Dovey Johnson Roundtree
Encyclopedia
Dovey Johnson Roundtree is an African American
civil rights
activist, ordained minister, and attorney. Her 1955 victory before the Interstate Commerce Commission
in the first bus desegregation case to be brought before the ICC resulted in the only explicit repudiation of the separate but equal
doctrine in the field of interstate bus transportation by a court or federal administrative body. That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company
(64 MCC 769 (1955)), which Dovey Roundtree argued with her law partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson, was invoked by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
during the 1961 Freedom Riders' campaign in his successful battle to compel the Interstate Commerce Commission
to enforce its rulings and end Jim Crow in public transportation.
Roundtree was saluted by First Lady Michelle Obama
on the occasion of the release of her 2009 autobiography, Justice Older than the Law, which Roundtree co-authored with Washington journalist Katie McCabe and which won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. In a letter made public at a July 23, 2009 tribute to Roundtree at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial
at Arlington National Cemetery
, the First Lady cited Roundtree's historic contributions to the law, the military and the ministry, and stated: "It is on the shoulders of people like Dovey Johnson Roundtree that we stand today, and it is with her commitment to our core ideals that we will continue moving toward a better tomorrow."
A protege of black activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune
, Roundtree was selected by Bethune for the first class of African American women to be trained as officers in the newly-created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps
) during World War II
. In 1961 she became one of the first women to receive full ministerial status in the African Methodist Episcopal Church
, which had just begun ordaining women at a level beyond mere preachers in 1960. With her controversial admission to the all-white Women's Bar of the District of Columbia in 1962, she broke the color bar for minority women in the Washington legal community. In one of Washington's most sensational and widely-covered murder cases, United States v. Ray Crump, tried in the summer of 1965 on the eve of the Watts riots, Roundtree won acquittal for the black laborer accused of the murder of Georgetown
socialite (and former wife of a CIA
officer) Mary Pinchot Meyer
, a woman with romantic ties to President John F. Kennedy
.
The founding partner of the Washington, D.C.
law firm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Parker in 1970 following the death of her first law partner Julius Robertson in 1961, Roundtree was special consultant for legal affairs to the AME Church, and General Counsel to the National Council of Negro Women
. She was the inspiration for actress Cicely Tyson
's depiction of a maverick civil rights
lawyer in the television series "Sweet Justice", and the recipient, along with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
, of the American Bar Association
's 2000 Margaret Brent
Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.
, the second oldest of four daughters of James Eliot Johnson, a printer in the local offices of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
, and Lela Bryant Johnson, a seamstress and domestic. Following the death of her father in the influenza epidemic of 1919, Roundtree and her mother and sisters went to live with her maternal grandmother, Rachel Bryant Graham, and her husband, the Rev. Clyde L. Graham, an AME Zion Church minister. Though Rachel Graham had only a third-grade education, she wielded great influence in Charlotte's black community, and through her involvement in the colored women's club movement she formed a friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune
, who at that time traveled extensively through the South as head of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, the precursor to the National Council of Negro Women
. Bethune's vision inspired Roundtree to excel academically, rise above poverty and Jim Crow, target a medical career, and work her way through Spelman College
from 1934 to 1938, at the height of the Great Depression.
It was Bethune to whom Roundtree turned in 1941, as the threat of war generated unprecedented numbers of jobs for African Americans in the country's "defense preparedness" program. Resigning the South Carolina
teaching position she had taken up on college graduation in 1938, she sought out Bethune in Washington, D.C. for assistance in obtaining employment in the burgeoning defense industry. Bethune immediately tapped her for the select group of 40 African American women who were to become the first to train as officers in the newly created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.
