Dovey Mae Johnson Roundtree (April 17, 1914 – May 21, 2018) was 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.Barnes, Journey From Jim Crow, p. 99. That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (64 MCC 769 (1955)), which Dovey Roundtree brought before the ICC 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 convince the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce its rulings and end Jim Crow laws in public transportation."Petition for Rule-Making Filed by Attorney General on Behalf of the United States," ICC Docket No. MC-C-3358, May 29, 1961.
A protégé 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)Putney, When the Nation Was In Need, pp. 29–30. 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.Greason, Walter David, The A.M.E. Church Review, pp. 45-55. 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.Green, Joyce Hens, Oral History, Second Interview, September 16, 1999, pp. 65-67. 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,Chapman, William, "Crump Free in Murder on Towpath," The Washington Post, July 31, 1965, p. A1. a woman with romantic ties to President John F. Kennedy.Bradlee, A Good Life, pp. 267-268.
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.Warner, Honorable John, Congressional Record, April 13, 2000. She was the inspiration for actress Cicely Tyson's depiction of a maverick civil rights lawyer in the television series "Sweet Justice",Weinraub, Judith, "A Long Life of Sweet Justice", The Washington Post, February 4, 1995. 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.
Early life and influences Dovey Mae Johnson was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, 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, a minister in the A.M.E. Zion Church. Her grandmother weathered the death of her first husband, who was killed by the Ku Klux Klan. When Rachel Graham was a teenager, she ran from a white man who had reportedly tried to molest her. Enraged, he stomped on her feet, making sure she would never run again. Although Rachel Bryant Graham had only a third-grade education, she wielded great influence in Charlotte's black community. 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.Roundtree and McCabe, Mighty Justice.
It was Bethune to whom Roundtree turned to in 1941, as the threat of World War II generated unprecedented numbers of jobs for African Americans in the country's "defense preparedness" program. Resigning from 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.McCabe, Washingtonian, Putney, When the Nation Was in Need, Roundtree, Dear Sisters, Dear Daughters.
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 9981 in 1948.Putney, When the Nation Was in Need.
Legal career Roundtree first entered the civil rights arena in October 1945 in a nine-month postwar assignment with black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who was staging a national campaign to make the wartime Fair Employment Practice 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.Smith, Rebels in the Law. From 1947 to 1950, she immersed herself in the assault on school segregation being mounted by Thurgood Marshall and Howard Law professors James Nabrit Jr. and George E. C. Hayes which in 1954 culminated in the epochal Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.
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 Company (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. Dovey Roundtree's former Howard Law School professor, Frank Reeves, then head of the Washington DC office of the NAACP, referred Sarah Keys to Dovey Roundtree because of Roundtree's own experiences with bus segregation during her World War II WAC service. For Roundtree, the case became a personal mission. "It was as though I sat looking in a mirror, so strong was my sense of walking where Sarah Keys had walked," Roundtree recalled in her 2019 autobiography, Mighty Justice. The Keys case challenged the right of a private bus carrier to impose its Jim Crow laws on black passengers traveling across state lines.Barnes, Journey From Jim Crow.
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. Their complaint, along with the NAACP's companion train case, was rejected by ICC hearing examiner Isadore Freidson on their first pass. The case would have died at that point had it not been for Roundtree's outreach to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in Sarah Keys' Congressional district to protest the hearing examiner's ruling and demand a hearing by the full 11-man commission. Following Powell's intervention, the full hearing was granted, and Roundtree and Robertson were given 30 days to file exceptions. In those exceptions, they invoked both the commerce clause of the US Constitution as well as the Supreme Court's reasoning in Brown v. Board, handed down in May of that same year, and applied Brown explicitly to the area of public transportation. On November 7, 1955, in a historic ruling in which the ICC departed from its long history of adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruling, the Commission banned separate but equal for the first time in the field of interstate bus travel.Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow, McCabe, Washingtonian. In the Keys case, and in the 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.Barnes, McCabe.
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."Petition for Rule Making," Dept. of Justice, May 29, 1961. 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 negligence 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.Dunie, Morrey, The Washington Post.