch that little n—– and cut his —- off!”

Two years later, a white man came to his neighborhood and rounded up a group of black boys, including 11-year old Hill.  The men led the boys to a makeshift boxing ring where they were blinded and ordered to fight.  The last boy standing was promised a prize.  Hill won.  When Hill returned home he showed off the 50 cents he’d been paid.  But his surrogate parents, Bradford and Lelia Pentecost, didn’t share his joy.

“I got a whipping for making a fool of myself for white folks,” Hill recalled.

At age 15, Hill left Roanoke for Washington, D.C. to attend Dunbar High School because Roanoke had no high school for black students.  Throughout his childhood, Hill was troubled by the isolation of black communities and the ways in which black students were subjected to separate and unequal facilities.

But Hill would fight the inequities of a world ruled by the Plessy decision.  “I always figured it was just as stupid for me to hate white folks because they were white as it was for white folks to hate me because I wasn’t,” he said.

A Social Engineer

After earning a Bachelor’s Degree from Howard University in 1931, Hill attended Howard University Law School, where he was a protégé of the brilliant Charles Hamilton Houston.  Before entering law school, Hill described himself as “one of those happy-go-lucky kids,” satisfied with C grades.  But his Howard days turned him into one of a small cadre of black lawyers that demanded for blacks, equality and the undelivered promises of the Constitution.

Understanding that the laws of the United States did not operate the same for blacks and whites, and that few white attorneys during that time could be expected to dedicate their lives to the cause, Houston set out to teach young black law students how to eliminate legal discrepancies.  Houston had taken over Howard’s law school in 1922 and purged the faculty, recruited top-notch legal scholars, built up the library, and toughened admission standards.  Soon Howard University Law School became a civil-rights law laboratory where attorneys learned how to “bend the laws to the needs of blacks.”

Hill described Houston as a tough disciplinarian who insisted on class preparation, orderliness, and good work habits.  Anything less and he’d point students toward the bus terminal.  Hill recalled Houston’s first speech to incoming students where he promised to work them to death.

“He kept hammering at us all those years that, as lawyers, we had to be social engineers or else we were parasites,” said Hill.  In 1933, Hill graduated from Howard University Law School, ranking second to his good friend Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who led the Brown legal team and later became the founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice.

In the early 1930s, Hill, Houston and Marshall, along with Samuel W. Tucker, and William Hastie began documenting inequalities affecting blacks.  The attorneys of their generation could not avoid being involved with civil rights.

“Go Fishing”

On February 19, 1956 The Washington Post printed a column with the headline: “Is It Time NAACP Went Fishing?” written by journalist Benjamin Muse.  In that piece, Muse complained that since the Brown decision in 1954, the tactics of the Virginia branch of the NAACP, headed by Hill, had caused immense damage to the reputation of the organization and to the “good will of white people.”

Muse argued that Hill and other NAACP leaders were pressing too quickly for immediate desegregation instead of a gradual process.  Through his Washington Post column, Muse suggested that Hill and the rest of the NAACP attorneys should “relax now and reflect on the vast significance of their recent gains.  They should get back to their personal business – or go fishing.”

But Hill did not relax.  Instead, he litigated cases involving matters such as the equalization of salaries for school teachers; the right to serve on grand and petit juries; free bus transportation for public school children; equalization of public school facilities; protection of firemen and other railway workers in rights to employment and to fair and impartial representation by the statutory bargaining agents; the right of participation in primary elections; the elimination of segregation on common carriers in both intrastate and interstate travel; the use of public facilities in a non-discriminatory and non-segregated fashion, including public schools and places of public assembly and recreation; the securing of housing of choice and the right of African-Americans, through organizations like the NAACP, to assert their constitutional rights and seek redress of their grievances in the courts.

Being a social engineer came at a price.  After the Brown decision, Hill’s family received death threats and in 1955, a cross was burned on their lawn.  The family received so many threats that they unplugged the phone and threw it in the trash can at night.  He told a reporter that Richmond officials, “had the ambulance, the fire department and the undertaker all sent to my house in about 15 minutes of each other” to intimidate him.

In 1994, Hill told Human Rights Magazine: “I can’t understand why Americans are willing to send their children – black and white – to foreign lands to fight, and sometimes die, to preserve the American concepts of freedom, democracy and civil rights, when at the same time these same Americans are unwilling to undergo an occasional inconvenience or suffer a slight financial loss to help break down racial barriers and racial discrimination in this country.”

Hill retired from his Richmond law practice at age 92.  As the 50^th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown was observed across the country in 2004, Hill was feted as a one of the last and the longest-living titans of the civil rights era.  His dedication and achievements were applauded wherever he went.  At his funeral, an inscription on the inner lid of his casket read, “May the work I’ve done speak for me.”

Though his name may not ring as loudly as some of the other titans of the era, Hill’s work not only speaks for him but for the potential and possibilities of a nation that continues its struggle to fulfill the American promise.  And for me, I respect and honor Hill’s dedication to justice and I understand that I am a direct beneficiary of his sacrifices and contributions.