A large number of men and women were nominated for greatest Virginian of the 20th century. Richmond civil rights attorney Oliver White Hill Sr. (1907-2007) carried the day because more than any other person, wrote Times-Dispatch Editorial Page Editor Todd Culbertson, he was 20th-century Virginia's pre-eminent "force for good."

Hill lived one-fourth of the entire English-language portion of Virginia's history, and for more than half of that time in the oppressive Jim Crow regime that denied the basic human rights of American citizenship to a huge portion of the South's citizens. The finest of the remarkable cadre of civil rights lawyers in Virginia, and the longest-lived, he was brave, principled, tolerant, progressive -- and extremely effective.

Mayor L. Douglas Wilder naturally and wisely placed Hill's career in the perspective of his co-workers: "The NAACP attorneys, Oliver W. Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and Samuel Tucker were leaders of that group who constantly fought against discrimination and segregation as practiced across the U.S.A. and in Virginia." There were many others, but, as Wilder summarized their significance, "Hill, Robinson, and Tucker were in the vanguard and were as influential as any persons or groups in bringing about change in our society."

Even though Hill did not become a federal judge, as Spottswood Robinson did, he lived long enough to see many of the fruits of their joint labors on behalf of democracy and liberty.

When Hill died this past summer, he was praised throughout Virginia for his important contributions to commonwealth and country. In evidence of how much had changed since his early days, Hill won praise from people and from influential institutions that had once opposed his efforts to break down racial segregation.

Historian James Hershman, who has written important scholarship on the civil rights movement in Virginia, unhesitatingly proclaimed, "The greatest Virginian of the 20th century was Oliver W. Hill. Hill's lifelong struggle was to end racial segregation and to promote human rights." In many ways, he won an unwinnable phase of that long effort.

A native of Richmond, Hill grew up in Roanoke. But because Roanoke did not have a high school for black students, he had to move to Washington, D.C., to complete his education. He graduated from the law school at Howard University, and returned to Roanoke and then to Richmond, where he practiced law from the 1930s to the 1990s.

"He became the lead attorney," Hershman wrote, "in a small group of civil rights lawyers who carried out the legal strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: to demand public school equalization under segregation, and, building on that campaign, later to attack segregation itself."

Hill argued the Davis v. Prince Edward County school desegregation case, one of several that the Supreme Court heard and decided together in 1954 under the name Brown v. Board of Education when proclaiming mandatory racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

"After the 1954 ruling overturned segregation," Hershman wrote, "Hill became the central target in the white backlash to the decision, and he confronted the full resistance -- the massive resistance -- put up by the state government. At great personal sacrifice and ever possessing a quiet moral and physical courage, Hill never wavered in the fight against massive resistance until it was defeated, and all legal vestiges of the old separate-but-equal system were removed."

Hill was one of the leaders of a remarkable team of civil rights attorneys and civil rights advocates, white and black, male and female. Without all of them, the struggles of black Virginians to participate fully in American democracy could not have succeeded.

Hershman was no doubt correct when he wrote that Hill and Tucker and the other leaders of the civil rights movement "undoubtedly would have named as their candidates for the honor all those Virginians, of all races, women and men, who fought for civil rights -- who desegregated public schools and public accommodations, who registered people to vote, who marched and protested."

Col. William Corvello, a former state police superintendent, agreed when he wrote, "Among these improvements were those dealing with voting rights that saw elimination of poll taxes and other qualifiers intended to exclude blacks from voting. As a consequence, blacks hold elective offices across the political spectrum of our nation at local, state, and federal levels. When Douglas Wilder was elected governor of Virginia, he was the first black elected governor from any of the 50 states. An event impossible to envision occurring prior to the era of Oliver Hill -- and certainly made possible through his efforts and those of his associates."

Historian John Deal concurred and predicted, "His greatness, for both blacks and whites, will only increase in subsequent generations."

If only he had lived a few more months to see the recognition he deserved more in life. The greatest Virginian of the 20th century is freedom's beacon: Oliver White Hill Sr.