, who was staging a national campaign to make the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) a permanent entity. Her FEPC involvement brought her into contact with the person who would inspire her to take on the law as her life's mission: Constitutional lawyer Pauli Murray
,an impassioned civil rights activist and legal academic who later founded the National Organization for Women
. Inspired by Murray's belief that the greatest instrument for social change was the law, Roundtree enrolled at Howard University School of Law
in the fall of 1947, one of only five women in her class. From 1947 to 1950, she immersed herself in the assault on school segregation being mounted by Thurgood Marshall
and Howard Law professors James Madison Nabrit, Jr. and George E.C. Hayes which in 1954 culminated in the epochal Supreme Court Brown decision (Brown v. Board of Education
347 US 483).
64 MCC 769 (1955). The case originated in a complaint by an African American WAC private named Sarah Louise Keys, who had been forced by a North Carolina
bus driver to yield her seat to a white Marine, just as Roundtree herself had been in 1943 while recruiting for the Army. The Keys case challenged the right of a private bus carrier to impose its Jim Crow laws on black passengers traveling across state lines.
When the matter was dismissed by the US District Court for the District of Columbia on jurisdictional grounds, Roundtree and Robertson took their complaint to the Interstate Commerce Commission
,the federal administrative body charged with the enforcement of the Interstate Commerce Act. Turned down by the Commission on their first pass, they filed exceptions, arguing that the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board, handed down in May of that same year, delegitimized segregation not only in public education, but in public transportation as well. On November 7, 1955, in a historic ruling in which the ICC departed from its long history of adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson
ruling (Plessy 163 US 537 (1896), the Commission banned separate but equal
for the first time in the field of interstate bus travel. In the Keys case, and in a companion railway case that the NAACP had filed shortly after Keys (NAACP v. St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company 297 ICC 335 (1955), the ICC broke with its precedent and ruled that the nondiscrimination language of the Interstate Commerce Act prohibited segregation itself.
Though hailed by the press as a historic breakthrough and a "symbol of a movement that cannot be held back," the Keys case lay dormant from 1955 to 1961, its intent largely blunted by the ICC commissioner who had dissented from the majority opinion, South Carolina
Democrat
J. Monroe Johnson. It was not until the summer of 1961, when the violence resulting from the Freedom Riders' campaign prompted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
to take action against the ICC that the impact of the Keys case was felt. On May 29, 1961, responding to the protests of civil rights leaders, Kennedy issued a Justice Department petition in which he cited Keys and the companion NAACP train case, along with the 1960 Supreme Court Boynton v. Virginia
ruling and called upon the ICC to enforce the ruling it had handed down itself in 1955. Under pressure from the Attorney General, the Commission at last acted upon its own rulings and in September 1961 put a permanent end to segregation in travel across state lines.
The sudden death of her partner Julius Robertson of a heart attack in November 1961 marked a turning point for Dovey Roundtree, who as an African American woman found herself a sole practitioner in a legal community still dominated by men. "At a time when a female lawyer of any race was regarded skeptically, I'd derived a significant measure of credibility from my association with Julius," she later wrote, adding that in the wake of Robertson's death, "there were times when I felt truly vulnerable." Sustained by her ordination into the ministry of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
on November 30, 1961, Dovey Roundtree went on to build a thriving law practice, working as a sole practitioner for nine years before founding a second law firm, Roundtree Knox Hunter and Parker, in 1970.
In 1962, she broke another barrier with her nomination for membership to the all-white Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia by attorney Joyce Hens Green
(later an Associate Judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit). The nomination precipitated a firestorm of controversy, with several of the Association's board members vehemently opposing Roundtree's nomination. Only when Green demanded a vote by the full membership was Roundtree admitted to the Women's Bar as its first black member.
that solidified her reputation in the Washington, D.C. legal community. For a fee of one dollar, Roundtree took on the defense of Ray Crump, Jr., accused of the execution-style shooting of Meyer as she took her daily walk along the C & O Canal. Crump, who had been found by police wandering along the towpath near the scene of the crime, was arrested on the word of an eyewitness who claimed Crump resembled the black man he had seen standing over Meyer's body moments after the murder. He had then been indicted without a preliminary hearing. Convinced that Crump's limited mental capacity rendered him incapable of perpetrating a murder of such stealth and meticulousness, Roundtree took on the United States government in a July 1965 trial in which the notoriety of the victim drew record crowds of lawyers, law students, and reporters to the United States District Court.
