The Roanoke Times | File 1999

Civil rights attorney Oliver Hill is shown in 1999 in his Richmond office. Hill, who was at the front of the court fight that led the United States Supreme Court to end racially segregated schools, died Sunday . He was 100.

Associated Press | File 1954

KEY YEARS

• 1940 Oliver Hill won his first civil rights case in Virginia, one that required equal pay for black and white teachers.
• 1948 Hill was the first black elected to Richmond’s City Council since Reconstruction.
• 1951 Hill argued a lawsuit on behalf of students protesting deplorable conditions at their high school for blacks in Farmville.
• 1954 The Farmville lawsuit with Hill was part of a series of lawsuits against racially segregated public schools that became the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which changed America’s society by setting the foundation for integrated education. Information from The Associated Press

Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund gathered for this photograph in 1954. Pictured (from left) are Louis L. Redding, Robert L. Carter, Oliver W. Hill, Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood W. Robinson III.

Associated Press | File 1999

President Clinton congratulates Oliver Hill after presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House

Oliver Hill, a Roanoke-raised civil rights lawyer and one of the architects of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case, died Sunday morning in Richmond.

Hill, who turned 100 May 1, died peacefully during breakfast at his home, according to Joseph Morrissey, a family friend.

"Few individuals in Virginia's rich history have worked as tirelessly as Oliver Hill to make life better for all of our citizens," said Gov. Tim Kaine. "His life's work was predicated on the simple truth that all men and women truly are created equal."

It was work inspired by hardship. Hill was born in Richmond but spent most of his childhood in segregated Roanoke.

At age 9, he once said, while returning bottles for deposit, he was chased from a Campbell Avenue distillery by grown white men, one of whom shouted, "Catch that little n----- and cut his ... off!"

When he was 11, a white man came to Hill's Gainsboro neighborhood and rounded up a group of black children, including Hill. They were led, blindfolded, into a makeshift boxing ring, prompted to fight and told that the last child standing would win a prize. Hill prevailed and returned home, eager to show his surrogate parents, Bradford and Lelia Pentecost, the 50 cents he'd been paid. Their response surprised the young man.

"I got a whipping," Hill recalled in 1993. "For making a fool of myself for white folks."

In 1922, 15-year-old Hill finally left Roanoke for Washington, D.C., because Roanoke at that time had no high school for black students.

He entered Howard Law School in 1930 and found a mentor in the school's dean, Charles Houston, who Hill said told students that lawyers who weren't "social engineers" fighting for people's rights were simply social parasites.

Hill graduated second in Howard's Class of 1933; first in his class was Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first black to serve on the United States Supreme Court. The two men would eventually make history together.

"We became about as close of friends as anybody has ever been," Marshall told a Richmond newspaper in 1992.

After graduation, Hill returned to Roanoke to set up a law practice, but the Depression made cases too scarce and he eventually moved to Richmond. He was able to support himself drawing up wills and handling divorces and accident claims, but he was also starting to wage battles over equal rights.

In 1940, Hill won his first civil rights case in Virginia, which required equal pay for black and white teachers. Eight years later, he was the first black man elected to Richmond City Council.

Working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Hill labored for years against Jim Crow segregation laws. His legal team filed more civil rights lawsuits in Virginia than were filed in any other Southern state, which eventually yielded historic changes in black voting rights, school bus access, jury selection and employment protection.

As the 1950s began, Hill and Marshall realized that rather than fighting case-by-case, they needed to challenge the entire "separate-but-equal" doctrine head-on and strive for complete integration.

Soon after, Hill and NAACP law partner Spottswood W. Robinson III represented black Prince Edward County students in a lawsuit that challenged racially separate schools. That case was one of five that led to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that set the foundation for integrated education.

Separate schools, the justices ruled in May 1954, could never be equal and the process of segregation "may affect their [black children's] hearts and minds in a way unlikely to be undone."

The battle was not without its wounds. During that era, Hill received constant threatening phone calls and letters, and a cross was once burned on his lawn. Crusading for his cause also did little for his bank account, and in 1992 Hill told the Richmond News Leader, "We got very few fees for any of this."

In May, Roanoke City Councilman Alfred Dowe told The Roanoke Times, "I think the values that Oliver Hill represented were battling and fighting for the common man who frankly would not have a voice were it not for intervention."

Hill practiced law well into his 80s, longer than any other attorney in the Brown case.

In 1999, then President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Virginia's NAACP created an Oliver W. Hill Freedom Fighter Award, of which he was the first recipient, to honor "those who would dare to fight for a just world, even at the risk of losing physical comfort, security and safety."

In April, the Gainsboro house where he grew up was purchased by the Oliver Hill Foundation, with help from the city of Roanoke. The two-story, 2,500-square-foot home at Fourth Street and Gilmer Avenue was bought for about $96,000 and will be renovated. The Hill Foundation hopes to use it for a purpose their namesake would appreciate and wants to install in it a headquarters for free legal help, using a staff of law students.

"We needed a use that is consistent with his legacy, and we also needed a use that is an ongoing type of thing, not just something for people to look at," said the foundation's director, Richmond attorney Clarence Dunnaville, in May.

Perhaps the most telling detail of Hill's quest for racial equality came in 2005. When Hill began his law career, he borrowed books from Virginia's Supreme Court of Appeals and law library in Richmond, but was only allowed to keep books out over the weekend.

Two years ago, the State Office Building, the building that housed that library and which now houses the lieutenant governor's office, was renamed the Oliver W. Hill Building. It's the first and only building in Capitol Square to be named in honor of a black man.

In a statement read by his son at the rededication, Hill asked, "Who would have thought back in 1939, given the racial climate at the time, that 66 years later that building would be named after me?"

The Associated Press contributed to this report.