Oliver Hill, Roanoke's Contribution to Brown v. Board
Near Roanoke, Virginia
Oliver White Hill was born in Richmond in nineteen oh seven and came to Roanoke as a child, growing up in the Gainsboro neighborhood on the northern ridge above downtown. He attended Roanoke's segregated schools through the eighth grade, then finished high school at Dunbar in Washington. He went on to Howard University, where he would meet Thurgood Marshall, who would become his colleague and in some respects his rival in the long campaign against segregated education in Virginia.
Hill earned his law degree from Howard in nineteen thirty-three and returned to Virginia to practice. The work was slow and difficult and often dangerous. Civil rights attorneys in Virginia in the nineteen thirties and forties operated in an environment in which white resistance to any challenge to segregation was intense and sometimes violent, where courthouse doors were not reliably open, where clients faced retaliation for bringing cases.
Hill filed equalization suits through the nineteen forties, arguing that Virginia was required by the Supreme Court's existing separate-but-equal doctrine to actually make Black schools equal to white ones. This approach was strategic: by documenting the gap between what Black and white students received, Hill built a record that demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining separate and equal simultaneously. When the NAACP Legal Defense Fund decided to shift from equalization suits to a direct assault on Plessy versus Ferguson, Hill and his Virginia colleagues were part of that shift.
The Davis case, Davis versus County School Board of Prince Edward County, originated with a student strike at the all-Black Moton High School in Farmville in April nineteen fifty-one. Hill and his colleague Spottswood Robinson filed the case that grew out of that strike. It became one of the five cases decided together as Brown versus Board of Education on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty-four.
The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional had Oliver Hill's name on one of the briefs.
