Oliver White Hill, Sr.: Liberator of the Commonwealth

by Charles McGuigan 2003

Oliver White Hill, Sr.’s voice wavers as he begins to  recount his life. He was born just 42 years after the Civil War ended, in the capital of the Confederacy, when blacks in the South were still little more than slaves, at best second or third class citizens. As a young man he became a freedom fighter and patriot of the same mag-nitude as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

At an early age Oliver Hill moved with his mother, Olivia, and stepfather to Roanoke where they lived in a house owned by a man named Bill Branford S. Pentecost, who worked as a cook on the Norfolk Western Railroad. Oliver’s parents worked at The Homestead and for almost eight years the Pentecosts would become Oliver’s surrogate parents. Bill Pentecost would bring daily papers from cities throughout the South and Midwest. “By the time I was seven years old,” Mr. Hill remembers. “I was familiar with everything south-east of the Mississippi River. The St. Louis Post. The Cincinnati Inquirer, the Atlanta Constitution, the Chatanooga Times. We’d have a nice time reading the papers. He was a very fine man.”

By the age of nine, the young Oliver learned to play cards and tennis, and he also learned how to make money and save it. Awake by 3 a.m. on Saturdays, he delivered newspapers, actually creating his own routes. He saved $39 to buy his own bicycle and he started a savings account. “I had three or four hundred dollars in the savings account before it was all over,” Mr. Hill tells me.

Always resourceful, the nine-year-old Oliver foraged for pint and quart whisky bottles that could be redeemed for a penny a piece at an old distillery. One Saturday morning as the young boy brought his treasures of redeemable glass into the distillery a man told him to go upstairs. As Oliver neared the top step, the man downstairs called out, “Catch that little n***er and cut out his balls.

Oliver ran. The stairs below him were blocked, so he charged onto the second floor and was immediately chased by three men.

“I didn’t know what the hell balls or testicles or whatever he wanted to call them were,” says Mr. Hill. “I didn’t know what their function was, but I knew they were mine and I wanted to keep them. I ran from them and finally got loose and ran home. I was scared to death.”

Mr. Pentecost was out of town when this happened, but when he got home late one night, his wife told him the story, and the next morning he walked with Oliver down to the dis-tillery. The place was completely empty. “I remember he was mad as hell,” Mr. Hill says. “And, of course, we didn’t report it to the police; they were as much the enemy as anybody else.”

Back in those days, it was a way of life for Blacks. “The general idea in the black community was there were two kinds of white folks, good white folks and bad white folks, and you could always tell the difference,” says Mr. Hill, paus-ing just long enough to deliver the punch. “The good white folks were buried at least six feet deep.” 

At age 14, Oliver Hill began attending one of the finest high schools in the nation—Dunbar, in Washington D.C. “Dunbar had the highest paid salary of Negro teachers any-where,” says Mr. Hill. “We had more PhDs than any other school in the country, white or black.”

In his senior year, Oliver received a book from an uncle that would change his life: The Annotated Constitution of the United States. He memorized this text, rereading the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. 

After graduation, Oliver Hill entered Howard University. The university’s president, Dr. Mordecai Johnson, had decided Howard would have a first-class law school. “He was a scholar, a Baptist preacher and a wonderful speaker,” Mr. Hill says. “I prefer him to Martin Luther King.” 

After completing his undergraduate work, Oliver Hill went to law school at Howard, which was headed up by Charles Hamilton Huston, the first Black to study law at Harvard.

Charles Huston built an institution that would fine-tune the skills of an army of young men who would fight the good fight against segregation, in effect, launch the Second American Revolution. Among those young men were Oliver White Hill and his classmate, Thurgood Marshall.

Oliver Hill and Thurgood Marshall became quick friends. While Thurgood worked as an assistant librarian, Oliver waited tables in the dining room of an upscale apart-ment building. In the afternoons, the two would study together. They’d sometimes eat lunch at a place called Father Divine’s Restaurant. “If you said, ‘Peace, ’tis truly wonderful’, you’d get a good meal for twenty-five cents,” says Mr. Hill. “Deluxe lunch was thirty-five cents.” 

