Justice Older Than the Law

     Dovey Mae Roundtree passed away quietly in Charlotte, NC on May 21, 2018 at the age of 104.  Dovey Roundtree was an African American civil rights activist, attorney and ordained minister, born in Charlotte, NC on April 17, 1914. Her father worked as a printer at a local AME Zion Church while her mother was a domestic and a seamstress.  Johnson attended Spellman College and taught briefly in South Carolina before moving to Washington, DC. Because of her college education, Mary McLeod Bethune selected her to be among the first forty African American women who trained as officers in the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.  Later, she entered Howard Law School where Thurgood Marshall was one of her instructors.
As an attorney, her most prominent case came in 1955. Sarah Louise Keys, an African American WAC private had been forced by a North Carolina bus driver to relinquish her seat to a white Marine. Roundtree took the complaint to the Interstate Commerce Commission which on November 7, 1955 ruled that segregated interstate bus travel was banned. The Sarah Keys vs. The Carolina Coach Company decision was hailed as a major breakthrough for the civil rights movement. However, it remained unenforced until US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy used it to support the Freedom Riders Campaign. On May 29, 1961, the Department of Justice ordered the enforcement of the ruling and put a permanent end to segregated interstate travel.  Later, in 1964, she became one of the best known criminal defense lawyers in Washington when she won a not guilty verdict for African American day laborer Ray Crump who had been wrongly accused of murdering a Georgetown socialite.
Her memoir states that “As a woman and a woman of color in an age when black lawyers had to leave the courthouse to use the bathroom, she dared to practice before the court of justice and was unflinching.” She turned her practice to defending the disenfranchised and poor blacks of D.C. and was known as a one-person legal aid society. Today we pay tribute to Dovey Roundtree. “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.”  Michelle Obama             

Winner of the Association of Black Women Historians' 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize
A new edition of Justice Older Than The Law: The Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree by Katie McCabe and Dovey Johnson Roundtree, will be released in 2019.