← The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
Dovey Johnson Roundtree
02:03:21
Dovey Johnson Roundtree grew up in the Jim Crow era South and carried her grandmother’s philosophy of "find a way or make one” as her armor into every challenge she faced. She became one of the first Black women in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II, then earned her law degree at Howard and built dual careers as a civil‑rights attorney and as a minister in the AME church. In 1955, she helped win a landmark bus‑desegregation case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was a quiet but powerful blow to the concept of “separate but equal.” She spent decades fighting for justice in Washington, D.C., and lived to 104, leaving behind a legacy of unshakable purpose and inspiration for future generations.
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- [00:00]
Susan
In case you missed it, we just wanted to give you a reminder that we have two trips in the latter part of the year that have opened for ticket sales. In August we are taking a trip through the Loire Valley to meet up with the likes of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Catherine de Medici. And in October we return to Italy where we will eat our weight in gelato. Very important and visit with Catherine de Medici again. That lady really got around.
- [00:27]
Beckett
Visit Like Minds Travel. Click on Group Tours for information and to register. We hope to see you there. Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.
- [00:42]
Susan
And Here is your 30 second summary. Dovey Johnson Roundtree grew up in the Jim Crow era South and carried her grandmother's findaway spirit as armor into every challenge she faced. She she became one of the first black women in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II, then earned her law degree at Howard and built dual careers as a civil rights attorney and as a minister in the AME Church. She helped win a landmark bus desegregation case in 1955, a quiet but powerful blow to the concept of separate but equal. She spent decades fighting for justice in Washington, D.C. and lived to 104, leaving behind a legacy of unshakable purpose, purpose and inspiration for future generations. The End let's talk about Dovey Johnson Roundtree.
- [01:36]
Beckett
But first, let's drop her into history. In 1934, as Adolf Hitler was rapidly deepening his authoritarian and dictatorial powers, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York opened as a venue for African American artists. The first US High school driver's education class began in State College, Pennsylvania. Five year old Shirley Temple appeared in her first feature film, Stand up and Cheer and Donald Duck also made his movie premiere in a film called the Wise Little hen. Hall number 534 got a name change and was launched as the RMS Queen Mary. Her final voyage would be 33 years later when in 1967 she would be docked in California and to become a hotel where you can still stay. The first identical quintuplets to survive infancy, the Dionne Quince, Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, Shirley MacLaine, Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Brigitte Bardot and my mom were all born. Scientist Marie Curie, suffragist Kate Sheppard and Alice in Wonderland's first audience and inspiration, Alice Liddell, all died. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were married and in 1934 Dovey Johnson fulfilled one of the dreams that would change her life and began college.
- [03:04]
Susan
Dovey Mary Magdalene Johnson was born on April 17, 1914 in Charlotte, North Carolina, the second of the four daughters of James Johnson and Lela Bryant Johnson. Papa was tall and handsome and supremely intelligent with a spirit to fill the room. He worked in offices of the local chapter of the AME Church and taught Sunday school. He had intended to be a minister. He thought it was the highest calling a man could adopt. Mama, beautiful, proud, also supremely intelligent, had a tragedy in her life. Her actual father, during her childhood, had run afoul of the local chapter of the KKK and was forced to flee without his family. But the KKK caught and murdered him, leaving Mama and her two brothers without a father. And Grandma a widow with very small children. She looks like she supported them by domestic work, probably based on future events, laundry. I'm not entirely certain how they survived. But later in Mama's childhood, Grandma married Clyde Graham. No relation, as far as I know, a minister in the AME Church. I'm looking for evidence that Mama had any sort of education, and I'm really not seeing that she did. They didn't have real stability until grandmama married this second husband. In fact, for a while they were itinerants because he got jobs from place to place. And that is not conducive to a through line on education.
- [04:47]
Beckett
No, not at all. But Pastor Clyde was an itinerant preacher. That was his job. That's you go from one church to another. And that's what they did for a while until they were able to settle down with a permanent position for him as the pastor at Charlotte, North Carolina's Stonewall African Methodist Episcopal Church. And the family quickly became a part of the community. As a matter of fact, they were the center of it and not much time at all. They lived in the parsonage. And if Layla was going to get any education, this is when she's going to get it because they aren't moving around from, you know, from place to place. I did find references that grandma Rachel had about a third grade level education, which given her background, I found hard to believe. But I can't help but think that Laila had a little bit more than that just based on the importance of education for her children. When Laila was 21 in 1913, Lela married 38 year old James Elliot Johnson. He was a printer at the AME Publishing and he also was a church worker at Leila's new Father's church in Charlotte. So I'm guessing that's where they met. There's no stories about how they met. Or anything, but it was a tight community, so I'm sure that's how they met.
- [06:06]
Susan
Technically. Davi's sister, the eldest daughter, Beatrice, was a half sister. Papa had been widowed with a child when he and Mama married. This seems to be quite a love match.
- [06:18]
Beckett
Oh, no argument at all. And in the same way that Grandma Rachel, Layla's mother, and her new husband had just become a family, you know, a tight family unit. That was the same situation with Beatrice. She was a sister, and I actually referred to her as the sister throughout the whole thing because that's how Dovey looked at her. She didn't count halves.
- [06:40]
Susan
She was a sister.
- [06:41]
Beckett
Yeah.
- [06:41]
Susan
There were three more daughters in quick succession. Tragically, when dovey was only 5 years old, Papa died, joining about 700,000 other Americans who perished in the influenza epidemic after World War I. You might know it as the Spanish flu.
- [07:00]
Beckett
And every time we bring up the Spanish Flu, I feel it is my responsibility to say that it did not originate in Spain. Spain was neutral in World War I. But Spain also didn't have any embargoes on journalists, so they were able to report on the deaths that were from this influenza. And to be perfectly honest, as far as I can tell, the very first reported case was in Kansas, United States. So why isn't it called the Kansas Flu? I don't know. It's estimated that 40% of the world's population contracted this influenza in just a year and a half. In addition to Dovey's father, this influenza, in just a year and a half, half killed 20 to 50 million people.
- [07:45]
Susan
Mama, of course, was plunged into the deepest of depressions. Grandma Rachel came and got the entire little family and brought them home to her house at 905 East Boundary street, technically the parsonage for the AME church. Grandma battled the sadness with food, music, love, praying and hard work. Grandma Rachel was a force of nature. She dragged. Dragged that little family out of the abyss. When the KKK was rampaging one night outside with their torches and their yelling, Grandma Rachel stood guard on the porch with a broom. The bravery of this person who'd already suffered so much in her history. She'd been through a lot.
- [08:33]
Beckett
Grandma Rachel had been born to formerly enslaved parents. The father still worked on the farm where he had been enslaved. And as a young teenager, the former enslaver of her father thought he would have his way with her and physically assaulted her. Now, she fought back and was able to run away from him, but in the process, he had stomped on her feet and broken them. So Badly that they never healed. And they were a physical pain that she had every day for the rest of her life. And this is a woman who was on her feet. She worked not only as a laundress,
- [09:15]
Susan
but she was involved.
- [09:16]
Beckett
Involved in so many church organizations, so many women's organizations. She really was one of the centers of the community. She would be up at the sunrise, she would make lye soap, she would make herbal medicines. She would have gatherings of women from the church in her backyard. She was on her feet all day. And at the end of the day, she would soak her feet and Dovey would rub them, but it did not ever stop hurting.
- [09:46]
Susan
His rationale of crushing her feet with his boots was that how dare she run? And he would make sure she could never run again. No one was ever prosecuted for that. So this woman who endured that, who lost her husband to violence and fought to survive, was now a lantern in the darkness in yet another broken time in history. And everyone in the neighborhood came to her for advice, for remedies, for prayers, or sometimes a much needed talking to.
