Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 31, 1993 TAG: 9301310184
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
CIVIL RIGHTS VETERAN: TODAY'S BATTLES `MORE COMPLICATED'
LAWYER OLIVER HILL learned about racism as a child growing up in segregated Roanoke. He went on to join his friend and ally, Thurgood Marshall, in winning the greatest civil rights case in the nation's history.
One day, as the first World War raged in Europe, a white man came over to Roanoke's Gainsboro neighborhood and rounded up a group of black children. Oliver Hill, 11, went along.
The man took the children across the Norfolk and Western tracks to downtown. He and some other men blindfolded the youngsters and put them into a makeshift boxing ring. A free-for-all. They promised the winner - the last boy left standing - a prize.
Oliver, a stocky kid, could see dimly through his blindfold. He held his own.
Then he went home to Mr. and Mrs. Pentecost, the couple who served as surrogate parents while his mother and stepfather were working in Hot Springs. He proudly showed them the 50 cents he'd earned.
They didn't congratulate him. "I got a whipping," Hill remembers. "For making a fool of myself for white folks."
It was a lesson about pride and dignity in the face of racism. Oliver Hill learned many such lessons when he was growing up in Roanoke in a segregated society. They helped him go on to become one of America's pre-eminent civil rights attorneys.
Hill joined Thurgood Marshall and a handful of other lawyers in the two-decade legal attack on school segregation. In 1954, their efforts produced Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools.
Marshall, who went on to become the nation's first black Supreme Court justice, died last Sunday after years of illness.
Hill, 85, is a partner in a Richmond law firm. He is the last of the team of winning attorneys in the Brown case who still practices law.
More than half a century ago, Hill and Marshall met in law school and made a personal pact to fight segregation and racism in America. Oliver Hill has never turned back.
`They had strong ideas about things'
He was born Oliver White in 1907 in Richmond, capital of the Old Confederacy.
His father, William Henry White Jr., was an alcoholic who ran out on his family when Oliver was a baby. Oliver met him only once.
His mother later married Joseph C. Hill, and Oliver took his stepfather's last name. The family moved to Roanoke when he was 5.
They shared a house with the Pentecosts on Gilmer Avenue, not far from Henry Street.
When Virginia went dry - outlawing the sale of liquor - the pool hall that Joseph Hill operated went out of business. Oliver's mother and stepfather moved to Bath County to take jobs at The Homestead resort. Oliver stayed with the Pentecosts so he could go to school in Roanoke.
Bradford Pentecost was a chef/cook on the Norfolk and Western, so the couple was well-off compared with other blacks. "They had strong ideas about things," Hill says.
In those days, the traveling salesmen who knocked on the door almost daily didn't show much respect to black folks. But it was different at the Pentecost house. If a peddler tried to call Lelia Pentecost by her first name or wouldn't take his hat off, she'd throw him out and slam the door behind him.
One of Hill's first memories of racism happened when he was about 9.
He tried to earn some money by collecting whiskey bottles and taking them to a distillery on Campbell Avenue. Inside, a white man yelled to his co-workers: "Catch that little nigger and cut his . . . off!"
They chased him around the building before he finally ran away. Hill couldn't tell whether they were joking or not, but the threat terrorized him.
Because Roanoke had no high school for black students, Hill moved to Washington, D.C., with his mother and stepfather when he was 15.
Social engineers
In 1930, he entered Howard Law School. There he came under the sway of Charles Houston, the school's dean. Houston taught his students that any lawyer who was not a "social engineer" fighting for people's rights was a social parasite.
It seemed that Hill and Thurgood Marshall should have been antagonists. They came from rival colleges and fraternities. But they quickly became friends.
"He was a helluva fine fellow - in that he always had a lie to tell," Hill says of Marshall. "He was a great storyteller. I don't know where in the hell he found these stories."
"We became about as close of friends as anybody has ever been," Marshall told a Richmond newspaper reporter last year. "You want to know what his nickname was? Peanut. I don't know how he got it, but I know he don't like it."
Marshall graduated first in the Class of 1933; Hill was second.
Hill returned to Roanoke and set up practice, but that was during the Depression and cases were scarce. After two years, he moved to Washington, D.C., and, later, to Richmond.
Hill supported himself with run-of-the-mill cases: wills, divorces, accident claims. But he put most of his energy into the nonpaying part of his practice: the battle for equal rights.
At the time, civil rights lawyers were handcuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson. The ruling said Jim Crow segregation laws were legal as long as facilities were of equal quality for both races.
The campaign to destroy Plessy was slow and frustrating. Hill, Marshall and other civil rights lawyers started by trying to force local officials to upgrade black schools to bring them up to the court's "separate-but-equal" standard.
From the 1930s into the 1950s, Hill traversed the state, from the Eastern Shore to Southwest Virginia. He packed sandwiches because few restaurants would serve him. He drove to avoid segregated buses and trains.
In Sussex, a poor county in southern Tidewater, Hill took up the case of children who lived 40 miles from the nearest black school. The county had no bus for them.
Hill loaded some black children into a truck and drove them to the nearby white school. He told the principal he wanted to enroll them.
