Photos by SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

The Oliver White Hill Community Law Center officially opens in Roanoke on Friday at the Gilmer Avenue home where the civil rights lawyer grew up. The center will offer assistance to the legally needy.

Famed civil rights attorney Bill Coleman (center) arrives at the dedication of the Oliver Hill house. Coleman, who is speaking at Roanoke College today, arrived a day early for the dedication.

Photos by SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

A metallic bust of Oliver Hill is on display at the Oliver White Hill Community Law Center. The lawyer died in 2007 at the age of 100.

Esther Vassar, president of the Oliver Hill Foundation, speaks at Friday's dedication. The Hill house now houses a legal aid center that is staffed by law students from Washington and Lee University.

Editor's note: A paragraph from the original copy of this story was removed because it misidentified someone.

On a picnic afternoon, about 100 people circled the front lawn of a wooden house on Gilmer Avenue Northwest to celebrate the life of Oliver Hill, the revered civil rights lawyer who grew up there.

The man spent decades in the courtroom, helped to integrate public schools, and died in 2007 at the age of 100. But his legacy still looms over No. 401, where the young Oliver lived until he left Roanoke at 15 because the city lacked a black high school.

The house officially opened Friday as the Oliver White Hill Community Law Center -- a memorial in name, but a house with a mission.

The legal clinic offers counsel on civil issues to the legally needy, be they homeless, a senior citizen or the ex-offender who needs his rights restored. Law students from Washington and Lee University staff the center, the Lexington law school's first off-campus legal aid site.

"We're not talking so much about the past. We're talking about the present," declared Elaine Jones, vice president of the Oliver Hill Foundation, in a marathon of remembrances from friends and dignitaries.

To those who knew Hill, the new functions of his childhood home are a good match with his career.

The clinic aims to help an underserved demographic (clientele can make up to 250 percent of the poverty level). Hill had always enjoyed working with law students, said Oliver Hill Jr., his son.

Friday's dedication settles the once uncertain fate of the house, which was being used as rental property as recently as 2005. The Hill Foundation bought the house in April 2007, announcing that in spring the property would become a community legal center.

The foundation struck an agreement with the W&L law school last year. The house received a thorough renovation and was leased to the new tenant for $1 a year.

Now, a large metallic bust of Hill sits in the hall, where the lawyer watches visitors arrive, an NAACP pin fixed to his lapel for all time.

The Friday crowd had plenty to say about the lawyer, who attached a lawsuit about a dilapidated high school in central Virginia to Brown v. Board of Education, the case that ended segregation in the country's public schools in 1954.

Hill was called an agent of justice and a lion of history, the most significant Virginian of the past century and a defender against the "thingification" of human beings.

"He would've loved to be here today," said Jimmy Morris, a dapper man in a bow tie who knew Hill for 25 years. Hill, he said, loved to collect his accolades.

He also collected an impressive array of local politicians. Almost everyone on the Roanoke City Council arrived, along with a state senator, a few hopefuls for the House of Delegates and a letter from both of Virginia's U.S. senators.

Watching the events from the porch was a Hill contemporary named William Coleman. ("You have a constitutional right to call me Bill," the 88-year-old said, pointing out that taxpayers paid his salary for years.)

Coleman, who was in town to speak at the Roanoke College commencement this morning, had also devised legal strategy for Brown v. Board of Education as part of his own long legal career. He recalled Hill was a committed attorney, but turned talk away from history.

"We've got to talk about the future, not the past," Coleman said.

Shortly after 3 p.m., a school bus deposited youngsters at a nearby corner. And Marlo Thomas, a 34-year-old Roanoker and mother, stopped to study the new legal clinic.

"What's going on?" Thomas asked a spectator. As it happened, she had some troubles of her own, and was shorted on some wages at her last restaurant job, she said.

"So if you feel like you've been done wrong, you can go there?"