- [10:15]
Beckett
Right.
- [10:16]
Susan
She was. She was good about scolding people in a loving way.
- [10:20]
Beckett
Yes. While their community was very tight and took care of each other, it was just an island in the big world of the Jim Crow South. Just outside their community is where all this horrible things were happening, including one day. It started out so wonderful. You know, remember when you were a kid and your grandma wanted to take you on errands and it was such an honor, and Grandma Rachel asked Dovey to go with her. And Dovey was so excited. And they got on the trolley and sat down, and the conductor yelled a slur at Dovey through her grandmother. You know, move that child. I'm paraphrasing. And Grandma Rachel just stiffened, pulled the cord to stop the trolley, and they got off, walked into town, ran the errands and walked back. Charlie's passing them the whole time. Because she was not going to put her granddaughter on that trolley again and face that ugliness. What Dovey's takeaway from that later in life was that her grandmother was, quote, powerful as she was, could not protect me from the thing she most hated.
- [11:30]
Susan
So Grandma and Grandpa and Mama, as she recovered, gave the children the stability that they needed. And one by one, as they got old enough, they began to go to the local school, the Myers Street Elementary School. Education was the key. They were not alone in thinking this higher education was the way up and out for African Americans. We've talked about that in many episodes before and the family spared no expense and no effort, you know, to scrape together money for school clothes, shoes, books, supplies. Grandpa ran a store in town and I'm convinced that most of the profits went straight into the children's future. Grandpa actually had made it to high school, but as we have said, Grandma only made it to third grade. And that was not going to happen to these children.
- [12:20]
Beckett
No. He scraped up enough money to buy the kids a set of encyclopedias, one volume at a time. And Dovey, later in life thought back at her childhood and said she was simply a book kid. She said she had books and papers and she'd had them all her life. And when she was a child, her grandfather would bring home cigar boxes and she would fill the cigar boxes with her writings as a child. Just write, write, write, stack, stack, stack, store, store, store. That's the memory that she has of her childhood.
- [12:55]
Susan
You know, we talked about this in the Grandma Moses and you know what the Charlotte Bronte episode about how important the availability of blank paper is.
- [13:05]
Beckett
Yes, yes.
- [13:06]
Susan
In childhood for your development.
- [13:08]
Beckett
Yeah. And not only is she writing, but she's speaking. She joked later in life that her mother told her that she made her first speech where she got a round of applause at 3.
- [13:22]
Susan
You know, you bend your twig one way. That's right when you're a little kid and that's the way that you're going to go. Well, Grandma took in white ladies laundry and Mama went to work as a maid for one of the richest white families in Charlotte. And not only that, her mother would go after dinner off to night classes to learn tailoring and fine sewing. Oldest daughter Bea taught everyone to read. And I did too. As the oldest daughter, I taught every single one of those children how to read. Yes.
- [13:51]
Beckett
Oh my goodness, I love that.
- [13:53]
Susan
All my brothers taught me how to
- [13:55]
Beckett
do is ride a bike. Maybe. I don't know. I was the oldest by five minutes, so I guess it doesn't. It's not the same situation, is it? I'll be quiet now.
- [14:04]
Susan
Well, speaking of bending your twig, you know that'll come up later in Bea's life too. Well, Grandma Rachel was connected through all these women's organizations that she belonged to that typically would cross class and income lines. She was connected with the great Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, who we have covered
- [14:25]
Beckett
in episode 223 and 224 because she had such a big life. And we run across her in the stories of other people because she was so well connected. And how wonderful for Dovey that this was a woman that her grandmother in, you know, in Charlotte, North Carolina, was also connected to.
- [14:46]
Susan
We wish that you would go listen to those episodes, but in the interest of not interrupting the current narrative, let's just tell you that Dr. Bethune created an educational institution out of nothing but force of will and hard work. She defied the Klan and the political machines of Jim Crow in the south to enable African Americans to exercise their right to vote. So that woman is in their house right now. This person who would become greater still, by the way, than what we have right now was on a first name basis with Grandma Duffy was one degree of separation from one of the most famous African American activists in the country. Oh, just sitting here on your grandma's couch. How was school today? It's madness. Madness, isn't it? That like, the most famous activist in the country is just hanging out with your grandma, calling each other by first names.
- [15:41]
Beckett
Right?
- [15:41]
Susan
Oh, Rachel. Oh, Mary.
- [15:43]
Beckett
Right.
- [15:44]
Susan
Grandma was the inspiration at home, and Dr. Bethune was the lantern for the outside world. That's what I would say.
- [15:50]
Beckett
Oh, I would say that's a lovely way to put it.
- [15:53]
Susan
And we just wanted to mention Dr. Bethune here because she appears later in our story. But Debbie first met her in the living room when she was only 10 years old. I am in sleep debt again.
- [16:14]
Beckett
Oh, no.
- [16:16]
Susan
So much sleep debt. I mean, I always joke that in my 20s, I had no sleep because I was out. In my 30s, I had no sleep because I had a baby. And now I have no sleep because of the history Tigs podcast. And it's a good thing, but it's also really rough for one's well being. My mind is going a thousand miles a minute. It's a little hard to unwind, to relax at night. And that is why the fortuitous delivery of this osea's dream collection is about to change my life.
- [16:46]
Beckett
I do use some of their dream collection now on my face, the Dream Night serum goes on so easily and it absorbs, like, wicked fast. And then the Dream night cream goes over that and I just go to bed and it tells me, oh, Susan, you're going to bed now. It's part of my routine. But what just came in the mail today is the dream Bioretinol body serum. Yeah, it's not bedtime yet, so I'll tell you tomorrow how it goes. But I did smell it.
- [17:16]
Susan
The scent of the dream collection, I will tell you, is like serenity. Yeah, that's a word that really sounds like what it means. Serenity doesn't it yeah, it does. In addition, it visibly firms and improves elasticity and smooths the look of lines and wrinkles on the body with less potential for irritation than you get with a traditional retinol. The thing I'm most excited about is it reduces the signs of stress on your skin and the dryness all over is something that I am really fighting right now.
- [17:53]
Beckett
So give your skin a rest with clean, clinically tested skin care from osea.
- [17:58]
Susan
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- [18:10]
Beckett
s e a malibu.com.
- [18:22]
Susan
The whole family worked together to send oldest daughter Bea off to teachers College. After all, she'd had years of experience teaching those ding dongs to read. It was only natural, that is how her twig had been bent. She headed off to Winston Salem College, which was the only black college that awarded a BA degree at this time. So it was a natural fit.
- [18:44]
Beckett
Myers street elementary, the school that Dovey and her sisters went to and then up to Second Ward High School, was the second school now because of a Supreme Court decision long before Dovey was even born. Legally, the government had to provide separate but equal schooling for both black students and white students.
- [19:05]
Susan
Practically speaking. However, as we know, what that meant though, was that African American students often faced extremely poor facilities. The schools had been broken down. The books were discards, in some cases from the white school if they appeared at all. All the equipment was substandard, even the buildings.
- [19:28]
Beckett
Meyer Street Elementary School, the building itself had begun life as a tobacco barn.
- [19:34]
Susan
Ironically, though, the facilities and the supplies were often inferior. African American students, as a rule, got better teachers due to the lack of reasonable opportunities for the increasing number of university educated African Americans. A lot of times they became teachers to bring up the next generation. And you know, we talk about this all the time how Laura Ingalls Wilder got a teacher certificate at 15, right when the guy gave her the exam in the dining room, you know, on the fly. It was not even considered. But like some of these people that were teaching, African American elementary school students had master's degrees and were well versed in educational philosophy.