Charles Huston noticed how the pair of aspiring attor-neys hit it off. “We became his proteges,” Mr. Hill says. 

After passing the bar, Oliver returned to Roanoke and was sworn in as a lawyer. He shared office space with an established attorney and picked up a few cases in hustings court. “A penalty of ten years got you ten dollars,” Mr. Hill remembers. “For murder you got twenty-five dollars.”

On his birthday, in 1939, Oliver Hill returned to Richmond. “That’s when I became a counselor for the Joint Committee for the Virginia’s Teachers Association and the NAACP,” he says. It was turning point in his career. Now, he could sink his teeth into the law. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, black teachers were paid significantly less than their white counterparts. And this metamorphosed into something of even greater importance. “We began challenging not only the teacher’s salaries, but we were challenging the unequal quality of the facilities, the course of study and all that sort of thing,” says Mr. Hill.

Oliver Hill filed suit against one school system after another--Sussex, Norfolk, Newport News, Chesterfield, Gloucester. 

In Gloucester, county officials argued that they didn’t have enough money to equalize the schools, so the court ordered them to apply to the Board of Supervisors to hold a bond referendum. Before the general vote, members of the School Board scattered across the county telling citizens to vote against the bond issue, and they did.

“We learned about it and filed a motion for further relief,” Mr. Hill says. “And they hauled the School Board members down to court and the judge was so mad he didn’t know what to do. He fined each of them five hundred dollars and ordered that it be paid out of their private funds, not public funds.” He considers the judge’s actions and then says, “He was a fine judge. He just couldn’t bring himself to order Negro children to school with white children. I don’t know why they were so adamant about that. Desegregation would have been the sensible thing to have done, starting the kids off together in kindergarten.”

At 36, Oliver Hill was drafted. Discrimination in the Army was rampant and it all left a bad taste in his mouth. “If you were unemployed, you got something like twenty-two dollars a week,” he says. “I never drew anything. I never got the benefit of the housing deal. I didn’t want anything to do with the government. In high school I learned how to avoid drill. I was always anti-military.”

But he was always up for a fight. Stateside, Oliver Hill again joined the fight for independence. “The fight never stopped during the war,” says Mr. Hill. “When I got home I just jumped back into the fray.” His firm filed suit after suit in the pursuit of justice. 

The real battleground for integration was within the public school system. In 1951, a brave young woman by the name of Barbara Jones led a strike of some 450 students at Moton High School in Farmville. Her goal was not just a bet-ter school for Blacks: It was desegregation, a word that stirred the passions of many Southern whites. Fearing retaliation from whites, the local NAACP was reluctant to join the cause. But Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson came to the aid of Moton High. 

The spark had been ignited, and the fire was moving through the brush. Change was imminent. Things came to a head in 1954 with Brown versus the Board of Education. Oliver Hill remembers working the first case that led to that Supreme Court decision, which declared segregation in schools unconstitutional. “The first one was in Clarendon County, South Carolina,” he says. “As a matter of fact when we filed the suit down there they burned the school down, they burned the home of the principal down. That was the first case that we challenged segregation per se.”

There were numerous obstacles ahead, including the infernal Byrd machine that used massive resistance to block the Supreme Court’s decision. “Harry Byrd was a rabid rac-ist,” Mr. Hill remembers. “He always referred to me as ‘that n***er lawyer.’” 

Then there was Tenant Bryan, owner of the Richmond newspapers. “He was a segregationist,” says Mr. Hill. “He was an enemy of the people.”

Over the decades, Oliver Hill’s life was threatened in one way or other--late night phone calls, burning crosses and so on, the handiwork of cowards. And then Oliver tells me this: “Years ago I finally got some sense. I realized that if I got angry the way they did, I’d be as bad off as they were. The other thing I learned a long time ago is every now and then you run into a decent white person, and there have always been decent white people. The writer O. Henry used to say to watch a man, how he treats his children, how he treats his wife, how he treats people in inferior positions, domestics and things, and so I followed O. Henry. It was just as stupid for me to hate white folks as it was for them to hate me. I judge a person on his actions, nothing more.”