An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 10/8/2020
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"Poverty is not always because of the decisions of the poor but there could be higher explanations for it.”
Civil rights attorney Oliver W. Hill, Sr. is perhaps best-known for his pivotal role in arguing Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, ending decades of "separate but equal" doctrine. Born in 1907 in Richmond, VA, Hill ultimately graduated from Howard University law school in 1933 --second in standing, academically, only to his classmate Thurgood Marshall. He started his own law firm in Richmond, and later worked on the NAACP's legal team. His first civil rights victory came in 1940 in the form of Alston v. School Board of Norfolk, Va., where the state Supreme Court ordered the Norfolk school system to provide equal pay for Black and white teachers. It should also be noted that Hill also put aside his legal career during World War II and served in a segregated engineering unit of the U.S. Army, alongside his future legal colleague Samuel Wilbert Tucker.
Hill's full list of legal and personal accomplishments stretches well beyond the scope of this mere social media entry, and merits an entire semester's worth of study in and of itself. However some highlights are eminently worthy of mention; among them, he served on the Richmond, Va. City Council, the first African American elected to that post since Reconstruction; and he also co-founded the Old Dominion Bar Association. In April 1951 he and his partner Spottswood Robinson assumed responsibility for the desegregation lawsuit Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which arose out of a student-wide walkout from R. R. Moton High School in Farmville (see Lesson #16 in this series re: Barbara Johns). The Moton case would ultimately be consolidated with four other cases and decided under Brown, catapulting Hill to national attention. Unsurprisingly threats came to the Hill home so frequently in those days that Hill and his wife, Berensenia Walker, forbade their son, Oliver Hill, Jr., from answering the telephone until he was a young man. At one point a cross was burned in the family's front yard.
In 1968 Hill's firm won Quarles v. Philip Morris, a landmark equal employment opportunity case against a powerful tobacco company. The Washington Post once estimated that Hill's legal team was responsible for winning more than $50 million in access to school buses, voting rights, jury selection, and employment protection for black teachers and students. Hill received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999, while still practicing law (though blind and in a wheelchair), and the NAACP's Spingarn Award in 2005. He died in 2007, having lived to the age of 100.
Recommended reading: We Face The Dawn by Margaret Edds (a dual biography of Oliver Hill and his law partner Spottswood Robinson)
Next page - Lesson 46: Gwendolyn B. Bennett