Oliver White Hill, Sr.: Liberator of The Commonwealth

by Charles McGuigan 02.2003

Of the 726 people I have interviewed since this magazine’s inception eight years ago, Oliver White Hill, Sr. is the only person I have felt compelled to address as Mister. This is by no means to diminish the importance of past subjects, and the respect I have for them, but there is something about Mr. Hill that demands a different sort of respect. It is not only his presence, it is the past he came from and the future he forged for the entire country. Interviewing him, I suspect, is akin to somehow traveling back in time and interviewing the likes of James Madison. He is of that ilk, a patriot of that magnitude, a freedom fighter who used words and The Constitution to further the cause for justice and equality. Through history there have been few people like Mr. Oliver White Hill, Sr.

A fine powdery snow falls among the bare limbs of the trees that line Noble Avenue. I pull over just south of Rennie, in front of a brick house. In the yard there are two giant willow oaks, flanking the pathway, and near the curb a substantial dogwood. I can hear the birds before I see them. There are a hundred of them, rooting through the mat of narrow brown leaves under the dogwood, leaves from the willow oaks, fallen a couple months ago. Birds roost in the dogwood and then swoop down to search through the leaves. They are in unrelenting motion, pushed along by the wind with the snow in great eddies. And what’s amazing is they’re all robins, plump breasts a deep burnt orange against the browns and grays of the front yard.

Svelte, tall, Sandra Robinson, opens the door and invites me in. She wears black leather slacks and has large, dark, expressive eyes. Sandra is Mr. Hill’s caretaker and on numerous occasions through the course of the interview, she affectionately calls him grandpa. She leads me to a chair in the living room that is catty-cornered to an identical chair. 

When she leaves to get Mr. Hill, I wander around the room. Over the mantle piece is a painting of Oliver Hill, Sr. and Beresenia, his late wife of 59 years. There is a concert harp in one corner of the room and a Fender amplifier in another corner. On a long, narrow table beneath the window there is the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to Mr. Hill by former president Bill Clinton. I scan the bookcase near the fireplace. There’s a biography of George Marshall and assorted works of world literature and there are also Douglas Southall Freeman’s “R.E. Lee”.

Dipping Water And Working the Bells

Mr. Hill enters the room in a walker, with Sandra, a step behind, helping him navigate with her whispers (“A little to the right. Swing it all the way to the left.”) He maneuvers over to the chair and takes a seat.

The skin of his face is like parchment, but it is smooth, taut, and his eyes, that no longer see, due to a stroke that crushed his optic nerve, are set back in his skull. The lids are shut over the eyeballs giving him the look of a classical statue. A furze of white hair covers his upper lip, and a small patch grows under his lower lip, all trim and neatly shaven. He wears a dark three-piece suit, blue-striped shirt with white collar and a blue tie. His fingers are long and elegant and the skin is as taut as the skin that covers his face.

His voice is wavering, sometimes wispy as he begins to recount his life. The images he molds are stark and powerful. He was born just 42 years after the Civil War ended, when blacks in the South were still little more than slaves, at best second or third class citizens.

It was the first day of May in 1907, when Oliver Hill came into the world, born to Olivia White in the 1300 block of 1st Street in the former capital of the Confederacy. His father deserted the family early on, and three years later, after obtaining a divorce, Olivia married Joe Hill of Halls Hill, a predominantly black community in Arlington, just off Lee Highway. The two had met at The Homestead where they both worked. “She dipped water for the guests out there,” says Mr. Hill. “My stepfather was on bells, he was a bellman.”

Little Oliver Hill lived with his maternal grandmother in Richmond until her death. After the funeral, his mother and stepfather carted the six-year old off to Roanoke, where Joe Hill operated a pool hall on Norfolk Avenue, a street that runs parallel to the railroad tracks. In 1915, Virginia went dry, and the saloon near the pool hall shut its door. “My stepfather thought the closing of the saloon was going to ruin the neighborhood, so he closed the pool hall,” Mr. Hill says. “He looked for another place, but couldn’t find one, so he decided to go back up to Hot Springs and work on the bells.”

