He also helped win landmark legal decisions involving equality in pay for black teachers, access to school buses, voting rights, jury selection, and employment protection.

When Oliver was 9 years old, after the deaths of his maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather, W. H. White Jr. returned briefly to Richmond and asked his son if he wanted to live with him in New York City.

[3] Because Olivia Hill worked at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, during the spring and fall seasons, and a related resort in Bermuda during the winter, Oliver was raised by his maternal grandmother and grandaunt in a small house on St. James Street in a predominantly African-American section of Richmond.

His paternal grandmother, Kate Garnet White, was reputedly part Native American, but had little to do with Oliver and his mother.

Joseph Hill moved his wife and Oliver to Roanoke, where he operated a pool hall until Prohibition made that uneconomic, so he and Olivia resumed their hospitality industry careers.

Oliver was in the sixth grade, but he did not like the D.C. elementary school he attended for a semester, and so was allowed to return to Roanoke and his foster parents, the Pentecosts.

Upon learning that the Supreme Court had taken away many rights of African Americans, and that in the 1920s Congress could not even pass legislation outlawing lynching Negroes, Oliver White Hill determined to go to law school and reverse the Plessy v. Ferguson decision issued slightly before his birth.

He spent summers earning money for his education at various resorts in the Mid-Atlantic region, including Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and Oswegatchie, Connecticut, as well as for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

[8] Both studied under Charles Hamilton Houston, the chief architect in challenging Jim Crow laws through legal means.

Howard Law School had received funds to challenge segregation of Negroes, but that endowment was nearly wiped out during the 1929 stock market crash.

Hill politely thanked them, left, and soon filed a lawsuit in the federal district courthouse in Richmond, seeking to declare the disparities between white and black high school students unconstitutional.

Like his partner Samuel W. Tucker and other African-Americans, Hill experienced racial discrimination during his military service, particularly by white officers.

Unlike Tucker, Hill was not allowed to enlist in Officer Candidate School, but instead served in a unit of black engineers, and performed mostly support duties as a Staff Sergeant.

Hill served in the European Theatre of World War II until V-E Day, when his unit was shipped to the Pacific, from where he was ultimately discharged.

Returning to his law practice in Richmond, Hill also served as chief of the Virginia branch's legal staff.

In 1947, Hill persuaded W. Lester Banks to act as the Virginia Chapter's Executive Director and handle the organization's day-to-day activities.

In 1947, he first ran for the City Council of Richmond (which had changed its system to nine members elected at-large rather than by districts as before the war), but came in 10th in a race for 9 seats.

After the Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955, Virginia's dominant Byrd Organization adopted a policy known as massive resistance to avoid desegregation.

One of the last partners he brought into the firm, Clarence Dunnaville had worked with him in his youth on the school desegregation cases and continued his work through the Oliver Hill Foundation, which seeks to reuse Hill's former home in Roanoke to provide legal services to the poor through third year students at the Washington and Lee School of Law.

He mourned his partner and former Richmond judge, Harold M. Marsh Sr., gunned down by a tenant behind in rent and facing eviction in 1997 while stopped at a traffic light a half mile from the courthouse that would soon bear his and his brothers' names.

[31] On Sunday, August 5, 2007, Oliver Hill died peacefully during breakfast at his home in Richmond of natural causes at the age of 100.

And, despite all of the accolades and honors he received, Mr. Hill always believed his true legacy was working to challenge the conscience of our Commonwealth and our country.

[32]More than 1200 people viewed his body as it rested in the Executive Mansion before his funeral at the Greater Richmond Convention Center, near where his law office had stood for decades.

He is survived by his son, Oliver Hill Jr., professor of psychology at Virginia State University and executive director of its research foundation.

That September (2000), Hill and other NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers received the Harvard Medal of Freedom for their role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

[10] By the time July 2008 had arrived the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial was dedicated in Capitol Square, honoring the legacy of Oliver SR, his fellow attorneys and his clients.

[40] The following year, the state's Department of Historic Resources approved four plaques that had honored Oliver SR and his legacy: that, by the Greater Richmond Convention Center marks the former location of his in law office.

[41] A street in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom (a former slave trading neighborhood) named "Oliver Hill Way" is now one of the proposed boundaries of a redevelopment project.

[42] The City of Roanoke, Virginia renamed its courthouse in his honor on May 1, 2019, and previously dedicated a historical marker in front of his childhood home.