Oliver Hill

Hill (far left) on May 31, 1943

Oliver White Hill (born May 1, 1907 in Richmond , Virginia , † August 5, 2007 ibid) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist, who was best known for his fight against discrimination against blacks in the United States. One of his greatest successes was the Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County , which along with four other cases was brought up by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education dealt with in 1954 and resulted in desegregation in public schools.

Life

Hill was born Oliver White in May 1907 in Richmond. His father, a pastor, left the family when he was a baby, and when his mother remarried, he too was given his stepfather's surname. He spent most of his childhood in Roanoke, Virginia . His mother worked as a maid, his stepfather as a bellhop. The family later moved to Washington DC , where Hill graduated from Dunbar High School. He then attended Howard University , which he graduated in 1933 as the second best of his class after his friend Thurgood Marshall .

Hill first worked as a lawyer in Roanoke, but then moved to Richmond in 1939 and started his own law firm there. In 1940 he won his first civil rights case Alston v. Together with Thurgood Marshall, William H. Hastie and Leon A. Ranson . School Board of Norfolk, Va. , Which gave black teachers equal pay. In 1943 Hill joined the Army to fight in World War II . On D-Day, for example, he was a staff sergeant at the Omaha Beach landing operation .

After the war he returned to his office. His next success in the Supreme Court of Virginia was advocating equality for black school children in transportation to school. In 1948 he became the first black man since Reconstruction that the city council was elected by Richmond.

Together with his partner Spottswood William Robinson III , he represented dozens of civil rights cases in Virginia in the early 1950s. In the spring of 1951, he took on the case of Black Farmville, Virginia, students studying at the dilapidated RR Moton High School. This gave rise to the Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County , whose application he lodged in court on May 23, 1951. The unsuccessful lawsuit by both the State Court and the District Court found its way to the Supreme Court, where it was tried along with four other cases. On May 17, 1954, segregation in public schools was lifted. For the next decade, Hill continued to fight segregation . In 1959, the Virginia Supreme Court repealed Virginia State law that banned integrated schools. But only the Green v. School Board of New Kent County brought the hoped-for success in 1968.

Hill's life was permanently threatened during the 1940s and 1950s. He received threatening letters and phone calls so often that he forbade his son to take calls. A cross was also burned on the lawn in front of his house, a common method used by the Ku Klux Klan at the time to intimidate and threaten opponents.

Until his retirement in 1998 he dealt with his company partners Samuel W. Tucker and Henry L. Marsh III again and again with civil rights cases. Two years later he published his autobiography The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education . He died on August 5, 2007 at his Richmond home at the age of 100.

President Clinton honored him on August 11, 1999 with the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom . In 2005 he received the Spingarn Medal .

literature

• Oliver Hill: The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education, The Autobiography of Oliver W. Hill, Sr. Four-G Publishers, 2000, ISBN 1885066791

Web links

• Biography (English)
• Obituary at orf.at