The Pentecost Home 

Olivia joined her husband in Hot Springs, and Oliver stayed living in the large house on Gilman Avenue that had been his home since his mother and stepfather had moved to Roanoke. The man who owned the house was a cook on the Norfolk Western Railroad and when he would return home from his trips, he would bring stacks of newspapers from across the Southeast, and the young Oliver Hill would flip through the papers. “By the time I was seven years old,” Mr. Hill remembers. “I was familiar with everything southeast of the Mississippi River. The St. Louis Post. The Cincinnati Inquirer, the Atlanta Constitution, the Chatanooga Times. I’d read the funny papers, Happy Hooligan, Little Orphan Annie, Mutt and Jeff, and he’d read the rest of the paper. Finally, it got so he would read things in the newspaper to me.” Mr. Hill makes himself more erect in the chair. “We’d have a nice time reading the papers,” he says. “He was a very fine man.”

The man’s name was Bill Branford S. Pentecost and for the next eight years he and his wife would act as Oliver’s surrogate parents. “I was so comfortable with the Pentecosts that my mother decided to leave me there,” says Mr. Hill. “They went back up to The Homestead and let me stay in the big house at 401 Gilman. It was in a changing neighborhood. There were several other Negro families in there. Dr. Dudley, and next to him Dr. Roberts, and next to him was Mr. Edwards. Mr. Edwards was a trainman in the yard.”

A Liberal Household

The Pentecosts were fairly open-minded by the traditional standards of the day. “I started playing tennis when I was nine years old,” Mr. Hill says. “By the time I was nine I was playing cards with grown folks, I was playing hearts and spades and whisk. The Pentecosts were more liberal in their thinking than the majority of folks in those days.”

This aura of liberalism attracted neighborhood children to the Pentecost household. “At our house we’d play music and sing,” says Mr. Hill. “I had a birthday party and some kids had been invited. By the time I had my ninth birthday, kids would ask me two or three weeks before my birthday when my birthday party was. It became a big social event and all we really did was serve up ice cream and cookies. But what attracted the kids was the attitude in the Pentecost house.”

A Pentecost attitude that Oliver Hill learned at an early age, was pay as you go. Instead of buying four or five appliances on layaway—that era’s answer to credit cards—the Pentecosts would save the money for a given appliance and go into a store and buy it outright.

So when young Oliver Hill decided he wanted a bicycle, he developed a newspaper route. He’d rise at 3 a.m. Saturday mornings to pick up his newspapers and then solicit for accounts through different neighborhoods. In the afternoon he’d sell one of the Hearst newspapers in the same manner.

“I made the routes myself,” he tells me. “In the white neighborhoods I’d sell them all. When I first started out in the winter time I never saw any white boys, but when the weather got good I had to run like hell.”

But Oliver persisted. In a relatively short time, he had saved $39 to purchase his first bike. He also started up a savings account at a local savings and loan association. Each week he’d give himself a spending allowance of twenty cents. He’d also set aside a quarter for Sunday school. The rest went into his account. “I had three or four hundred dollars in the savings account before it was all over,” he says.

First Encounter With Bigots

One day, when he was just nine years old, it looked as if it was all over for Oliver Hill. Earlier that day he had noticed kids picking up pint and quart whisky bottles and sticking them in a sack. When Oliver asked what they were doing, the kids told him they were taking them to a distillery down on Norfolk Avenue to be redeemed for a penny a pop. Oliver liked the idea of this seemingly easy money. He scoured alleys and abandoned lots and soon had an armful of whisky bottles that he carried over to the distillery. The man who met him on the ground floor told Oliver to take the bottles upstairs. Oliver complied. As he neared the top step, the man downstairs called out, “Catch that little nigger 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, on the Columbus run or the Birmingham run, when the incident occurred, 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 distillery. 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 Americans of African descent. They were forced to live outside the mainstream, excluded from much of society, and, rightfully, blacks distrusted whites. “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, pausing just long enough to deliver the punch. “Because the good white folks were buried at least six feet deep.” 