- [20:20]
Beckett
So while teaching in buildings that used to be tobacco barns, both Dovey's elementary and high school have long been demolished. The high school disappeared in the 70s, although they did leave one building for like an auditorium and for sporting events. However, I was so excited to read that because of proud alumni, they pooled their resources and Construction began just last year on a new Second Ward High School. So in Charlotte, they're going to be getting a brand new Second Ward High School. The old one was the Tigers. So go Tigers until I know better.
- [20:58]
Susan
Well, family attention turned to Duffy, who was the next in line. And one of Dovey's teachers from Second Ward High School had come home with her the year she was 14. This teacher, her name's Edith Wimbish, came from a very prominent family in Atlanta. It was an honor to have her in the house. In fact, the community viewed it as an honor that she would, quote, deign to come teach in their humble community at all. It was a big deal that this teacher took the time to come home with Dovey and inform her parents that Dovey had the intellectual firepower necessary to get into Spelman College in Atlanta. That was a giant big deal. That is. I mean, that is aiming high. They called Spelman the Black Vassar. I mean, that's as high as you're gonna go. It was a women's college. It had started in the basement of the Friendship Baptist Church in 1881 as an institution called the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. And three years later, due to a generous gift by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and his wife, Laura Spellman Rockefeller, the institution was able to acres of land that had been formerly held by the Union army during the Civil War. And they immediately started construction of one of the finest institutes of learning in the country. It was named after the wife's family, Laura Spelman. Rockefeller was her name. She and her parents had run a stop in the Underground Railroad during the war, and they were fervent abolitionists. And it seemed only natural that this new institution be named for them. So that's where you get Spelman College.
- [22:48]
Beckett
When I had heard I was reading about Spelman, I was like, wasn't there a TV show that was set there? No, it was A Different World was filmed there back in the 90s. Do you remember that?
- [22:56]
Susan
Oh, my gosh.
- [22:57]
Beckett
Yeah. It wasn't Spelman College, which I thought it was. Did you? Yep.
- [23:01]
Susan
Absolutely.
- [23:02]
Beckett
Yeah. No, it was Hillman College. It's a fictional HBCU that they made up for the show, but filmed at Spelman.
- [23:09]
Susan
Well, that's supposed to be Spelman.
- [23:11]
Beckett
Why did we remember that it was Spelman when it wasn't Spelman College? Go Jaguars. It's only intramural sports, but they have a name, so. Yay. Anyhow.
- [23:22]
Susan
Well, Mama always told Dovey that she took after her father the most of all. The sisters. Her intelligence. She had his way of speaking, the way people were drawn to her. But Spelman, I mean, that was going to be such a stretch. Eight times more expensive than Bea's school, which they had only managed because North Carolina covered the actual tuition and all they'd had to pay for is room and board. But she could be pre med at Spelman. That was a dream that Dovey had had since childhood. And it was going to be a stepping stone for graduate work and the network she'd gain access to there you couldn't really put a price on it. Was aiming high. But her teacher had faith in her. Her family loved this dream. Unrealistic as it was, they did have four years to pull it off. And so they decided they would settle in to try. But then the nationwide shock of the Great Depression slammed into the family. The year Dovi was a sophomore, Grandma's laundry business dried up as her customers could no longer afford to outsource that work. People stopped giving donations of food to the pastor's family. They had to use it at home. After all, Grandpa couldn't keep his store open. He fell into a deep depression. I read, you know, providers, when they can no longer provide, often fall into a deep depression. And I'm sorry to say that Grandpa began to drink and was effectively useless for a while.
- [24:50]
Beckett
They had to move out of the parsonage because he was no longer welcome as the head pastor there. They were scraping hard just to keep food on the table.
- [25:01]
Susan
It was Mama's wages at the Hurley residence that paid the rent on a series of rented homes over the next few years. Mama also used the training she had acquired in night school to take in fine dressmaking clients that she had met through her employer. Mama was working all the hours of the day. Dovey called her a woman of steel. Dovey began working at the Hurleys too, as a nanny after school and on weekends, just to keep the family together. Even though money was at a premium. Grandma took in two 8 year old mixed race boys as foster children, who the girls from now on always called their brothers. It's a bold thing to do. The stipend that came from the government barely covered the foster children's expenses. So it wasn't a money making opportunity. It was that those two children were, I have to say, despised by the community for their mixed race. And Grandma took them in and brought them up and always defended them. These are my children. There will be no speculation.
- [26:04]
Beckett
Right? And it's the same community, so she's a pillar of it. So people listened well at Least when
- [26:10]
Susan
she was in the room. Grandpa dragged himself together at last and opened another store. But college was looking more and more like a pipe dream. Where on earth was this family going to come up with money for any college, much less the elite, expensive, best in class institution that Dovey and Mama were aiming for? And then the miracle occurred. Mr. Hurley had gotten a new job in Atlanta where Spelman was. And then I wrote seven exclamation marks. And Mrs. Hurley wanted Mama and Dovey to go, too. Grandma was the one that objected at the beginning. Atlanta was the deep south. You know, even here in North Carolina, they were very discriminated against in all public spheres. It was a very segregated environment. But Atlanta was notorious for racial violence. Dovey even suspected her grandma of crying in fear of the thought of her loved ones going into that, I hate to say war zone. I mean, this woman who'd been disabled by one white man and seen her husband killed by a gang of other ones did not want two of her family members walking in to hell. But Mama held firm. They could not leave this chance in the dirt. They work for Dovey's first year, and then Mama would be back with her family. You know, we have to do it, Mother. We have to do it.
- [27:42]
Beckett
So they did. When they got to Atlanta, Dovey and her mother went to Spelman for the first time. They had never been on the campus before, so they finally got a chance to see with this place that they've been dreaming about going to, what it looked like, what it was about. And Dovey said, I thought I had arrived at the throne of grace the first time I saw Spelman.
- [28:04]
Susan
So Mama and Dovey went to work, and the city itself was more of a wasteland than even Grandma had feared. The Great Depression had caused the racial tensions to flare even higher. Everyone was struggling for the scarce resources. The streets were actually very, very dangerous. And it looks like, at least at the beginning, the ladies didn't live in, but traveled from an impoverished area of the city to the safe white suburban enclave where the Hurleys lived. Yeah, Dovey was in charge of four year old Bailee Hurley, and Mama was in charge of the other domestic work.
- [28:41]
Beckett
Edith Wimbish had moved back to Atlanta. That was her hometown, and she was able to bring them into her community. This is a community of professionals, doctors and lawyers and teachers. Some of them even wrote recommendation letters for Dovey to be accepted at Spelman. That's how close in the community they were.
- [29:02]
Susan
It took them two years to save enough for Dovey's first year at college. But they did it at last, and Mama went back home to North Carolina to grandma and grandpa and her other children. A year later than she had meant to. But nevertheless, she left, because as far as she was concerned, Dovey was safely on her way. But something happened that was bewildering. When the admittance letter came from Spelman College, she showed it to Mrs. Hurley, who turned into what. What would you call it?
- [29:33]
Beckett
An icicle, A complete change. She had said, oh, I want so much for you in life, Dovey. This is a red flag right here. Look at so and so's girl. She's doing great. And she didn't go to college. You don't need to go to college. But now, presented with not only college, but the best college that Dovey could possibly go to, an acceptance to it, Mrs. Hurley's inner Mrs. Hurley came out. She wanted to support Dovey the way she wanted to support Dovey, not the way that Dovey needed support.
