Robert H. Hamill earned degrees from Northwestern University and Yale University. He served for three years as the director of the Wesley Foundation at the University of Iowa before becoming pastor of the Ottawa St. Methodist Church of Joliet. He was later employed as the dean of the chapel at Boston University in the sixties.
Hamill wrote a sermon titled “Black Power and White Response” which provided background for University of North Carolina at Greensboro Chancellor James S. Ferguson's position paper presented at a Methodist race relations conference in 1970.