Dunbar High School

At age 14, after graduation from eighth grade, Oliver Hill had the opportunity to attend one of the finest high schools in the nation—Dunbar, in Washington D.C. “The thing about Dunbar was that Negroes and whites received the same salary,” says Mr. Hill. “Negroes at Dunbar had the highest paid salary of Negro teachers anywhere. We had more PhDs and Masters than any other school. At that time it was considered to be one of the finest high schools in the country, white or black.”

While at Dunbar, Oliver, as was the case with every other member of the student body, had to take part in the Cadet Corps. He wasn’t particularly fond of the drills, and knew that the only way to avoid them was to let school officials know he was interested in pursuing a career in physical education. “I never for a minute planned to go into physical education,” he says, “But it was a way to dodge drill for the Cadet Corps.”

There were times too, when the tedium of high school got to him, so Oliver Hill did what was kids have always done and always will do. He cut class. “If I cut school, I’d go down to the library and spend the day reading. Once, I went to the courts, but I couldn’t find anything exciting.”

Somewhere in his junior or senior year, Oliver would receive a book that would plant a seed in his brain that would change his life forever. His stepfather’s brother, Sam Hill, died unexpectedly from a stroke. “He worked at the post offices and had gone to night school and had passed the bar,” Oliver recalls. “He had a sundown law practice.” After Sam Hill’s death, his wife gave Oliver a 1924 Annotated Constitution of the United States. Oliver pored over the volume, rereading the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. He spent time at the Congressional Library and read various civil rights cases and was particularly intrigued by Plessy vs. Fergusson. “I didn’t see how in the world they could argue that they weren’t in violation of the 13th and 14th amendments.”

Dr. Mordecai Johnson’s Law School

After high school graduation, Oliver Hill entered Howard University. He took classes in philosophy, real estate, economics. “And I studied enough psychology to make it my major,” he says.

It was an amazing time for Howard, which was finally coming into its own. Mr. Hill remembers the university’s president, Dr. Mordecai Johnson. “He was a marvelous scholar,” he says. “He was a Baptist preacher and a wonderful speaker. I prefer him to Martin Luther King.” When Dr. Johnson spoke, the assembly halls filled to standing room only.

Upon completion of his undergraduate work, Oliver Hill decided to study law. And it was at a perfect time, for Dr. Johnson had decided that Howard University would have a first-class law school. 

To head up this law school, Dr. Johnson hired Charles Hamilton Huston, a brilliant lawyer and a highly regarded legal scholar who was the first American of African descent to study law at Harvard. His plan was to create a full-time day school devoted to law. Until that time, Howard had had only an evening law school. Dr. Johnson hired some of the finest lawyers in the country to teach at Howard Law School. Among them was William Hastie, the first American of African descent to be made a federal circuit court judge.

“It created a whole lot of fervor around Washington,” Mr. Hill remembers. “Because up till that time the majority of the members of the faculty at Howard Law School were white people with jobs in the judiciary or some agency of the federal government. They were adjunct faculty at Howard.”

Charles Hamilton Huston

What Charles Huston was doing was creating 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. And the young men who attended the new Howard Law School proved themselves remarkable attorneys. Among them were Oliver White Hill and his classmate, Thurgood Marshall, men who would further perfect the ultimate aim our non-exclusionary republic.

Understanding that many blacks didn’t have the same advantages of whites in a separate but far from equal society, Huston had his law students do a fair amount of “field work”. They spent time at the United States Attorney General’s office, toured the FBI office where they learned about fingerprints and other forensic studies. They visited Washington D.C.’s city jail, which at the time was located in Quantico. They went to St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital. And always, they were observing, taking notes, learning all the nuts and bolts about a white-dominated society. “Negroes had no experience in many of these things,” says Mr. Hill. “They couldn’t get it from their parents or relatives, but they did get it from the field trips.”  

Thanks to Huston, Howard law students also benefited from guest lecturers such as Clarence Darrow. “He was one of the top lawyers in the country in that day,” says Mr. Hill. “And he lectured to my class at least twice.

Oliver And Thurgood

Oliver Hill and Thurgood Marshall became quick friends. Thurgood worked as an assistant librarian and Oliver waited tables in the dining room of an upscale apartment building on Connecticut Avenue and L Street. 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 attorneys hit it off. “We became his prodigies,” Mr. Hill says. 