- [30:05]
Susan
It was very bewildering to her. You know, she had run in with her acceptance letter honestly and for real, expecting Mrs. Hurley to jump up and down with excitement in her innocence. That's the reception and that's the relationship she thought that they had. You know, Mrs. Hurley had given us a hundred kindnesses. She had taken us under her wing. She had never been anything but lovely to us. And. And I think the word Spelman meant hotbed of insurrection. You know, it was now hostile formality land at the Hurley's house. Also, Dovey in the house endured the antagonistic commentary of Mrs. Hurley's friends. She heard the word, ooh, you're gonna hate this. Uppity. Uppity. Who does she think she is? I wouldn't have one of those in the house. One of what? Educated people in the house. Yeah. And the dynamic changed so drastically, and by now Dovey was living in. And she had to walk on eggshells around Mrs. Hurley all the time. Mrs. Hurley's mask had come off, supported by her friends.
- [31:16]
Beckett
You know, like, here, let me take that mask for you and show you how we are here in the South. South, you know, the deep South, Atlanta.
- [31:23]
Susan
But Dovey had to put one on. You know, Dovey had to put one on. It broke her heart to realize Mrs. Hurley wasn't who she thought she was. From this point on, Dovey wore her own mask at work, a heavy one of servitude. So she's not safe in the streets of Atlanta, and she's not safe anymore at, quote, home. The teacher that started it all. Susan had mentioned Edith Wimbish. Luckily, that family took her in. She had the relief of Sunday afternoons with groaning tables full of food and also great conversation with the most prominent African Americans in Atlanta. There were doctors and preachers and lawyers and professors and. And the best of everyone. And then she began her year at Spelman. And every day she fled from Mrs. Hurley's house to the trolley for the security of the iron gates that held back the hostility side. She really felt out of her depth a little bit. Ed Spelman. You know, Spelman women were the very upper crust of African American society. They'd all had debuts, they'd been to cotillions. Some had summer houses, extensive wardrobes everywhere. Definitely privileged childhoods, completely detached from Dovey's experiences as could be possible in America, you know. And it was there that she met a wonderful teacher with the spectacular name of May Neptune.
- [32:45]
Beckett
May Neptune was a white woman. She was a professor of English lit. She was advisor to the school paper called the Campus Mirror. And she tapped Dovey very early on to write for that paper. Said, you need to do this. So Dovey took it on, and eventually she would become the editor in chief of The Daily Mirror. Ms. Neptune also gave Dovey, like, a place to rest her feet during the day at her apartment. So she's like, you can be here. You need to look, rest, come here. She really took her under her wing.
- [33:18]
Susan
May Neptune was about 60, and from Duffy's description, she looked like the Grandma on the Mrs. Butterworth syrup bottle on the outside, but on the inside, she was a fiery revolutionary. She had earned advanced degrees in Ohio. Ohio always at the forefront, by the way, of women's education. I think Oberlin College opened in, like, 1830. Something like Ohio was advanced. And through her travels, she spent decades in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. A white lady. I'm just gonna go back. In this era of such segregation, a white lady deep into the network of the Harlem Renaissance, which had brought her into contact with many of the famous African American intellectuals and activists of the day, and actually inspired her to come down to Atlanta where she can make a difference. She encouraged Dovey, without judgment, to learn and write about injustice. What she had experienced, what her family had experienced, the clan, the doctrine of separate but equal, the terrible walking on eggshells she was forced to do in order to be able to stay in school, becoming a different person in Mrs. Hurley's house. All of her experience was worthy of writing about. Ms. Neptune introduced Dovey to the wider world. You know, the wider world of what was happening in Europe, for example, the history of her people. She insisted on excellence and high standards and just opened Dovey's mind to authors and history and politics and possibilities. She, like no other person, got to know Dovey, would listen to her fears and her stories. She became a true friend. She would even defy convention to go sit with Dovey in the back of the trolley car so they could keep talking, which for Atlanta was an awfully brazen thing to do. Together they would go see speakers that inspired Dovey to fight for what she wanted to see, the true history and struggle of African American people and her part in making the change. W.E.B. du Bois came and spoke of each individual being part of something bigger than themselves, and she really took that to heart. She absorbed. Absorbed information like a sponge and reveled in the university atmosphere. There were delightful discussions and. And reading and rabbit holes. Oh, my, you know. And just like many college students, she cut a bow on the trolley. Sometimes you meet him at the coffee store, sometimes you meet him in class. This particular beau was on the trolley, a handsome man named Bill Rountree, who went to Spelman's brother all male school, Morehouse. And gradually their friendship built on just shared trolley rides. And studying really became a true college romance. He, despite his refined experience and manners, was also the son of a housekeeper. He, unlike most other students in this refined atmosphere, was familiar with struggle and deprivation and the determination to overcome it. They had a lot in common. All seemed poised for a joyful, rewarding college career. Until one day in May, at the end of the 1935 school year, she
- [36:39]
Beckett
had made it to her second year of school. So she had only had money for the first year when they moved to Atlanta. So the second year she's used that, and she was just barely getting by. But she was doing college during the day, going back home, taking care of the kids, studying late into the night. But one day she came home from class, and Mrs. Hurley and some police officers met her, and Mrs. Hurley just shouted, thief. Thief. You stole from me. And Dovey was like, I stole what? You stole from me. Arrest her. Arrest her. And the police officers arrested her. Dovey had absolutely no idea what she was being accused of outside of theft.
- [37:23]
Susan
They took her to the police station and they locked her up. Duffy was in so much trouble. A black person in the legal system in Georgia was almost doomed. Who could she reach out to? Because despite the cotillions and the philosophy in the background and money in a fancy bow tie, there's not one African American person on earth that would have a bit of influence here. And during orientation, the president of Spelman had literally said in a speech off campus, it's unclear how much the college can assist you. You will be on your own. So who on earth is she going to call?
- [38:01]
Beckett
Well, she called the one person that would come to mind, and that's Ms. Neptune. A few hours after talking to Ms. Neptune, a attorney showed up, a white attorney, and he asked Dovey if she had ever stolen anything. And she said, no, of course not. I have no idea what this is about. And the attorney nodded his head and said, okay, just hang tight. Dovey did have to spend the night in jail, but by the next morning, she was released and the charges were dropped.
- [38:29]
Susan
It turns out that Ms. Neptune and a woman whose name she got wrong, by the way, in her autobiography named Ms. Rockefeller, who happens not to be affiliated with any rock. What are the chances? She's the head of the Treasury Department. And I'm only mentioning her here because she comes in later as a super big assistant. So together, Ms. Neptune and her friend Ms. Rockefeller arranged temporary housing for her and got her things moved. So there was not that awkwardness. But Dovey was in dire straits. Without the Hurley job, she was going to be in trouble financially. So she got campus job after campus job. She ultimately had to work three campus jobs just to come close to surviving for two years. In fact, she got hauled into the principal's office once because she'd been running on campus. And you're in college. It's not the principal, even the president. The president she had to go appear in front of because she'd been running. And she's like, I've got to run. I've got all I gotta go. I gotta be places I can't be, walking with my head high with great poise and blah, blah, blah. She's like, I gotta just keep swimming, girl. You know, like, yeah, so whatever. Like, well, just watch that. But as the depression moved on, Dovey noted that even some of her wealthier classmates were having to leave college. Dovey's own account was far in the negative. There's no way these campus jobs are going to make it. And one day, junior year, that same president of Spelman had to be firm, called her in. This was not a little joking thing about, like, less of the hair flying in the air, cruising around. Please, no, you have to pay your debt. We can't keep this up. You know, maybe go get a teaching job for a few years, catch up with your debt, and then come Back up to you. But either way, you have to be out by the end of the semester. Unless your account is current. I'm going to tell you. Kube is holding people's diplomas for parking tickets. They've always been like this. Wow. Yes, wow. But this was the end then. As far as Debbie was concerned, this was the end of the dream. There's literally. I mean, there's no way to pay this. If she left without a degree, number one, she'd never get a job that was even gonna let her pay it back. And then she'd have no further opportunities. This was the end of the road. She was wandering aimlessly, and her feet ended up taking her to the place
- [40:50]
Beckett
of comfort, Ms. Neptune's house. So she laid out her plight to Ms. Neptune. She's crying. She. She doesn't know what to do. This is. Her dream is over. And Ms. Neptune just took it all in and basically said, no, no, I don't think so, and got busy.
