Oliver Hill remembered in changed world

RICHMOND (AP) — They remembered famed civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill as a man of boundless vision, who called on old-fashioned values of brotherhood as he challenged America to fulfill the promises of equality made by its founders.

Mr. Hill, who died Aug. 5 at age 100, didn’t invent anything new; he simply challenged the nation to live up to the ideal of loving thy neighbor, said Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat who eulogized the Richmond native at a memorial service yesterday in the city’s convention center.

“His life is a challenge. Are we up to it?” Mr. Kaine asked the crowd, which included several former governors, among them, L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first elected black governor and Richmond’s current mayor.

Also attending were U.S. Sen. James H. Webb Jr., Virginia Democrat, and Virginia Secretary of Public Safety John Marshall, the son of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a close friend of Mr. Hill’s.

Speaking before an audience speckled black and white, Mr. Kaine likened the man who helped integrate the nation’s schools to the biblical good Samaritan, reaching out to help those in need.

In Mr. Hill’s day, those were black Americans in need of equal education.

“Mr. Hill changed his time, he changed our times,” Mr. Kaine said. “No Virginian in the past hundred years has had as much impact.”

Born in 1907, Mr. Hill entered a world where the U.S. Supreme Court recently had upheld laws banning a black man from sitting in a white train car, and Virginia lawmakers had rewritten the state’s constitution to firm up restrictions on blacks.

By the time Mr. Hill graduated from Howard University’s law school in 1933, he had set his mind to challenging laws making blacks second-class citizens. He also had met Mr. Marshall, and the two would become part of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense and Education Fund team.

“These few people changed the world,” said his son, Oliver Hill Jr.

Mr. Hill won his first civil rights case in 1940 in Virginia, securing equal pay for black and white teachers.

He took his most famous case years later, when Mr. Hill argued on behalf of a group of black students protesting the conditions of their segregated Farmville school. They were lead by a scrappy youth named Barbara Johns.

“[Miss Johns] had such high morale, we didn’t have the heart to break that spirit,” Mr. Hill told the Associated Press in 2001.

Attorneys eventually would bundle the case with four others and take the matter to the Supreme Court. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education victory secured Mr. Hill a place in the history books.

Still, he didn’t give up the fight, said state Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, Richmond Democrat.

He recalled watching the tall, handsome lawyer argue down white Virginia lawmakers still giving short shrift to black schools.

Later, Mr. Hill offered Mr. Marsh a job; their firm — Hill, Tucker and Marsh — had its offices near the downtown Richmond site of yesterday’s service.

“Each person in America, in fact all persons everywhere, have greater freedom and opportunities because of the life and service of Oliver Hill,” Mr. Marsh said.

Mr. Hill received numerous awards over the years, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

But yesterday, family and friends remembered “Peanut” as much for his achievements as his love of bridge, the Redskins and life.

They recalled a man who wanted to live well beyond the year 2000 to see what became of the folks he referred to as “Earthlings.”

“What he meant by that was that we are all in this together,” his son told the audience. “As soon as we realize that we’re all in this together, that’s when we will begin solving the problems we face as a society.”

More than 1,200 people gathered at the Executive Mansion on Saturday where Mr. Hill’s body lay in repose, the first since tennis legend Arthur Ashe in 1993 to have public viewing in the Executive Mansion.