After graduating from Howard, Oliver continued working at a seafood restaurant, and on Thurdays, his day off, he would study for the bar in Alexandria with another aspiring attorney. In December, Oliver headed to Richmond to take the battery of tests.

He spent the night at Slaughter’s Hotel, a place famous for its Smithfield ham steaks, on Second Street. He told the desk clerk that night that he needed a wake-up call at seven sharp, and the clerk nodded. Oliver woke that morning to the rapping of rain on his windows. It was a dark, wet morning, and immediately he began reading the law, boning up for the exams he would take later in the morning.

He kept reading his notes, then became a little concerned and when he checked his watch he discovered it was 8:30. The wake up call had never come. On his way out of the hotel, he bawled out the front desk clerk, then with long, purposeful strides he made his way over to Broad Street and hailed a cab there. The driver didn’t know how to get into the Capitol grounds, but he eventually found the entrance off of 9th Street.

Late For The Bar

It was now past nine o’clock and the exams were already in progress. Oliver Hill entered the General Assembly Room, and the only seats he saw were in the front row. “I lived in Washington and thought everything was the same here, so I plopped down in the front row,” he says. When the clerk of court came to collect Oliver’s identification card, he noticed that the man shuffled it to the back of the deck of cards he held in his hand. “But I didn’t care,” says Mr. Hill. “Hell, by that time I was excited to be taking the bar.”

The first question stumped him. It concerned federal procedure, something that was not covered in detail at Howard in those years. “I had sense enough to know that I didn’t know anything about the damned question,” Mr. Hill tells me. “But the rest of the exam wasn’t bad. After I finished it, I came back to the first question and used my imagination.” He took more tests later that day, after a lunch break. And the following day there were two more sessions of exams. When it was over, Oliver Hill, assuming he had failed, gathered his bags and boarded a Greyhound bound for Washington. “I just forgot all about it,” he says with a laugh and a smile.

A month or two later, at a dance held at a Masonic Lodge, an old acquaintance approached Oliver Hill and said, “Congratulations!”

“What do you mean congratulations?” asked Oliver.

“Hell, you don’t pass the bar every day.”

Oliver Hill had no idea. He went to library and found newspapers from the last week of December, and there was his name, big as life, under the heading “Passed The Virginia Bar”. He called the Pentecost home in Roanoke and asked what had happened. They had just received a letter that informed them that Oliver had passed the bar. The hold up apparently came because the state, still trying its best to undermine the advancement of blacks, refused to furnish the information unless it received receipts proving Oliver Hill had paid his poll taxes over the previous three years. “They wouldn’t let me know I had passed until the poll tax receipts were received,” he says.

In September, Oliver Hill traveled back to Roanoke and was sworn in as a lawyer in hustings court. “The clerk there told me that if I had waited another month or two, I would have had to take the bar all over again,” Mr. Hill says.

Hanging His Shingle

Prospects for the young lawyer weren’t particularly bright. He shared space with an established attorney who had his offices above a drugstore at the corner of Henry and High. The man’s name was J. Henry Claytor, and his office was a mess.

“Claytor was one of these guys whose desk was piled sky high with material,” Mr. Hill remembers. “One time, after I’d been there for about six months, he had to go to Baltimore for a few days, so I decided this was a good time to go through his stuff and put it in neat piles. By the time he got back I had everything neat. And he just blew up. He didn’t know where anything was.”

Oliver Hill picked up a few cases in hustings court, and some of the work was done gratis. “Back in those days, unless the offense carried a penalty of at least ten years, you didn’t get anything,” he says. “A penalty of ten years got you ten dollars. For murder you got twenty-five dollars.”

Looking back on those early years, Mr. Hill realizes that he might have missed a golden opportunity. “I was stupid back then because I didn’t have enough sense to raise the jury question,” he says. “That would have gotten me some publicity.” In those days, blacks were not permitted to sit on juries, even when those juries were deciding the penalty to be imposed on a black man. “Everything was segregated,” he says. “Blacks were segregated and in some instances completely eliminated from participation. There were no blacks on any juries.”

