Hill, Oliver (1907-2007), was a prominent American lawyer. Hill’s work on behalf of the civil rights movement helped end racial discrimination in public facilities in the United States.
Oliver White Hill was born Oliver White in Richmond, Virginia, on May 1, 1907. His parents divorced when Oliver was young, and the boy took his stepfather’s last name after his mother remarried. Hill earned an undergraduate degree from Howard University, a predominantly African American university in Washington, D.C. At the time, African Americans were denied admission to most institutions of higher learning. In 1933, Hill graduated from Howard University’s law school. Thurgood Marshall , who would later become the first African American justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, was one of Hill’s friends and classmates.
Hill began working as a lawyer in private practice in 1939. In 1940, he served as co-counsel, with Marshall and others, in a lawsuit filed by an African American schoolteacher along with an African American schoolteachers’ organization against the Norfolk, Virginia, school board. The appeals court ruled that Norfolk’s schools had used a pay system that was discriminatory against African American teachers and therefore unconstitutional based on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment . In 1942, Hill was a leading founder of an association for Virginia’s African American lawyers. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945, during World War II. In 1948, Hill won election to the Richmond City Council.
Hill served as the lead attorney for the Virginia State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) . In 1951, Hill helped argue the plaintiffs’ case in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, after African American students had walked out of their segregated school in Farmville, Virginia, because of unsafe conditions. The suit would become one of several considered collectively by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). In the 1954 case, the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. See also School desegregation, United States .
Hill worked for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, beginning in the early 1960’s. He then returned to his law practice, focusing on civil rights cases. Hill retired in 1998. In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded Hill the Presidential Medal of Freedom . In 2000, Hill published a memoir, The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond: The Autobiography of Oliver W. Hill, Sr. In 2005, the NAACP awarded Hill the Spingarn Medal for outstanding achievement in his career. Hill died on Aug. 5, 2007.
