Spottswood W. Robinson III and Oliver Hill in Court

NAACP attorneys Spottswood W. Robinson III (far left) and Oliver W. Hill (far right) flank George Leakes and Elaine Bowen, students from West Point who served as witnesses in a 1953 court case involving school segregation. Several Black parents were convicted of violating mandatory school attendance laws when they refused to send their children to the all-Black Hamilton-Holmes high school twenty miles from West Point. Robinson and Hill defended the parents in one of a series of public-school desegregation cases they took on in Virginia.