Hill did not win re-election in the next election (1951), failing to make the last available seat by 44 votes, because controversy over his legal work discussed below had begun, and because Hill also supported an unpopular highway project. Civil rights pioneer As head of the Virginia branch's legal staff, which also included his law partner Spottswood W. Robinson III and a dozen others, Hill filed dozens of lawsuits over the state. They won over $50 million in improvements for black students and teachers. Hill believed schools could be the crux for desegregation, but he was also a realist, acknowledging that Southern techniques for "getting along" among races both caused whites to believe most blacks preferred segregation, when in fact they bitterly opposed it. An early case in the Virginia Supreme Court won equal transportation for black school children. In 1951, the team took up the cause of the African-American students at the segregated R.R. Moton High School in Farmville who had walked out of their dilapidated school. The subsequent lawsuit, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, later became one of the five cases decided under Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954. During the 1940s and 1950s, the safety of Hill's life and family were often threatened as a result of his legal work. Crank calls (many with threats) came all through the day and night until the family learned to take their telephone off the hook at night-time (much to the telephone company's displeasure, but then it also refused to trace the crank and threatening calls which had provoked that self-help). Hill's young son was not allowed to answer the telephone, and at one point in 1955 a cross was burned on the Hills' lawn. Nonetheless, Hill and his clients continued their legal battles to assert their civil rights. After the Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955, Virginia's dominant Byrd Organization adopted a policy known as massive resistance to avoid desegregation. A special legislative session in 1956 passed a legislative package known as the Stanley Plan. This included two special legislative committees with enhanced powers, and which came to harass the NAACP. It also permitted the governor (then Thomas B. Stanley, followed by J. Lindsay Almond)to close schools which desegregated, as well as provided tuition grant support of segregation academies set up to avoid the extant public