Against the elaborate circumstantial case presented by US Attorney Alfred Hantman and his legal team, Roundtree pitted a single fact: Crump's diminutive size. At five feet three and a half inches and 130 pounds, Roundtree argued, Crump was four to five inches shorter and at least 50 pounds lighter than the man described by the eyewitness. Stunning the court with the brevity and simplicity of her thirty-minute case, Roundtree called only three witnesses, each of whom testified to Crump's good character, and she presented but a single exhibit: Raymond Crump himself.
The not-guilty verdict in the case left permanently open to speculation the possibility of CIA involvement in Meyer's murder. It also cemented Roundtree's reputation among Washington trial lawyers and judges, and resulted in her appointment to high-profile murder cases, including the 1977 defense of John Griffin in a sensational retrial for his alleged role in the murder of a group of Hanafi Muslims at a DC temple.
Following her retirement to her home in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1996, Roundtree joined such distinguished black elders as John Hope Franklin
, Coretta Scott King
and Maya Angelou
in creating an oral history of her life for the Internet through the National Visionary Leadership Project, founded by activist Camille Cosby and journalist Renee Poussaint. Her 2004 interview with Poussaint appears on the Project's web site at
www.visionaryproject.org/roundtreedovey/
Roundtree's autobiography, Justice Older than the Law, written with National Magazine Award
winner Katie McCabe,http://www.justiceolderthanthelaw.com won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.http://www.abwh.org/awards.htm
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
activist, ordained minister, and attorney. Her 1955 victory before the Interstate Commerce Commission
Interstate Commerce Commission
The Interstate Commerce Commission was a regulatory body in the United States created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The agency's original purpose was to regulate railroads to ensure fair rates, to eliminate rate discrimination, and to regulate other aspects of common carriers, including...
in the first bus desegregation case to be brought before the ICC resulted in the only explicit repudiation of the separate but equal
Separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities was to...
doctrine in the field of interstate bus transportation by a court or federal administrative body. That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company
Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company
Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 64 MCC 769 is a landmark civil rights case in the United States in which the Interstate Commerce Commission, in response to a bus segregation complaint filed in 1953 by a Women's Army Corps private named Sarah Louise Keys, broke with its historic adherence to...
(64 MCC 769 (1955)), which Dovey Roundtree argued with her law partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson, was invoked by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy , also referred to by his initials RFK, was an American politician, a Democratic senator from New York, and a noted civil rights activist. An icon of modern American liberalism and member of the Kennedy family, he was a younger brother of President John F...
during the 1961 Freedom Riders' campaign in his successful battle to compel the Interstate Commerce Commission
Interstate Commerce Commission
The Interstate Commerce Commission was a regulatory body in the United States created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The agency's original purpose was to regulate railroads to ensure fair rates, to eliminate rate discrimination, and to regulate other aspects of common carriers, including...
to enforce its rulings and end Jim Crow in public transportation.
Roundtree was saluted by First Lady Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is the wife of the 44th and incumbent President of the United States, Barack Obama, and is the first African-American First Lady of the United States...
on the occasion of the release of her 2009 autobiography, Justice Older than the Law, which Roundtree co-authored with Washington journalist Katie McCabe and which won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. In a letter made public at a July 23, 2009 tribute to Roundtree at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial
Women in Military Service for America Memorial
The Women in Military Service for America Memorial is located at the Ceremonial Entrance to Arlington National Cemetery and honors all women who have served in the United States Armed Forces. New York architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, husband and wife, designed the memorial...
at Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia, is a military cemetery in the United States of America, established during the American Civil War on the grounds of Arlington House, formerly the estate of the family of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's wife Mary Anna Lee, a great...
, the First Lady cited Roundtree's historic contributions to the law, the military and the ministry, and stated: "It is on the shoulders of people like Dovey Johnson Roundtree that we stand today, and it is with her commitment to our core ideals that we will continue moving toward a better tomorrow."