Oliver Hill was making little money as an attorney. At times he wrote letters to collect delinquent accounts for someone he knew. He wrote other letters, as well, but he was not practicing much law. “I struggled around there for a year and a half,” he says, “doing nothing.”

Solo Practice In Richmond

He returned to Washington, D. C. and with a friend, who managed a restaurant, decided to organize black workers to insure they received appropriate compensation. “I was trying to become a labor organizer,” says Mr. Hill. “But I didn’t have too much success at that either.”

In 1939 on his birthday, Oliver Hill returned to the place of his birth. He was going to enter a practice with two other lawyers. “But one of them had a drinking problem,” Mr. Hill says with a smile. “He was a beer drinker and would go on a binge and stay away for two or three days. I didn’t want to work with the other lawyer either.”

So he stayed in a solo practice. “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. For example, white teachers in the Richmond schools were paid between $1,000 and $1,800 annually; black instructors were paid only between $350 and $999. “We were fighting for equal pay for Negro teachers,” he says.

Equality Of Schools

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 County, City of Norfolk, Newport News, Chesterfield County, Gloucester County. 

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 order 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.”

The Sensation Of A Lynching

This stubborn stupidity that prevented blacks equal opportunity on all levels angered Oliver Hill, but there was only one time that he was actually scared. In 1939, he and an associate drove down to Emporia on Election Day to check out polling locations to make sure that blacks weren’t being prevented from voting. 

“We came around the corner on a narrow road and started down this daggone hill and we looked down there and there were about forty white folks with sticks and ropes,” he says. “There was no way to turn around on this little ole narrow road so we kept on down through the crowd and went across a one-way, covered bridge.” When they crossed the bridge, they looked back and saw that the white men were trying to pull a half-submerged car out of the river. “But we had all the sensation you get being the victims of a lynching,” says Mr. Hill. “I got scared that time. I was too scared to be angry.”

During World War II, Oliver Hill applied for a commission. “And all I did by that was get in a whole lot of trouble,” he says. But lawyers were officer material, and Oliver Hill persisted. He took his physical exam in Richmond. “Of course, I was in excellent physical condition,” he remembers. “They had a line of doctors and each one gave me good marks all the way down the line and then when one doctor got to my feet, he said, ‘He has racially flat feet’, and they gave me back my papers.”

Rapists With Tails

He was eventually drafted at the age of 36, and despite his education, entered the army as an enlisted man. On January 1, 1944 he shipped out on the Queen Elizabeth, steaming for Scotland. When he arrived, there was a letter for him that stated that since he was no longer in the continental United States, he could reapply for OCS with the British. “So I applied and never heard anything from them,” he tells me.

Oliver Hill and other black soldiers were relocated to Wales. “The chaplain in the advance patrol told all the people up there that the soldiers who were coming had tails and that they’d rape all the girls,” Mr. Hill says. “We were there for over three months, and the conduct of the Negro soldiers was completely contrary to what that prejudiced chaplain had told them. They told some of the boys what he had said about them and if they could have got hold of that chaplain that night, they would have lynched him.”

But the chaplain’s act of racism may well have saved the lives of the young black soldiers. When the inspector general got wind of the incident he headed to the base in Wales and conducted an investigation. Oliver Hill typed up the report, outlining exactly what had happened. The black troops were delayed from going to Normandy. “If it hadn’t been for that damned old prejudiced chaplain, we’d have been in D-Day,” Mr. Hill says with a deep laugh. “I’d probably have been fish bait sixty years ago.”

A Thrice Denied Commission

When Oliver finally did arrive in Normandy, there was a letter waiting for him once again. It informed him that he could reapply for OCS at the Normandy base section. “I said the hell with it,” he says. “Playing all these silly games. I didn’t bother with it anymore.”

A colonel there told Oliver Hill that he could receive a field commission.

“I’ve got great news for you,” the colonel told him.

“No you haven’t either,” said Oliver Hill.

“You mean you don’t want a field commission?”

“Colonel, the only thing I want to do is get the hell of this damned army.”

When the war wound down in Europe, Oliver Hill was sent to the Pacific Theater. They had just crossed the equator when the news came that the Japanese had surrendered. “But the ship kept on to Manila,” he says. “We fooled around there for four or five days before they’d let us land. Nobody wanted anymore troops there after the war was over.”