- [41:06]
Susan
She said, that's. This isn't the end of the world. Like, yes, it was. Omg. How can you be so blind? But in a matter of hours, Ms. Neptune had handled it. It turns out old Ms. Rockefeller in the treasurer's office had gone to the president herself. And I don't know what relationship they had, but Ms. Rockefeller pulled some strings. You know what I mean?
- [41:31]
Beckett
Yeah.
- [41:32]
Susan
And Mary Elle. No relation, literally. What are the chances, you know? Didn't they do that on the Bachelor, though? They had a guy whose last name was Marriott or something.
- [41:40]
Beckett
Oh, ye. It was one of those. I don't think it was the Bachelor or Hilton. Yeah.
- [41:43]
Susan
Anyway, it was one of those names like, ooh, you know, okay, you know. No, this was not a real Rockefeller. But anyway, she had arranged for a partial scholarship. And Ms. Neptune had lent Dovey the rest of the money from her meager salary from her savings. Had lent her the money, and who's to say what future she would have? Who's to say if that money would ever come back? So it was alone. But Ms. Neptune really, I mean, had to make that choice that it's possibly a gift, Right? You know, what Ms. Neptune had given her was more than money. It was a future.
- [42:22]
Beckett
And Dovey said, I will repay back every cent. I just don't know how to thank you. And the answer Ms. Neptune gave her was very simple. Pass it on.
- [42:32]
Susan
I do think it's cute. Apropos of nothing, literally nothing, that she called her this pet name that I'm like, you guys are nerds. Nerds. Nerds. She called her Dovibus, which is like fake Latin. I don't know Catholic school people who've taken Latin. You know what I mean by third declension? You know, whatever. So anyway, so it's a fake name. Kind of like Arama is like fake Greek. Like the bowl a Rama. The smellarama is fake Greek. Yeah, Dovibus.
- [43:01]
Beckett
So cute.
- [43:01]
Susan
Anyway, there you go. Just a little window into the geekery at the institutes of higher learning.
- [43:07]
Beckett
I think it's a good example of their relationship. Right? Just like grandma Rachel had taken on those two boys, Ms. Neptune had taken on Dovey. Like it takes a community and I am part of your community. Let's go. In June of 1938, 24 year old Dovey Mae Johnson graduated from Spelman with a double major in both English and biology. We had already talked about the hard times that her family had hit. They could only scrape up enough money for one person to come to the graduation, which was their sister Eunice. And Eunice came down to cheer on as the representative of the whole family.
- [43:48]
Susan
Dovey wrote in her autobiography that after graduation, upon her visit home, she saw her family struggle with new eyes. Two of her sisters were now in college. That's what happens when the younger ones grow up. And mama was barely holding it together. Medical school. Dovey's lifelong dream was going to have to wait. Her family needed her. 2026 Year of the Fire horse is a year of self reflection for me. And I am thinking about how I can make a healthy impact this year in lots of different aspects of my life. And Blueland's products are not just about tidying things, but about a cleaner lifestyle by reducing single use plastics.
- [44:49]
Beckett
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- [45:00]
Susan
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Beckett
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Susan
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Beckett
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- [45:52]
Susan
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Beckett
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Susan
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- [46:43]
Beckett
So Dovey has graduated college, but med school's out of the question. She just has a big question mark in front of her which path to take. She still has her beau in Bill Rountree, and he's talking of marriage. Is that the path she's going to go on? But another opportunity opened itself up and she decided this is what she needed to do right then and right there. She wanted to make some money. So she took a teaching position, seventh grade English and science, not too far from Charlotte, so she could visit. She couldn't live at home, but she could Visit. She made $55 a month, which is about $1,300 now. Dollars. She only needed 12 of that, 55 for her own room and board. And the rest, it went back home to her family. So she was helping to support them from her teaching job.
- [47:31]
Susan
But Dovey was restless. Surely there was more out there. And Dovey went on an impulse sort of to try and see Dr. Bethune in Washington, D.C. and found her out because she hadn't called ahead. And she got a positive invitation from the staff there to come back. I'm sure there'll be a place for you. A Spelman graduate, I mean, yeah, of course, that knows personally. Dr. Bethune. It took a full year to make this decision, but Dovey decided to make the leap. The war had begun for America and defense contractors had been forced to integrate their industry. There was possibly a lot of opportunity across America, so it was time to make the leap.
- [48:16]
Beckett
Right now in our story, Dr. Mary Bethune is the head of the Division of Negro affairs for the National Youth Administration. It's one of Frances Perkins and FDR's New Deal projects. Dr. Bethune is working in US government at this point. So Dovey went to visit Grandma Rachel's old friend, Dr. Bethune. And when she walked into her office, Dr. Bethune looked at her and said, you're Rachel Graham's granddaughter. She remembered her. How flattering is that? Dovey's like, I think I need to get a job in the defense industry. I want to do something. And Dr. Bethune looked at her and said, ah, no, I have something in mind for you. Not in a defense plant, but let's just get you busy now. Let's get you a job. And Dovey started to work in Dr. Bethune's office, doing research for her.
- [49:10]
Susan
Dovey saw firsthand the intense work and valuable network that Dr. Bethune was managing from her office. Here again, I say, please go listen to our coverage of Mary Bethune. Dovey wrote, I never got used to how casually and constantly she met with powerful people that I had only seen in newspapers. It seemed like all roads led to Dr. Bethune, including the road to the White House. We have talked before about the close personal friendship of Dr. Bethune and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This, of course, blew Debbie's mind at first, but after a while, Mrs. Roosevelt would come in, wave, remember Dovey's name every time. She's so good at that. Was happy to see her, asked about her people. Well, huh. And then after listening to these two friends, these older ladies working together, she realized this was a genuine partnership. And what specifically had they been working on all these months? Well, Dr. Bethune came to Dovey with a proposition. The war Department had finally been made to understand that women in the services would be vital to win the war.
- [50:30]
Beckett
Now, women had been in the armed forces as a support role, not as an official armed forces person. They had been in positions like nurses and volunteer support staff, but not as officers or enlisted soldiers, and specifically not black women.
- [50:49]
Susan
The Women's auxiliary Corps, or WAC, with two A's, was being created. As they spoke, Dr. Bethune had put her foot in the door and insisted that black women should be included in the officers training school. In a speech that she had given right at the beginning of the war, the European war, she said, perhaps the greatest battle is before us. The fight for a new America. Fearless, free, united, morally rearmed, in which 12 million Negroes, shoulder to shoulder with their fellow Americans, will strive that this nation, under God, will have a new birth of freedom. This dream, this ideal, this aspiration, this is what American democracy means to me.
- [51:36]
Beckett
One of the things that Dovey had said about Dr. Bethune, this backs up what you just said, is she said, quote, she was before her time before her time. She was dreaming dreams and pushing things you wouldn't think black women would be thinking about. This is just another example of that. She wanted the black women involved.