A protege of black activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator and civil rights leader best known for starting a school for African American students in Daytona Beach, Florida, that eventually became Bethune-Cookman University and for being an advisor to President Franklin D...
, Roundtree was selected by Bethune for the first class of African American women to be trained as officers in the newly-created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps
Women's Army Corps
The Women's Army Corps was the women's branch of the US Army. It was created as an auxiliary unit, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps on 15 May 1942 by Public Law 554, and converted to full status as the WAC in 1943...
) during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. In 1961 she became one of the first women to receive full ministerial status in the African Methodist Episcopal Church
African Methodist Episcopal Church
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, usually called the A.M.E. Church, is a predominantly African American Methodist denomination based in the United States. It was founded by the Rev. Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1816 from several black Methodist congregations in the...
, which had just begun ordaining women at a level beyond mere preachers in 1960. With her controversial admission to the all-white Women's Bar of the District of Columbia in 1962, she broke the color bar for minority women in the Washington legal community. In one of Washington's most sensational and widely-covered murder cases, United States v. Ray Crump, tried in the summer of 1965 on the eve of the Watts riots, Roundtree won acquittal for the black laborer accused of the murder of Georgetown
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Georgetown is a neighborhood located in northwest Washington, D.C., situated along the Potomac River. Founded in 1751, the port of Georgetown predated the establishment of the federal district and the City of Washington by 40 years...
socialite (and former wife of a CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
officer) Mary Pinchot Meyer
Mary Pinchot Meyer
Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer was an American socialite, painter, former wife of Central Intelligence Agency official Cord Meyer and intimate friend of United States president John F. Kennedy, who was often noted for her desirable physique and social skills...
, a woman with romantic ties to President John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
.
The founding partner of the Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
law firm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Parker in 1970 following the death of her first law partner Julius Robertson in 1961, Roundtree was special consultant for legal affairs to the AME Church, and General Counsel to the National Council of Negro Women
National Council of Negro Women
The National Council of Negro Women is a non-profit organization with the mission to advance the opportunities and the quality of life for African American women, their families and communities. NCNW fulfills this mission through research, advocacy, national and community based services and...
. She was the inspiration for actress Cicely Tyson
Cicely Tyson
Cicely Tyson is an American actress. A successful stage actress, Tyson is also known for her Oscar-nominated role in the film Sounder and the television movies The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Roots....
's depiction of a maverick civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
lawyer in the television series "Sweet Justice", and the recipient, along with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor is an American jurist who was the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States. She served as an Associate Justice from 1981 until her retirement from the Court in 2006. O'Connor was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981...
, of the American Bar Association
American Bar Association
The American Bar Association , founded August 21, 1878, is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. The ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation...
's 2000 Margaret Brent
Margaret Brent
Margaret Brent , an English immigrant to the Colony of Maryland, was the first woman in the English North American colonies to appear before a court of the Common Law. She was a significant founding settler in the early histories of the colonies of Maryland and Virginia...
Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.
Early life and the influences
Roundtree was born Dovey Mae Johnson in Charlotte, North CarolinaCharlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the seat of Mecklenburg County. In 2010, Charlotte's population according to the US Census Bureau was 731,424, making it the 17th largest city in the United States based on population. The Charlotte metropolitan area had a 2009...
, the second oldest of four daughters of James Eliot Johnson, a printer in the local offices of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or AME Zion Church, is a historically African-American Christian denomination. It was officially formed in 1821, but operated for a number of years before then....
, and Lela Bryant Johnson, a seamstress and domestic. Following the death of her father in the influenza epidemic of 1919, Roundtree and her mother and sisters went to live with her maternal grandmother, Rachel Bryant Graham, and her husband, the Rev. Clyde L. Graham, an AME Zion Church minister. Though Rachel Graham had only a third-grade education, she wielded great influence in Charlotte's black community, and through her involvement in the colored women's club movement she formed a friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator and civil rights leader best known for starting a school for African American students in Daytona Beach, Florida, that eventually became Bethune-Cookman University and for being an advisor to President Franklin D...