"I remember the eyes on that guy," Hill told author Richard Kluger, who recounted the tale in "Simple Justice," his 1975 book. "He ran for the phone and got the district superintendent, who told him, `Don't go lettin' any niggers in there.' "
`We've been waiting for a leader'
By the late 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had won a slew of cases in federal court. But the victories often meant little.
When a judge instructed Gloucester County to fix up its only black school, local officials responded by putting a brick facade on the outside of the pre-Civil War building. Then they splashed some whitewash around the inside. The NAACP had to go back to court and persuade a federal judge to fine School Board members $1,000 each.
When Pulaski County officials showed equal stubbornness, the NAACP said fines were not enough. Hill demanded that the schools be integrated. "That ole judge," Hill remembered, "he kept saying to us, `I will not do it! I will not do it!' I thought he'd bust a blood vessel."
In 1950, NAACP lawyers decided it was time to put an end to the plodding "equalization" strategy. All they had won so far were Jim Crow schools that were a little newer, but no better. Hill and Marshall knew they must challenge the separate-but-equal doctrine head-on.
When the lawyers held a meeting at a church in Dinwiddie County to explain the new direction, Hill remembered, more than 400 people showed up.
"There was this old man in the back wearing overalls and he gets up after hearing us out - he looked like he didn't know beans from Adam - and he says, `Mr. Hill, I've heard you, and all I want say is that we've known all along that you couldn't do it this way, a piece at a time, and we've just been waiting for a leader to tell us we had to go all the way.' "
`No hurt or harm'
Prince Edward County was not the NAACP lawyer's first choice for an assault on Jim Crow in Virginia. They believed a city like Richmond or Norfolk - where racial views were a bit less virulent than in the red-clay country of Southside Virginia - would have been better.
But they changed their thinking after black students at Moton High in Prince Edward went on strike, refusing to attend school in a cramped tar-paper shack. "We just didn't have the heart to tell 'em to break it up," Hill said.
The NAACP took the county School Board to federal court in Richmond.
When the trial began on Feb. 25, 1952, School Board attorney T. Justin Moore set the tone. He asked one black psychologist why "the Negro" wanted to be a "sun-tanned white man."
Hill responded in his closing argument by lashing out at those who said "separate-but-equal" schools would help blacks develop talents unique to their race:
"That is foremost in the minds of these people who want segregated schools: Let a Negro develop along certain lines. Athletics, that is all right. Music - fine, all Negroes are supposed to be able to sing. Rhythm - Negroes are supposed to be able to dance. But . . . we want to have an opportunity to develop our talents, whatever they may be, in whatever fields of endeavor there are existing in this country. . . . I submit that in this segregated school system, you don't have that opportunity."
The three-judge panel that heard the case disagreed. It said school segregation rested not upon racism but upon the social conventions of Virginia: "We have found no hurt or harm to either race."
The NAACP appealed, and Davis vs. School Board of Prince Edward County joined similar lawsuits from Kansas, South Carolina and Delaware before the U.S. Supreme Court under the title Brown vs. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall argued the case before the high court.
On May 17, 1954, the court announced its decision.
Separate schools, the justices ruled, could never be equal. Segregating black children generated a feeling of inferiority "that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to be undone."
Since his term on Richmond City Council in the late 1940s, Hill had been threatened by phone callers and letter writers. It got to the point where he automatically took the phone off the hook every night before he went to bed.
After the Brown decision, things got nastier. Someone burned a cross in his yard. Once, while he was away overnight, police officers, firefighters and an undertaker came to his home to tell his wife he was dead.
The official response to the Brown ruling was first to stall, then to defy the law. In Virginia, the political machine of U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. responded with "massive resistance" - closing schools in many parts of the state rather than allowing white and black children to attend classes together.
In 1961, 10 days after being named assistant to the federal housing commissioner, Hill returned to Prince Edward County.
He stood on the lawn of Farmville's white-columned courthouse and told a rally of more than 1,000 people that the officials who had closed Virginia's schools were "education robbers" guilty of "crimes against humanity."
Hill said the only difference between the school closings and Nazi crimes was in degree - the difference between a swindler who preys on widows and orphans and a highwayman who assaults and robs his victims.
Still fighting
Oliver Hill doesn't handle any big civil rights cases anymore. He's getting older, so he needs to work at his own pace. But he still takes smaller cases where he thinks he can do some good.
Wednesday, the day before he attended Marshall's funeral in Washington, Hill traveled to James River Correctional Center to talk to an inmate whom he believes has been unfairly denied parole. "He got a very raw deal."
These days, things are more complicated than they were when Hill first starting suing segregationists. He says the current Supreme Court is as hostile to civil rights as the court was a century ago when it set down the "separate-but-equal" doctrine.
"Everybody believes that segregation is wrong - so they say," Hill says. "But they raise all these silly questions like political correctness, reverse discrimination and all that kinda junk."
Hill doesn't have any quick solutions to the nation's racial tumult, just one thought: "The white majority has got to recognize that it's to their interest - rather than just blacks' interest - to bring about this cultural change.
"My favorite term is: We got to realize that we're all human earthlings."
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