“ AS A GENERAL RULE, HE DIDN’T HOLD GRUDGES, SO HE COULD INTERACT WITH EVEN HIS MOST ARDENT FOES AND THAT ALLOWED HIM TO ACCOM- PLISH A LOT MORE THAN HE WOULD HAVE.” — OLIVER HILL JR.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: OLIVER W. HILL SR., AGED 7, NAACP’S LEGAL TEAM, AND FROM LEFT TO RIGHT NAACP ATTORNEY SPOTTSWOOD ROBINSON, STUDENTS GEORGE LEAKES AND ELAINE BOWEN, AND OLIVER W. HILL SR.
Desegregation and Re-segregation in Norfolk’s Public Schools, published by UVA Press. T ough change progressed slowly, Hill remained optimis-
tic, writing, “I played a small part in alleviating the evils of segregation and related conditions. T rough the rule of law, these changes have occurred during my lifetime. [Yet] much work remains to be done.… I believe that human earthlings can meet the challenge and do great things.”2
THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL
Hill rose to the pinnacle of his profession from the ground fl oor, growing up in a blue-collar family, his mother and stepfather working in the hotel industry. As a boy in Roanoke, Va., he worked various jobs: hawking newspapers, shining shoes, delivering ice, mixing concrete, and selling ice cream for payment in ice cream. While an undergraduate at Howard University, he waited tables, drove a taxi, and worked for the railroad. He was an enterprising youth who did everything possible to make money despite the diffi culties he faced in the racially hostile society of Jim Crow-era Virginia. During that time, he says, “I didn’t have much use for white people.”3 As he matured, he came to see things diff erently and
concluded that “it was just as stupid for me to hate white people because they were white as it was for white people to hate me because I wasn’t white. Consequently, I began to judge people on the basis of my experience with them.”4 Oliver Hill Jr., the chair of the psychology department of Virginia State University in Petersburg, Va., says that this
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was one of the hallmarks of his father’s character. “He was able to respect the personhood of everybody,”
Oliver Hill Jr. says. “[And] he had a great love of humanity, and the ability to constructively engage with people without making enemies.”
THE TURNING POINT
T e pivotal event in Hill’s life occurred when his stepuncle, who was an attorney, suddenly died. “I was one of those happy-go-lucky C students in
college,” he said, during an interview with the Virginia Quarterly Review in 2004. “His wife gave me… an anno- tated Constitution of the United States. T at’s when I read the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.”5 He couldn’t understand how there could be laws permit-
ting segregation under the guarantees provided by those amendments to the U.S. Constitution. “So I decided the only thing for us to do was for some-
body to carry a case back to the U.S. Supreme Court and convince them that they ought to reverse Jim Crow.”6 Hill enrolled in Howard University School of Law,
where the noted civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston was the dean. Houston became his mentor, and the mentor of fellow classmate and future Supreme Court Justice T urgood Marshall, with whom Hill forged a life- long relationship as a co-worker and personal friend. T eir goal was to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upholding the “separate but equal” doctrine.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2012 DIVERSITY & THE BAR® 29
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