, who at that time traveled extensively through the South as head of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, the precursor to the National Council of Negro Women
National Council of Negro Women
The National Council of Negro Women is a non-profit organization with the mission to advance the opportunities and the quality of life for African American women, their families and communities. NCNW fulfills this mission through research, advocacy, national and community based services and...
. Bethune's vision inspired Roundtree to excel academically, rise above poverty and Jim Crow, target a medical career, and work her way through Spelman College
Spelman College
Spelman College is a four-year liberal arts women's college located in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The college is part of the Atlanta University Center academic consortium in Atlanta. Founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, Spelman was the first historically black female...
from 1934 to 1938, at the height of the Great Depression.
It was Bethune to whom Roundtree turned in 1941, as the threat of war generated unprecedented numbers of jobs for African Americans in the country's "defense preparedness" program. Resigning the South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
teaching position she had taken up on college graduation in 1938, she sought out Bethune in Washington, D.C. for assistance in obtaining employment in the burgeoning defense industry. Bethune immediately tapped her for the select group of 40 African American women who were to become the first to train as officers in the newly created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.
Army service
Roundtree publicly challenged the racial discrimination she confronted in the rigidly segregated Army even as she recruited other African American women for the WAAC on assignment in the Deep South. Traveling in uniform in the winter of 1943 without Army protection, she was evicted from a Miami bus and forced under threat of arrest to yield her seat to a white Marine. She persisted in her recruiting, bringing African American women into the Corps in such numbers that although the women served in segregated units, the groundwork was laid for an interracial Army four years before President Harry Truman mandated the desegregation of the military by executive order in 1948.Legal career
Roundtree first entered the civil rights arena in October 1945 in a nine-month postwar assignment with black labor leader A. Philip RandolphA. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
, who was staging a national campaign to make the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) a permanent entity. Her FEPC involvement brought her into contact with the person who would inspire her to take on the law as her life's mission: Constitutional lawyer Pauli Murray
Pauli Murray
The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline Murray was an American civil rights advocate, women's rights activist and feminist, lawyer, writer, poet, teacher, and ordained priest....
,an impassioned civil rights activist and legal academic who later founded the National Organization for Women
National Organization for Women
The National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1966 and has a membership of 500,000 contributing members. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S...
. Inspired by Murray's belief that the greatest instrument for social change was the law, Roundtree enrolled at Howard University School of Law
Howard University School of Law
Howard University School of Law is one of the professional graduate schools of Howard University. Located in Washington, D.C., it is one the oldest law schools in the country and the oldest historically black college or university law school in the United States...
in the fall of 1947, one of only five women in her class. From 1947 to 1950, she immersed herself in the assault on school segregation being mounted by Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from October 1967 until October 1991...
and Howard Law professors James Madison Nabrit, Jr. and George E.C. Hayes which in 1954 culminated in the epochal Supreme Court Brown decision (Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
347 US 483).
Desegregating bus travel
In 1952, during her first year of legal practice, Roundtree, along with her partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson, took on a bus desegregation case that would make legal history: Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach CompanySarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company
Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 64 MCC 769 is a landmark civil rights case in the United States in which the Interstate Commerce Commission, in response to a bus segregation complaint filed in 1953 by a Women's Army Corps private named Sarah Louise Keys, broke with its historic adherence to...
64 MCC 769 (1955). The case originated in a complaint by an African American WAC private named Sarah Louise Keys, who had been forced by a North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
bus driver to yield her seat to a white Marine, just as Roundtree herself had been in 1943 while recruiting for the Army. The Keys case challenged the right of a private bus carrier to impose its Jim Crow laws on black passengers traveling across state lines.
