Ms. Dovey Johnson Roundtree, defense lawyer and civil rights warrior, dies at 104
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, defense lawyer and civil rights warrior, dies at 104
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Julius Winfield Robertson and Dovey Johnson Roundtree, center, at the Supreme Court in about 1955. (Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree/Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree)
By Harrison Smith May 21 at 9:48 PM Email the author
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, a Washington criminal defense lawyer and courtroom warrior for civil rights who played a critical early role in the desegregation of interstate bus travel and mentored several generations of black lawyers, died May 21 at an assisted-living facility in Charlotte. She was 104. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said Jerry L. Hunter, her cousin and law partner. In a career that spanned nearly half a century, Ms. Roundtree defended predominantly poor African American clients — as well as black churches, community groups and the occasional politician. She was, former Fisk University president Walter J. Leonard once told The Washington Post, “a legal-aid clinic before there were legal-aid clinics.”
Her best-known case involved the black day laborer accused in the 1964 killing of Georgetown socialite and painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, who reportedly had an affair with President John F. Kennedy. She won him an acquittal despite what initially appeared to be damning witness testimony. Ms. Roundtree’s handling of the high-profile legal matter was later praised by Robert S. Bennett, who observed the proceedings as a clerk for the judge and decades later represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Ms. Roundtree, Bennett recalled in his memoir “In the Ring” (2008), “had a motherly warmth” and a “low-key, casual style” that appealed “not only to the mind but also the heart and soul of the jurors.”
Dovey Johnson Roundtree. (Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree/Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree)
“It was as if she was pleading for her own son,” Bennett added, “not a guilty defendant.”
Interviewed for a book about the trial, “A Very Private Woman” (1998), by political reporter Nina Burleigh, Ms. Roundtree explained that the case had additional significance for her because the defendant, Raymond Crump Jr., was a black man accused of murdering a white woman.
. . . .
In a phone interview, Katie McCabe, a Washington journalist who co-wrote Ms. Roundtree’s 2009 autobiography, “Justice Older Than the Law,” said Ms. Roundtree “transformed the legal canvas in Washington” by demonstrating that a black lawyer could win major cases before white judges and predominantly white juries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/dovey-johnson-roundtree-defense-lawyer-and-civil-rights-warrior-dies-at-104/2018/05/21/fc5d5458-5d5c-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e4bc28008a4f
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Dovey Johnson Roundtree, a courtroom warrior for civil rights who also challenged segregationist practices when she was in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, died at the age of 104.
2:54 AM - 22 May 2018
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https://www.stripes.com/polopoly_fs/1.528327.1526977579!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_900/image.jpg
After her service in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, Dovey Johnson Roundtree enrolled at Howard University's law school on the G.I. Bill.
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Raised in the Jim Crow South
Dovey Mae Johnson was born April 17, 1914, in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she recalled once hiding under the kitchen table while the Klan thundered past in the night on horseback. Her mother was a seamstress. Her father, a printer for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, died in the influenza pandemic of 1919.
After his death, the family lived with Roundtree's maternal grandparents in a church parsonage, near the AME Zion church where her grandfather worked as a minister.
Soon after her 1938 graduation from historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, she moved to Washington to work as a research assistant for Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women.
She served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, where she challenged segregationist practices, such as "colored only" tables in the mess halls on base, according to The New York Times. The "colored only" signs were removed. She recruited other black servicewomen. While traveling in uniform on a recruiting trip in 1943, Roundtree was ordered to give up her seat on a bus to a white Marine in Miami. She was forced to leave the bus and threatened with arrest.
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https://www.stripes.com/news/dovey-johnson-roundtree-lawyer-who-broke-civil-rights-barriers-in-the-courtroom-and-the-military-dies-at-104-1.528319
Justice Older Than the Law: the Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree
Justice Older than the Law: the Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree tells the story of the fearless civil rights warrior who shattered Jim Crow in the World War II military and in the courtrooms of the Nation's Capital and led the vanguard of women ordained to the ministry. In a richly voiced first-person account written with National Magazine Award-winner Katie McCabe, Dovey Roundtree has created an intimate history of America that reads like a novel, capturing the sweep of nine tumultuous decades and a vision of justice that goes far beyond the law.
The product of an extraordinary ten-year collaboration between McCabe and Roundtree, the book illuminates both the story of the country's struggle for social justice and the personal journey of the woman First Lady Michelle Obama saluted as "a truly inspiring woman," a fighter who represents "our most prized ideals and principles." The Association of Black Women Historians selected Justice Older than the Law as the best publication on an African American woman in 2009 (Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize), praising the way the writers used the novel format to draw readers into history.
To follow Dovey Roundtree's journey from the poverty of Jim Crow North Carolina to the courtrooms of Washington, DC is to watch the entire history of the civil rights movement roll past. As a protege of the great black educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune, Roundtree became one of the first women to break the gender and the color barriers in the World War II military, recruiting hundreds of other black women in the Deep South for the newly formed Women's Army Corps, often at risk of her life. She entered Howard University Law School on the cusp of the historic assault on school segregation that would culminate in the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Inspired by such giants as Thurgood Marshall and James Madison Nabrit, Jr., she went on to carve out her own place in history.
In November 1955, one month before Rosa Parks ignited the protest movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roundtree and her law partner Julius Winfield Robertson wrested from the notoriously segregationist Interstate Commerce Commission a bus desegregation case that demolished the doctrine of 'separate but equal' in the field of interstate travel, just as the Brown case had done in the area of public education. That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, invoked by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at the height of mob violence in the South during the Freedom Riders' campaign of 1961, helped bring an end to Jim Crow in travel across state lines.
At a time when black attorneys had to leave the courthouses to use the bathrooms, Dovey Roundtree took on Washington's white legal establishment in behalf of black clients, and she prevailed. Even as she opened doors for black attorneys, both male and female, at the DC bar, Roundtree broke new ground in 1961 as one of the first women to be ordained to the ministry of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. From the pulpit of Allen Chapel AME Church, located in one of Washington's most violent neighborhoods, she launched the final battle of her life, the one she continues to fight today, the battle to save the next generation from what she calls "the demon of violence." Justice Older than the Law is more than an autobiography of a civil rights heroine, more than a simple account of race in America. It is an eloquent expression of a vision of justice older by far than the law, and it speaks movingly and urgently to our racially troubled times.
https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Older-Than-Law-Roundtree-ebook/dp/B003UNL6TI
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" Well done, good and faithful servant." Rest well, Ms. Dovey Johnson Roundtree. Now, I have another book to add to my birthday wish list!
Thanks for another great morning read, Niyad. I always look forward to your interesting posts. Peace and blessings to you and yours!