Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 17, 1994 TAG: 9405170157
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
No trace in the rich red carpet and mahogany-paneled walls of the five-day trial that later was linked with cases from South Carolina, Kansas, and Delaware to become Brown v. Board of Education, converging like separate streams into a mighty river of change.
No reminders of 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns, whose stubborn refusal to accept the second-rate facilities at her Prince Edward County high school helped prompt the U.S. Supreme Court's May 17, 1954 order striking down separate schools for black and white children.
Or of Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, the local attornies who argued her case. Or of the Virginia gentlemen who represented the Prince Edward School Board and peopled the three-man court that ruled against Johns and her classmates, setting in motion their series of appeals.
There is in this courtroom, four decades later, only a hushed stillness and a weighty sense of the permanence of the law.
- - - - - -
"I forget that long, tall sucker's name," mused Oliver Hill recently as he sat, regal and erect, in the courtroom where he argued the most historic case of his legal career.
He is 87, the last of the dozen or so lawyers who plotted the end of school segregation in America to still practice law, and sometimes the memory fails.
No matter. As the 40th anniversary of the Brown decision approaches Tuesday, the trial record and newspaper microfilm detail the Virginia portion of the case:
How from Feb. 25-29, 1952, the two Virginia civil rights lawyers joined an NAACP colleague from New York in arguing with deliberate, almost-passionless precision that separate schools could never provide the equal opportunity demanded by the Constitution.
How the Old Guard of Virginia rallied, sending two of its most accomplished lawyers and the attorney general to rebut that claim - spicing their argument with questions about the racial and ethnic heritage of witnesses.
"I mean are you half-white, or half-colored, and half Panamanian, or what?" went one query.
And how one week after the trial ended, the judicial panel ruled that the separation of Prince Edward County students caused "no hurt or harm to either race."
The Virginia case was the last to be argued of the four that eventually formed Brown v. Board of Education, and it was unique in at least two ways.
According to Robert L. Carter, who represented the NAACP at the trial and is now semi-retired as a federal judge in New York City, it was the only one in which the bulk of the argument was presented by local attornies.
Hill - vibrant and combative - and Robinson - scholarly and frail - were simply "the best local civil rights lawyers that we had anywhere in the South," he said.
It also was the only case in which the defenders of the status quo were so well organized that they produced their own expert witness. Henry Garrett, renowned head of the psychology department at Columbia University, gave a stamp of legitimacy to racial segregation as he argued that Negro children actually benefitted from it.
It was Garrett's name that escaped Hill recently. What Hill has not forgotten is the anger instilled in him by Garrett. Hill's response was the most emotional outburst of the trial.
"Athletics, that is all right. Music, fine - all Negroes are supposed to be able to sing. Rhythm - all Negroes are supposed to be able to dance,"railed Hill after Garrett argued that black children could best develop their God-given gifts in separate schools.
"But we want an opportunity along with everybody else to develop in the technical fields. We want an opportunity to develop in the business and commerce of this nation. In other words, we want an opportunity to develop our talents, whatever they may be, in whatever fields of endeavor there are existing in this country . . . "
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The Virginia case was never meant to be.
"We would never have picked Prince Edward, right in the heart of the Southside," Hill said. "If we'd chosen a case we would have taken Richmond or Norfolk."
Indeed, in the spring of 1951, neither Hill nor Robinson had any immediate plans for attacking the unconstitutionality of school segregation in Virginia.
Operating out of a second-floor law office in Jackson Ward, then the heart of the capital's flourishing black community, the pair had for several years been waging a "school equalization" campaign, aimed at forcing local school systems to invest in black schools.
At one point, Hill estimates, they had legal actions pending in 75 of the state's school districts.
As time allowed, the pair also consulted with a small network of lawyers that had emerged from Howard University Law School in the 1930s, intent on dismantling segregation. By the early 1950s, that group had resolved to strike at the core of the issue by challenging the constitutionality of separate schools.
They had settled on Clarendon County, S.C., as the starting point.
When the South Carolina case went to trial in May 1951, Robinson was there. Hill would have been except for a legal commitment in Virginia.