- [51:55]
Susan
And the fight seems crazy now, but people of rank in the services spent all of their energy twisting and turning and trying every which way to get out of desegregating this organization. But in the end, as we talked about in our charity early podcast, out of the 440 women who joined the Officers Training Corps, 40 of them were African American. It actually ended up being 39 because somebody dropped out, but our Debbie Roundtree was among them. It was so touchy at first. They were in Des Moines, Iowa, at the training camp. You would think, okay, Iowa, that's not going to be segregated. But Jim Crow was strictly enforced in the armed forces. The women of color had separate sleeping quarters. There was no shared equipment. There were colored only signs on the dining tables. I will tell you something even grosser. After the African American women had enjoyed on a hot day, the use of the swimming pool, the commander of the base had it drained and refilled.
- [53:02]
Beckett
Other groups could use the pool at different times. The black women that were in an officer training school, officers were allowed one hour a week. And every time they went swimming, they insisted afterwards that it be purified, I think is the word they used. Purified.
- [53:20]
Susan
Ugh. And any instinct on the part of the actual wax to kind of self integrate, which began happening cross, cross race, for lack of a better word, friendships and camaraderie began to emerge, and any instinct on that part was slapped down and ruthlessly exterminated. News of this segregation certainly got into the press again. We talked about this in our charity early podcast. But news of the poor treatment of the black officers inevitably leaked out into definitely the white press, but definitely, definitely the black press. People came to see, was it really that bad? Oh, yes, it really was that bad. So there was extreme bad press. Now, for the wax in general, there was also bad press. Things got out about like, oh, the army's just importing these women to be comfort women for the soldiers. I'm not going to explain that. No need. We can look that up if you want. Oh, they're just sex workers with uniforms on, that's all. So already the WACs are fighting this stigma of women in the service, and then layered upon that this, like, absolutely vicious treatment of the black officers. So when Dovey objected to the treatment that the women of color were getting on this base, she was branded a troublemaker for her objections. And the commanders, as punishment, sent her out recruiting to the Deep South. So there's all this bad press, and then they sent her to the area of the country with the worst race relations. It was dangerous for her to even be there, you know, in uniform or out. We've seen how dangerous it was just when she was going to college. But Dovey went out. She was like, all right, then. And she turned it into an advantage. She told it like it was. She didn't hold back. She actually said, I still believed in everything that the WAC stood for. I believed in the war effort, the critical role of women in that effort, and in the right of blacks to fight along whites. Not later, not at some distant future date when America and the army walked out into the light and maybe abandoned Jim Crow. But right now, right now, and I could make that happen, the WAC offered me a chance I believe would never come again. The chance to advance, to train for careers, to build the kind of future we women wanted for our children. Our boys are dying for freedom. I pointed this out in every speech I made. What was segregation compared to that? And her recruiting caused thousands. I mean, her and others caused thousands of women of color to enlist in the wac. She actually wrote, and this reminds me of what happened here after 9 11. She wrote, Never at any time in my life was America more united than during World War II. But the army did not want them necessarily. 85% of recruits, quote, failed their entrance tests. And Davi later found out that white women with the same scores had been commissioned as officers. In some cases, this is something that the soldiers would say, like, we're fighting Hitler in Europe, but we're fighting Hitler. Ism at home. Mm.
- [56:34]
Beckett
Yeah.
- [56:35]
Susan
Yeah. It was an uphill battle.
- [56:37]
Beckett
Dovey knew that this was one of the battles that she would be facing when she went out on the road recruiting for the WACS. Dr. Bethune had become the advisor to the woman who ran the entire WAC program. Dr. Bethune's job was to make sure that black women were properly represented in this. She had warned Dovey. Dovey knew what she was getting into. But one night, Dovey was in Miami. She had boarded a bus as a ticket she had gotten from the army instructed her to do. She sat in the seat that her ticket was for, but the bus driver told her to move her seat in favor of a white soldier, and she said, no, I need to be on this bus. I am on official army business. And the driver wanted no part of it. And he kicked her off the bus, put her at the end of the line, there was an entire line of black passengers, and she was denied a seat. So she was left in Miami in the middle of the night, alone for hours, because she had been kicked off the bus for being black.
- [57:47]
Susan
Out in the wider world, it was really no better. Race riots had broken out in 40 cities due in large part to the stress America was feeling about the integration of war factories and all of the incoming people that were seeking employment. It got very stressful in America. So we're fighting a war in Europe. We're fighting a war here, too. Back in Fort Des Moines, the army had decided that integration was obviously not going to work. Look at the country as a whole. And they decided they were going to create a segregated regiment. Dovey, who they called, and this is probably. They thought it was going to be an insult. They called Dovey the walking naacp. She was a thorn in their side. And she took her captain's pin. I mean, that's something she achieved. She took it off and she said, if you go ahead with this separate but quote, not equal regiments, I am turning this in. I'm not going to have it.
- [58:50]
Beckett
She felt that making this move, she said, this is setting us back 100 years.
- [58:56]
Susan
She got Dr. Bethune, who of course got Mrs. Roosevelt involved. And ultimately the idea for the separate regiment was dissolved. And Duffy wrote, those who had thought to take my America from me found that they could not.
- [59:15]
Beckett
In the middle of all this, the WACs with two A's became the women's Auxiliary Corps. They were granted benefits that, when Dovey had signed up, were not given to the WACs originally. They didn't get overseas pay. They didn't get any death benefits. They didn't get any life insurance or retirement. They didn't even get free mail service when they were on base like white male soldiers did. I just. It blows my mind that so many women were willing to sign up to do this without those benefits. They were still paid a salary and they were helping the war effort. So I can see it from that aspect. But they weren't granted the same benefits that their equal partners that just happened to be men were getting originally. But in within two years, that was corrected. In the end, there were 150,000 WACs. Of them, only 6,500 were black. Other branches of the armed services were even worse. The waves which were the Navy women, of the 90,000, only 72, not 72,000, 72 were not white. Of the 12,000 Coast Guard women, which were called the spars, 12,000 white spars five non white, sparse, and the nurse corps 11,000 nurses, only one black woman.
- [60:40]
Susan
Dovey was sent back out on the road to try to recruit more black women. And this time, her eloquence and fire really was a positive spin. This time, she wrote, I was deeply changed by having seen the way in which a single voice, my voice, could make a difference. See, she had objected. She'd been the gum in the works. And she made a change. The greatest women in my life, Grandma, Ms. Neptune, and Dr. Bethune, had each in her own way, told me that the idea of America was worth fighting for, however ugly in its present reality. Now, at last, I had come to that myself. After the war, Davi was what my son would call micro famous, very well known in a very small circle, you know, she was recruited by a labor leader called A. Philip Randolph, who'd founded the powerful union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, which had tens of thousands of members all along the railroad lines of America. And who had been the one who had spearheaded that movement to have the defense plans desegregated in the first place? Well, now that the war was over, he wanted to make sure those changes stayed permanent. He wanted Dovey, among others, to go out into the country and campaign with state legislatures and members of other unions in order to make that happen and even expand the reach of that desegregation, if possible. And Dovey's war work had brought her to his attention. She was assigned the large shipyards of California, so far from home, and she took the job with the understanding that she was entering medical school in the fall. But first she had a journey to make, a long overdue journey of thanks.
- [62:35]
Beckett
Her old mentor, fairy godmother, friend, whatever you want to call her. Ms. Mary Neptune was living very simply in Georgia. Over the eight years since she had given Dovey that loan to finish Spelman, Dovey had been paying off a little bit here and a little bit there as she could, but she made a pilgrimage of sorts to go visit Ms. Neptune. And when she was there, over tea, she presented her with an envelope of cash. It was the remainder of the loan plus interest.