When the matter was dismissed by the US District Court for the District of Columbia on jurisdictional grounds, Roundtree and Robertson took their complaint to the Interstate Commerce Commission
Interstate Commerce Commission
The Interstate Commerce Commission was a regulatory body in the United States created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The agency's original purpose was to regulate railroads to ensure fair rates, to eliminate rate discrimination, and to regulate other aspects of common carriers, including...
,the federal administrative body charged with the enforcement of the Interstate Commerce Act. Turned down by the Commission on their first pass, they filed exceptions, arguing that the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board, handed down in May of that same year, delegitimized segregation not only in public education, but in public transportation as well. On November 7, 1955, in a historic ruling in which the ICC departed from its long history of adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 , is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses , under the doctrine of "separate but equal".The decision was handed...
ruling (Plessy 163 US 537 (1896), the Commission banned separate but equal
Separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities was to...
for the first time in the field of interstate bus travel. In the Keys case, and in a companion railway case that the NAACP had filed shortly after Keys (NAACP v. St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company 297 ICC 335 (1955), the ICC broke with its precedent and ruled that the nondiscrimination language of the Interstate Commerce Act prohibited segregation itself.
Though hailed by the press as a historic breakthrough and a "symbol of a movement that cannot be held back," the Keys case lay dormant from 1955 to 1961, its intent largely blunted by the ICC commissioner who had dissented from the majority opinion, South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
Democrat
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
J. Monroe Johnson. It was not until the summer of 1961, when the violence resulting from the Freedom Riders' campaign prompted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy , also referred to by his initials RFK, was an American politician, a Democratic senator from New York, and a noted civil rights activist. An icon of modern American liberalism and member of the Kennedy family, he was a younger brother of President John F...
to take action against the ICC that the impact of the Keys case was felt. On May 29, 1961, responding to the protests of civil rights leaders, Kennedy issued a Justice Department petition in which he cited Keys and the companion NAACP train case, along with the 1960 Supreme Court Boynton v. Virginia
Boynton v. Virginia
Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. The case overturned a judgment convicting an African American law student for trespassing by being in a restaurant in a bus terminal which was "whites only." It held that racial segregation in public...
ruling and called upon the ICC to enforce the ruling it had handed down itself in 1955. Under pressure from the Attorney General, the Commission at last acted upon its own rulings and in September 1961 put a permanent end to segregation in travel across state lines.
Washington, D.C.
While fighting the civil rights battle on the national level, Roundtree and her partner Julius Robertson undertook to represent black clients in civil and criminal matters in the segregated courtrooms of Washington, DC. At a time when black lawyers had to leave the courthouses to use the bathrooms and black clients were routinely referred to white attorneys in order to maximize their chances in court, Roundtree and Robertson broke with tradition. They pressed the cases of black clients before white judges and juries and prevailed, winning sizeable recoveries in accident and negligent cases. Their 1957 victory in a negligence case against a Washington, DC psychiatric facility, which resulted in the maximum recovery allowable under the Federal Tort Claims Act at that time, was widely regarded as a turning point not only for black clients in the Nation's Capital, but for black attorneys as well.The sudden death of her partner Julius Robertson of a heart attack in November 1961 marked a turning point for Dovey Roundtree, who as an African American woman found herself a sole practitioner in a legal community still dominated by men. "At a time when a female lawyer of any race was regarded skeptically, I'd derived a significant measure of credibility from my association with Julius," she later wrote, adding that in the wake of Robertson's death, "there were times when I felt truly vulnerable." Sustained by her ordination into the ministry of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
African Methodist Episcopal Church
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, usually called the A.M.E. Church, is a predominantly African American Methodist denomination based in the United States. It was founded by the Rev. Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1816 from several black Methodist congregations in the...
on November 30, 1961, Dovey Roundtree went on to build a thriving law practice, working as a sole practitioner for nine years before founding a second law firm, Roundtree Knox Hunter and Parker, in 1970.
In 1962, she broke another barrier with her nomination for membership to the all-white Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia by attorney Joyce Hens Green
Joyce Hens Green
Judge Joyce Hens Green is a Senior United States District Court Judge for the District of Columbia.-Childhood:Green was born in 1928 in New York City. Her father was a psychiatrist and her mother was a homemaker. She had one brother...
