Style Weekly
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Hill's "Homegoing"
by Amy Biegelsen
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Among the roughly 2,000 participants at Oliver White Hill Sr.'s memorial service Aug. 12, the term "homegoing" was often used to describe the ceremony honoring his life. The civil rights leader, who died Aug. 5 at 100 years old, is best remembered for his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that decreed the desegregation of schools. Hitting on the same theme, Gov. Tim Kaine noted in his eulogy that holding the ceremony at the Greater Richmond Convention Center was fitting, since the back wall of the building runs along the block where Hill's old law firm, Hill, Tucker & Marsh, once had its offices.
Pictured here (background, left to right) are former Virginia governors Gerald Baliles, Chuck Robb and Jim Gilmore (in profile). Others who paid their respects included (front row from left): Virginia ABC Board Commissioner and Oliver W. Hill Foundation President Esther H. Vassar; former Hill law partner and State Sen. Henry Marsh; Secretary of Public Safety John Marshall, the son of late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; and former President and Director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Elaine R. Jones. s
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