the Vice-President. When Milner was fired from his job for union activities, Tinsley became the state conference's President (and remained so for 30 years). However, the new general practice did not thrive in Roanoke, and he missed his wife, so Hill returned to Washington D.C. in June 1936. He and his college friend William T. Whitehead frequently took jobs as waiters, and also tried organizing waiters and cooks for the Congress of Industrial Organizations because the American Federation of Labor unions were white or segregated. After some meetings at Howard, Hill returned to Virginia in 1939, thinking to establish a law firm with J. Byron Hopkins (a class above Hill at Howard Law) and J. Thomas Hewin Jr. (whose father had an established practice in Richmond). Hill also traveled with Jesse Tinsley on NAACP errands and speaking assignments, and served the Virginia Teachers Association (because the Virginia Education Association only represented white teachers). He also met and worked some cases in outlying communities with Martin A. Martin of Danville. In 1942, Martin became the first African-American lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice's Trial Division, but he did not like his assignments and resigned a year later to work in Richmond with Hill and Spottswood W. Robinson III, forming Hill, Martin & Robinson at 623 N. Third Street in Richmond. In 1940, working with fellow attorneys Thurgood Marshall, William H. Hastie, and Leon A. Ransom, Hill won his first civil rights case. The decision in Alston v. School Board of Norfolk, Va., 112 F.2d 992 (4th Cir.), cert. denied 311 U.S. 693 (1940) gained pay equity for black teachers. The firm also worked to equalize school facilities and obtain bus transportation for black pupils. On Labor Day, 1942, Hill accompanied five schoolgirls and two fathers to two high schools in Sussex County, Virginia. The county had 23 one-, two- or three- room elementary schools (all lacking indoor plumbing) serving 1,902 children of African-American parents, but offered them education beyond the seventh grade only at a Training School in Waverly, Virginia (and no transportation). As of June 1942, Sussex County also had four new consolidated elementary and high schools for its 867 white students. The surprised principals of Jarrett High School and Stony Creek High School denied the African-American girls admission to their respective schools. Hill politely thanked them, left, and soon filed a lawsuit in the federal district courthouse in