Born May 1, 1907, Hill spent much of his childhood in Roanoke. While his parents worked out of town at The Homestead resort, he stayed with the Pentecost family, who taught him about pride in being Black.
“Consequently, from childhood I developed personal esteem and expected White folks to treat me like they did one another in such settings,” Hill wrote in his autobiography.
He graduated second in his class from Howard University Law School in 1933, behind his classmate and longtime friend, Thurgood Marshall.
In 1999, he received the President Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Clinton.
In 2003, Hill urged a Virginia legislative committee to support a resolution expressing “profound regret” for what was known in the 1950s as “Massive Resistance,” the state-led effort to defy the Supreme Court’s desegregation order. Rather than desegregate, Virginia chose to close entire public schools.
This past May, state officials unveiled images of a memorial planned on the state Capitol grounds in Richmond that features Hill and the students who staged the 1951 walkout at Farmville. The $2.6 million monument is to be unveiled next July.
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