(later an Associate Judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit). The nomination precipitated a firestorm of controversy, with several of the Association's board members vehemently opposing Roundtree's nomination. Only when Green demanded a vote by the full membership was Roundtree admitted to the Women's Bar as its first black member.
Ray Crump
It was Roundtree's successful defense of the black laborer accused of the 1964 murder of alleged Kennedy mistress Mary Pinchot MeyerMary Pinchot Meyer
Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer was an American socialite, painter, former wife of Central Intelligence Agency official Cord Meyer and intimate friend of United States president John F. Kennedy, who was often noted for her desirable physique and social skills...
that solidified her reputation in the Washington, D.C. legal community. For a fee of one dollar, Roundtree took on the defense of Ray Crump, Jr., accused of the execution-style shooting of Meyer as she took her daily walk along the C & O Canal. Crump, who had been found by police wandering along the towpath near the scene of the crime, was arrested on the word of an eyewitness who claimed Crump resembled the black man he had seen standing over Meyer's body moments after the murder. He had then been indicted without a preliminary hearing. Convinced that Crump's limited mental capacity rendered him incapable of perpetrating a murder of such stealth and meticulousness, Roundtree took on the United States government in a July 1965 trial in which the notoriety of the victim drew record crowds of lawyers, law students, and reporters to the United States District Court.
Against the elaborate circumstantial case presented by US Attorney Alfred Hantman and his legal team, Roundtree pitted a single fact: Crump's diminutive size. At five feet three and a half inches and 130 pounds, Roundtree argued, Crump was four to five inches shorter and at least 50 pounds lighter than the man described by the eyewitness. Stunning the court with the brevity and simplicity of her thirty-minute case, Roundtree called only three witnesses, each of whom testified to Crump's good character, and she presented but a single exhibit: Raymond Crump himself.
The not-guilty verdict in the case left permanently open to speculation the possibility of CIA involvement in Meyer's murder. It also cemented Roundtree's reputation among Washington trial lawyers and judges, and resulted in her appointment to high-profile murder cases, including the 1977 defense of John Griffin in a sensational retrial for his alleged role in the murder of a group of Hanafi Muslims at a DC temple.
Advocacy for children and the family
In the latter years of her practice, Roundtree forged a unique role for herself, melding her ministerial duties at Washington's Allen Chapel AME Church, located in one of the city's most violent neighborhoods, with her legal practice, concentrating her focus on family and ecumenical law. Through religious organizations and legal groups, she became a public advocate for the welfare of young children, who she believed were imperiled by societal violence and the disintegration of the family. She continued in this role following her retirement from active legal practice in 1996.Awards and honors
Roundtree has been honored by local and national bar associations and legal and religious institutions. She received the 1995 Distinguished Alumna Award from the Howard Law Alumni Of Greater Washington, the 1995 National Bar Association Charlotte E. Ray Award, the 1996 Spirit of Spelman College Founder's Day Award, the American Bar Association's 2000 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, the 2004 Living Legacy Award from the Howard University School of Divinity, and the 2006 Award of Excellence from the Charlotte, North Carolina Chapter of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund.Following her retirement to her home in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1996, Roundtree joined such distinguished black elders as John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin was a United States historian and past president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and...
, Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader. The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King helped lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.Mrs...
and Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou is an American author and poet who has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer" by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly...
in creating an oral history of her life for the Internet through the National Visionary Leadership Project, founded by activist Camille Cosby and journalist Renee Poussaint. Her 2004 interview with Poussaint appears on the Project's web site at
www.visionaryproject.org/roundtreedovey/
Roundtree's autobiography, Justice Older than the Law, written with National Magazine Award
National Magazine Award
The National Magazine Awards are a series of US awards that honor excellence in the magazine industry. They are administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City...
winner Katie McCabe,http://www.justiceolderthanthelaw.com won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.http://www.abwh.org/awards.htm