Hill died peacefully at his home during breakfast, said Joseph Morrissey, a friend of the Hill family.

In 1954, he 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.

"He was among the vanguard in seeking equal opportunity for all individuals, and he was steadfast in his commitment to effect change. He will be missed," said L. Doug las Wilder of Virginia, who in 1989 became the nation's first elected black governor and was a confidant of Hill's. Wilder is now Richmond's mayor.

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

A lawsuit argued by Hill in 1951 on behalf of students protesting deplorable conditions at their high school for blacks in Farmville became one of five cases decided under Brown.

Those battles to end the Jim Crow era were dangerous ones for Hill and other civil rights leaders. Hill once received so many threats that he and his wife, Berensenia, would not allow their son to answer the telephone.

Nor did his battle for civil rights bring him wealth.

"We got very few fees for any of this," he said in a 1992 interview in The Richmond News Leader.

Hill never lost sight of the importance of the 1954 court ruling. Without it, he said in an interview in the Richmond Times-Dispatch this year, "I doubt (the Rev. Martin Luther) King would have gotten to first base."

Hill was born May 1, 1907, and his father left when Hill was an infant. His mother remarried, and Hill took the name of his stepfather. He moved with his family to Roanoke, where he spent much of his childhood.

Later, his family moved to Washington, where he graduated from high school and graduated second in his class from Howard University's law school in 1933. The top law graduate that year was his friend Thurgood Marshall.