In many respects, Virginia's best-known civil rights duo was an unlikely team.
Six-feet, two-inches tall, earthy and fun-loving, Hill was a former high school football player who describes himself as "the volatile, explosive type." Today, even with his distinctive mustache turned white and his step grown halting, he is an imposing figure.
A Richmond native, abandoned by his alcoholic father, Hill grew up in Roanoke and Washington, D.C., in lower middle class circumstances. At one point, however, while his mother and stepfather were working at the Homestead resort in West Virginia, he lived with Roanoke's most prominent black family.
That experience broadened him culturally and heightened his sense of racial pride.
At Howard, Hill graduated second in the Class of '33; former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was first, and the pair formed a close and friendly rivalry. "We were both wild," Hill recalled. "The only difference was, he was married, and I was single."
Years later, from 1948 to 1952, Hill would become the first black man to serve on Richmond City Council. Today, he is revered as one of the city's living legends.
Robinson, by contrast, is courtly, studious and slightly built, a man whose intellect outweighs his physical presence. Reputed to have attained the best academic record in the history of Howard Law School, friends tease that Robinson nonetheless turned ill each time he was about to take the bar exam.
"Of all our crowd, even Thurgood, he was the most scholarly," Hill said.
Robinson, who is 10 years Hill's junior, eventually rose to chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Now living in semi-retirement in Richmond, Robinson has declined interviews about the Brown decision anniversary, both on his doctors' advice and because - in typically conscientious fashion - he fears a conflict with his status as a senior federal judge.
As Hill recalls, the first telephone call from Prince Edward County to their office came on a Monday afternoon in April 1951.
The caller was Barbara Johns, an energetic and strong-willed high school junior who had just led the student body at all-black Moton High School on a walkout that would last two weeks. The students' complaint was that in everything from textbooks to facilities to buses, their school was a poor cousin to all-white Farmville High.
"Barbara Johns was quite a persistent young lady," Hill said. "I told her we'd be through Farmville Wednesday morning early, just to get her off the phone. We were going to tell them to go on back to school. We didn't need the case."
But when Hill heard the details and saw the students' passion, he changed his mind. "When we got there, they were so organized, morale was so high, we didn't have the heart to say no," he said.
Robinson filed suit on May 23, 1951, in federal court in Richmond, representing more than 100 parents of 450 Moton High students.
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None of the attorneys in the case that would be dubbed Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County expected miracles.
They knew, for instance, that their chances of prevailing in the federal district court were almost nil. "We prepared the case with the idea that we were preparing a record to go to the Supreme Court," Hill said.
What they did expect, however, was that 40 years after the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, both the public schools and American life would be more integrated than they are.
"I thought we'd be much further along in the integration process. I thought by this time we'd have developed an integrated society," Hill said.
"I am disappointed, very disappointed," concurred Robert Carter.
Like an ancient sage grown wise from experience and contemplation, Hill has turned in recent years from concern about specific court cases and legal challenges to thoughts about the evolutionary nature of mankind.
He believes that man is ever resistant to change, and that sometimes the resistance is powerful enough to thwart generations.
But he also believes that change comes, and he is optimistic enough to maintain that it is ultimately in a forward direction.
"I'm still, have always been, an optimist," he said, half closing his almond-colored eyes in thought and pressing his long, tapered fingers against the polished surface of the counsels' table where he sat long ago.
His message is distilled into two ideas: that in the 21st century, Homo sapiens must come to regard themselves as "human earthlings," not black or white, not Chinese or Japanese, certainly not city dwellers or suburbanites.
And for that evolution to occur, he says, from earliest childhood, "for anything essential, we ought to learn to think in terms of cooperation rather than competition."
In Prince Edward County, the evolution may be far from complete, but - perhaps to a greater degree than in the nation at large - it has begun.
Of the 2,739 students in the public school system, approximately 40 percent are white and 60 percent are black, nearly reflecting the racial makeup of the school-age population.
The former Prince Edward Academy, the segregationist private school to which whites fled when integration came, has been renamed The Fuqua School. Since last fall when a new president was named, black enrollment among the 635 students has risen from 17 to 26.
by CNB