"Today, the more I learn about segregation and the Jim Crow system in Virginia, the more I agree with the great Virginia civil rights lawyer Oliver W. Hill Sr., a law partner with Samuel Tucker. Hill found a better way to explain the "Virginia way of life" that helped form me. In 1985, he described life for southern African American citizens during the Jim Crow era: "Virginia and the whole South were police states. There isn't a question about that. Negroes didn't serve on juries... You saw no blacks in places like city hall, or public buildings, unless, maybe an elevator operator or janitor. And that's the way it was." If the Virginia of my youth was no democracy, if I call a plantation an enslaved labor farm, then I should also call segregated Virginia by its true name- a racial police state. To be clear, the South of my birth was no democracy."