After the war, Oliver Hill opted not to take advantage of benefits offered to veterans. “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.”

Back In The Fray

But once back in the states, Oliver Hill again joined the fight for independence. His firm was called Hill, Martin and Robinson. His partners were Martin Armstrong Martin and Spottswood William Robinson, III.

“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. 

He speaks fondly of his former law partner Spottswood Robinson “Spot was one of these Negroes we called a Negro by choice,” Mr. Hill tells me with a chuckle. “He could be white, or he could be Negro whenever he wanted to. He was fair-skinned.”

In 1947, Oliver Hill waged an unsuccessful bid in the Democratic primary for the General Assembly. But it was by no means a loss. He came within 180 votes of winning the nomination. Blacks in the Richmond area, and throughout the South, were mobilizing. In 1946, the Richmond Civic Council, a group consisting of about 80 black churches, civic, labor, business and education groups, fostered a drive to get the black vote out. Oliver Hill campaigned on a biracial platform He called for tenure for teachers, who at the time were contracted on a year by year basis. He wanted higher salaries for teachers. He favored increased state spending for hospitals and public health programs. He also called for the abolition of the poll tax as a voting prerequisite. The United Labor Political Action Committee, the political branch of the AFL/CIO, supported Oliver Hill.

Elected To City Council

Richmond was changing. Since the war had ended, about 5,000 blacks had registered to vote, almost doubling their numbers in three years. And one of the primary reasons for this dramatic increase was Oliver Hill’s bid for a seat on Richmond City Council.

He ran in 1948 as an Independent, campaigning among blacks and whites. And it paid off. He won the election, becoming the first black elected to Council since Henry J. Moore won in 1898. What’s more, Oliver Hill received about 3,000 white votes. 

His stint on council once again brought home the inequity of a separate but equal society. “They’d be discussing things about the city that I’d never heard of,” Mr. Hill says. “And then on top of that they’d go to lunch together and all those kinds of things. It was exclusionary, and you can’t function successfully in an exclusionary situation.”

He remembers going into a restaurant over on Hull Street across from the courthouse. “I went in there and ordered a hot dog and the man served me,” he says. “I went in there from time to time to get a sandwich and they served me.” But he never sat at table in the restaurant. “There was a Jewish fellow who wrote humorous material and he said the solution for the segregation problem was to remove all the stools and let everybody stand up.”

Moton High School

The whole notion of segregation perplexed Oliver Hill. It was not a question of simply building equal facilities for blacks and whites. “One time I was arguing before the circuit court, and at that time we were not contesting segregation per se, but I said, ‘If you built two schools from the same plans, identical, and equipped them identically, and brought in equally qualified teachers, I would still consider those schools to be unequal.’ They were denying Negroes an opportunity to be involved in the mainstream, and to be part of America. It hindered the development of white folks and it hindered the development of Negroes. And I never realized it so much as I did when I served on Richmond City Council.”

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 better 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 black principal there, for not having squelched the strike, was summarily relieved of his duties.

Moton High, unlike its all-white counterpart called Farmville High, had no gym or cafeteria, no locker rooms or showers. And tarpaper shacks were attached to it to take care of the burgeoning student body.

Afraid of possible litigation, the Farmville School Board applied for and received a grant of $600,000 from the state to build a new high school for blacks only. 

Brown vs. Board of Education

The spark had been ignited, and the fire was moving through the brush, each stray ember starting another fire. Change was imminent.

At one point, someone arguing in favor of segregation noted that black students were ten times more likely to have been born out of wedlock than white students, that black students were 14 times more likely to contract venereal disease than white students. Oliver Hill nodded, acknowledging the serious nature of illegitimacy and venereal disease, but then he said, “The first step in eradicating this evil is the elimination of racial segregation—its breeding place.”

Things came to a head in 1954 with Brown versus the Board of Education. Oliver Hill remembers working the first case that led to the 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.”