- [63:09]
Susan
I think it's funny, she referred to having put the envelope in, quote, grandma's wallet in my blouse, and I'm just like, did you have that envelope in your bra? I mean, I've done it. I've actually had my phone in there when I'm gardening. Oh, I get it, I get it. But, you know, she was more than able to. To repay her benefactor at Least monetarily. Although she felt her whole life, she was never fully able to repay what she'd really been given, which was, you know, a chance. But think about that from Ms. Neptune's part. Like, how gratifying is that to know that you reached out and literally changed not only a life, but the world, you know? Oh, it's a ripple. It's a good thing to know the
- [63:50]
Beckett
ripples we always talk about. Yeah.
- [63:51]
Susan
Yeah. And just before she departed for the west coast, another reunion. College beau Bill Roundtree had been around to grandma's house. Oh, my goodness. The relatives loved him.
- [64:03]
Beckett
And he had asked if he could propose, if he could have her hand in marriage. And her family was just crazy for him. And they saw that as a perfectly logical choice for Dovey to make.
- [64:16]
Susan
They talked long distance on the phone every day. Does anyone remember long distance?
- [64:20]
Beckett
Oh, that was my relationship with my husband, because we didn't live in the same time zone, even.
- [64:25]
Susan
But the phone. The phone, the literal phone that you talk on. I know this is gonna blow. The younger listener's mind was more expensive at certain times of day, and the further geographically you were, the more it cost to make the phone call. People would sometimes even schedule the calls via letter so that everyone would meet up at a cheaper time of day. Crazy. Well, they inched closer and closer to commitment. And while she was in California, she met an activist by the name of Pauli Murray, who probably could be another
- [64:58]
Beckett
subject, you know, And I wrote the same thing. She needs her own episode. Yeah.
- [65:03]
Susan
Who inspired Dovey to believe this. Abandon her dream of medical school and instead study the law. She wrote the law misapplied, twisted, disingenuously interpreted that had generated the monstrosity known as separate but equal. It was this law, just as surely, that could shatter the monster as well of having made it. And it's your responsibility to take your skills and deal with that monster.
- [65:36]
Beckett
Oh, it was so inspirational. Dovey was on board. You know, Pauli Murray was a civil rights attorney and activist. She had had a similar decision to make in life. And after getting turned down for law schools all over the country that she could academically have gotten into, but she was either denied because she was black or she was denied because she was a woman. She even had, from FDR himself a recommendation letter to attend Harvard, and she didn't get in because she was a woman. Harvard Law. So Dovey was all on board. Medical school. What's medical school? Law school. She had set her sights on Pauli Murray's own alma mater, Howard University Law school in Washington, D.C. where on Pauli Murray's first day of law school, she was the only woman in class. And a professor said to her, I don't know why women should study law.
- [66:33]
Susan
So Dovey's like, yep, that's the school I need to go to, right? Kind of appealed to her sense of, oh, yeah, watch.
- [66:41]
Beckett
Do you know what I mean? Watch me.
- [66:43]
Susan
Yeah, well, there's a little bit of a wrinkle. Bill asked Dovey to marry him, and she said yes. And over Christmas, they flew to Chicago, where some friends were middle of the country to get married on Christmas Eve. And then, as a married couple, they rushed back to Portland, Oregon, for Dovey's last push to get the fair employment legislation passed in that state. She was giving speech, speech after speech, and he was following her to speech after speech. You're certainly always here, she said, and he's like, I'm your husband. That's what I do. And unfortunately, after not too long, it became clear that their goals were not the same. Perhaps if we'd talked more seriously about what each of us wanted, we wouldn't have made the mistake of marrying. Oh, dear. Well, it wasn't until they'd moved to Washington, D.C. to go to law school that he broke down and confessed it had never been his dream. It was her dream, and he was gonna leave. She was not torn. The way ahead was clear for her. She wrote, I could not turn away from the law once it took hold of me any more than I could deny my own being. She saw Bill's departure as a symbolic departure of her youth, you know, the person that she had been. And now, now it was time to be born anew.
- [68:12]
Beckett
I know this is an audio medium, but have you ever seen a picture of us? I'm the one in glasses. And while I need glasses to see, I also like them for fashion reasons. Every year I go to my eye doctor and I get my prescription, but I don't usually buy glasses there because they are very expensive. In the past, the online glasses I've gotten have been okay. They were kind of flimsy. The styles weren't exactly what I was looking for, but the prices were good. This year, I headed my eyeballs over to Warby Parker. Oh, my goodness. I am in adoration for this company. When I first went to their site, I took their style test, and a few styles came up as a suggestion, but I don't like to generally use just that. So I went and looked for myself. Their try on tool is the way that Try on tools are supposed to work right from my living room chair. I sat there nice and comfy, had my phone in my hand, pointed it at my face and boom. I am trying on styles on Warby Parker that actually look like the glasses, not like a sticker that was just pasted on my face. And in the end, the pair that I loved the best was one of those that had come up on the style test recommendations. The Blakely in peacock green. Green. Green seems to be a big color this year. They are of course prescription progressive lenses because I'm of a certain progressive age, I guess, and you don't want to sit in your comfy chair in your living room. No problem. Warby Parker has over 300 stores across the United States. You can go in and try the glasses on right there. As if that wasn't enough, for every pair Warby Parker sells, they also give a pair to someone in need. Need. Warby Parker has distributed over 2020 million pairs of glasses to people in need through their buy a pair give a pair program. Find out what I did that Warby Parker gives you quality and better looking prescription eyewear at a fraction of the going price. Our listeners get 15% off plus free shipping when you buy two or more pairs of prescription glasses@warbyparker.com shipping chicks that's 15% off when you buy two pairs of prescription glasses at Warby W A r b y parker.com chicks after you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you. That's warbyparker.com chicks. So her marriage is over, but Dovey still has a plan and she is going to go to Howard University Law School.
- [70:58]
Susan
After World War II, the Servicemen's Readjustment act of 1944 provided for payments to attend high school, college or trade school. But Jim Crow reached in even here with segregated institutions having to turn away tens of thousands of applicants due to lack of space from the high demand and white institutions refusing to integrate. So only about 20% of the African Americans who registered for educational benefits were ever actually registered at a college. And women faced another layer of prejudice. Dovey's friend and legal inspiration, Pauli Murray had a term for it. Jane Crow.
- [71:42]
Beckett
And Jane Crow showed up before Dovey could even register for classes. So she qualified for the GI Bill, which is the government is going to fund education after doing your service with the Army. So she has the GI Bill in her back pocket or her handbag and she went to register for her classes. And she showed up. The woman on the other side of the desk said, are you registering for your husband or your brother? And dovey said, I am registering for myself. I have the GI bill to help me pay for this. And the woman looked at her and said, so are you registering for your husband or your brother?
- [72:23]
Susan
You know, dovey could be a male name, I guess.
- [72:27]
Beckett
True. What?
- [72:28]
Susan
But then they saw the word captain and they're like, no, really, who are you registering for? Everyone gathered around.
- [72:35]
Beckett
So the whole office is there watching what's going on. And Dovey basically hopped up on the counter, reached across to the papers and told the woman on the other side, look, just do it like you do for the men.
- [72:51]
Susan
Oh, stamp, stamp. And she's on her way. She was one of only five women in her year, and she faced, here at the beginning of her law school career, dismissal and. And interruption and unhelpfulness. At first, the Jane crow of it all was almost unbearable. Dovey actually called it icy waves of unbelonging. But little by little, she found her people there. She was helped a lot by an administrator from the class of 1921 who had been only one of only two women in her year. She was invited to join the legal sorority epsilon sigma iota. And she found her people and the instructors who inspired her to greater heights.