Tenant Bryan: Segregationist

Virginia, then still controlled by the infamous Byrd machine, retaliated against the federal ruling with “massive resistance”. In 1955, when virtually every Virginia candidate ran on an anti-integration platform, Oliver Hill threw his hat into the ring again. He appealed for Virginia’s compliance with the Supreme Court decision and said, “the vast majority of people who believe in segregation do so from fear, superstition and ignorance of the issues involved.” He lost the Democratic primary.

It was James J. Kilpatrick, then editor of the now-defunct Richmond News-Leader, who added bullets to the arsenal of the bigoted majority when he invoked the Jeffersonian word interposition as a justification of massive resistance. Interposition, incidentally, was also declared unconstitutional.

“Kilpatrick was a fairly decent guy as a newspaper reporter,” Mr. Hill remembers. “As a matter of fact he served the cause of a Negro charged with murder or rape in New Jersey and helped him get out of the penitentiary. But when he became editor he changed. It could have been the publisher.”

That would have been Tenant Bryan, an odious man in Oliver Hill’s eyes. “Tenant Bryan operated both papers and was a segregationist of the worst kind himself,” says Mr. Hill. After attending a conference in Washington D.C., a conference that ironically was about why James Madison, author of The Constitution, deserved more recognition, Oliver Hill and Tenant Bryan shared a seat on the bus ride home to Richmond. “We disagreed the whole way back,” Mr. Hill says. “He was a segregationist, although, at that time he was on the trustee board at Virginia Union. He tried to show people he was a fine man, but he wasn’t. He was an enemy of the people.”

Byrd: Rabid Racist

And Harry Byrd was even worse. “He was a rabid racist,” Mr. Hill remembers. “A real segregationist. The thing about a segregationist, was they not only wanted to isolate Negroes, they insisted on everyone else isolating Negroes. Byrd always referred to me as ‘that nigger lawyer.’” Mr. Hill chuckles a bit when he says this.

Over the years there had been threats lodged against Oliver Hill. “We used to have to put the telephone in the wastebasket when we went to bed,” he says. “People would call threatening me at two or three in the morning, but I was never scared. I didn’t worry about anybody doing something to me over the telephone.”

Until the time his only child, Oliver, Jr., reached his teens, he was not permitted to answer the telephone. “That’s when they started getting scurrilous,” Mr. Hill says. “Asking for the Head Nigger In Charge, all that kind of crap. They’d use curse words and a lot of the time they’d just breathe into the telephone.”

Charred Cross In Tin Shed 

When the Hills lived on Overbrook, someone burnt a cross on their front lawn. A cab driver, who saw the culprits commit their crime, gave them chase to get their license number, but the car was gone in a flash. When the flaming crossed banged against the side of the Hill’s house, Olivia arose and woke her husband, who slept in a back room so he could read long into the night without disturbing his wife’s sleep. “I could see flames through the window and I ran downstairs, grabbed the garden hose and hooked it up and put the fire out,” he says. “We kept that cross for years and years in the little old tin house in the back yard. It didn’t scare me though, it just made me a little angry.” 

And then Oliver Hill 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.” He says that through the course of the years he has read a lot, has read everything that short story writer O. Henry ever wrote. “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.”

A Monument Of Monuments

As I leave the house, the robins still peck among the fallen leaves, winging from the dogwood down to the earth and back, hundreds and hundreds of them now, wheeling through the air, frenzied in their pursuit of something. The dusting of snow is now gone, ushered away by the wind, and the temperature has dropped. But the birds are still here on the front lawn of the house where one of Richmond’s true giants lives, as if they were paying homage to him, this man who has been called, among other things, The Liberator of Virginia.

Driving home, I see him again in my mind’s eye, sitting erect in the chair in his living room, his sharp features seemingly sculpted of stone or cast from bronze. I imagine a statue of him in bronze, standing at the beginning of Monument Avenue where a weaker, vainglorious soldier of a doomed and hopeless cause is frozen forever in time. Move the representation of J.E.B. Stuart further to the west, and replace it with Oliver Hill, standing tall, dwarfing all other monuments along that venerable avenue. As the Confederates face north or south depending on their survival after the Civil War (the dead face north in defiance; the survivors face south, looking homeward), allow Oliver Hill to look west, above them all, toward the sun. He was among those who fought the second great fight for true American independence and he and his army were victorious.