- [73:39]
Beckett
She became class vice president, and she was appointed to the Howard law review and won an award for her research skills.
- [73:49]
Susan
She had experience working for Dr. Bethune.
- [73:52]
Beckett
Being in Washington, D.C. as the civil rights movement is, I don't want to say boiling up, but it's becoming very loud. She's able to see what is going on right there in Washington. As far as law goes, she's in the right place.
- [74:08]
Susan
There was a giant push in the black legal community to start the assault on the case that had established separate but equal as the law of the land in the first place. It's called Plessy vs Ferguson. Cases were beginning to emerge all over the country that would challenge the legality of it, that would seek to remind the supreme court of the principles of the 14th amendment. Let me read you section one. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. Seemed very clear that that did not say separate but equal was okay. They were out to prove that Plessy vs Ferguson was not constitutional. And the time was right, you know, to be in law school. How exciting to study under the law. Dean named Charles Hamilton Houston was widely considered to be the best and most effective civil rights attorney in America. And here he was making it his mission to train others to follow in his footsteps. I mean, very exciting, including Thurgood Marshall, who would later go on to be the very first African American to serve on the United States Supreme Court. And he, by the way, was ready to bring it. He had been looking for years for an opportunity to run a test case in separate bid, equal education to the Supreme Court. And he finally got the case he'd been hoping for. And he would let students watch while he refined his arguments for this case. I must encourage you, if you're anywhere near Topeka, Kansas, the school that features so prominently in that case, which would become known as Brown versus Board of Education, that school has been turned into a museum. Actually, I think it's a national park or memorial. I don't know what the difference is. Let's just jump ahead just a tiny bit to kind of close that case. In 1952, he argued that case, Brown versus Board of Education, which, which I know people outside of America may not have heard of, but it was a landmark case in America. And he re argued the case. In 1953, the Supreme Court delivered its opinion that invalidated the separate but equal doctrine. Schools in America were to be integrated, at least according to the Supreme Court. It was an enormous step forward. That's just a little tiny jump in our timeline. I just wanted to show what kind of cases that Dovey was watching behind the scenes. I mean, it was the greatest practical education ever. One might call it lab. Yeah, you know, that was the lab. She went to lectures and this was the lab.
- [77:00]
Beckett
Yes, definitely.
- [77:01]
Susan
She actually summarized her entire legal education with this one sentence. I began to understand the distance between the law and real justice.
- [77:12]
Beckett
It just seems like she packed so much into those two years of law school because she was in the right place at the right time.
- [77:19]
Susan
As for her personal life, she had found and lived in a neighborhood that reminded her a lot of where she had grown up. A close knit community where everyone seemed to know each other. And it only took about a week before her back fence neighbor, Midwesterners, you know who that is, you know, people looking over the back fence at you. Her neighbor invited her to the Allen Chapel AME church, and she found a sanctuary there and a community. And she began to Reconnect with her religious upbringing, she actually started to teach Sunday school. It was a place of solace and support because really the rest of her life was such a struggle, really. I mean, it was like the final hurdle to her career. But she had a lot of battles to fight out in the real world and this was a lovely place to retreat to.
- [78:03]
Beckett
And as her graduation neared, she could not wait to introduce her family to this new life she had in Washington. Her grandmother Rachel, who was at the time about 78, and her mother Lena, who was about 58, were both planning to attend Dovey's graduation. Dovey saved up some money. She sent them reserved seat tickets on the train and waited. And when they arrived in Washington, Grandma Rachel could barely walk. What happened? Well, said the women, the conductor had not honored their reserve seat tickets. He sent them back to the already full Jim Crow car where they were forced to stand for the 10 hour journey. Nobody gave up their seats for these women. Grandma's feet gave out and she went into the restroom and put the seat down on the toilet and sat there for part of the train ride. So this luxury experience that they were expecting to go down to Washington and celebrate their daughter and granddaughter's graduation was almost ruined because of this horrible treatment. And Dovey's just looking at him and going, this is why I want to be a civil rights lawyer.
- [79:19]
Susan
But instead of being unalloyed joy Dovey's graduation, she sat there infuriated and angry and just vowed revenge on the railway company. And after it was all over, she and her future colleague, more on him later, did press a case against the railroad and they won a few hundred dollars. And to Dovey's embarrassment, she cried in front of the judge.
- [79:42]
Beckett
Yes.
- [79:42]
Susan
She was so angry. You know, a lot of times as women, I think we've been taught that anger is unseemly and it gets translated into tears. She was so angry. But as a lawyer, not as a granddaughter, Said her colleague, you've done the best you can for your client. You've won hundreds of dollars. That's about what other people who have sued the railroads have gotten. You have accomplished what you set out to do as far as you can go right now. But you know, that incident fired her up to take up further cases that would just eradicate separate but equal in this country. Like why should we have to seek remedies after having been abused?
- [80:21]
Beckett
Yeah. And what was firing her up in a way during this was she thought it was a slam dunk because the tickets were a contract and the Supreme Court had recently sided with a plaintiff in a very similar transportation case, but it didn't apply to this one. And they. They ended up having to settle out of court.
- [80:40]
Susan
Side note, Ms. Neptune gave her the traditional gift to those who have graduated from law school and brought her a new leather briefcase. And it was time to pay back another debt. By the way, since we're talking about Ms. Neptune, you know, we have reached into grandma's wallet and paid Ms. Neptune back. But she went to find Dr. Bethune, who had chosen her for that wack assignment. Not. Not that assignment is whack, but this with the wax. That's hilarious. Well, it turned out to kind of be a whack assignment, too, so it works either way. That assignment had hardened her into a fighter, you know, and she went to Dr. Bethune and promised that for the rest of her life, she would provide pro bono, free legal services for the National Council of Negro Women. And felt like, that is the least I can do, and I am going to give back in this way.
- [81:30]
Beckett
I mean, she's fulfilling that promise, you know, pass it forward that she had made all those years ago to Ms. Neptune.
- [81:35]
Susan
Just pass it forward.
- [81:36]
Beckett
She passed the bar. Speaking of passing, she passed the bar on her first attempt. And in 1951, at the age of 37, she was a practicing lawyer.
- [81:47]
Susan
During law school, Dovey Rountree and a married classmate named Julius Winfield Robertson frequently worked and studied together. He was. I don't know if I'd call him a big man on campus exactly, but he was prominent and involved in campus organizations and connected with prominent cases. In fact, I think he was one of the students who actually actively worked on Brown versus Board of Education. But Dovey admired him greatly for both his knowledge and, you know, his legal work, but also how he'd had to struggle to get where he was his self starting and also admired and frankly envied his family life. She says repeatedly in her autobiography that, you know, her one regret. She wished she had found a partner to walk through life with and had missed that part of life, really. It was really her only regret. But she admired how he had it all together at the same time.
- [82:36]
Beckett
He's doing undergraduate and law school in four years. He also managed to write and have published a memoir about his experiences in the Jim Crow South.
- [82:47]
Susan
But what I was saying earlier is those accomplishments were possible because he had a wife at home handling the domestic arrangement.
- [82:56]
Beckett
That is absolutely correct.
- [82:58]
Susan
So, Mrs. Robertson, we salute you, because I'm not sure anyone else ever did. Oh, I hope they did after graduation. It was only natural for Dovey and Julius to set up a law practice in Washington D.C. and I will tell you, there's an irony here. Segregation in Washington D.C. was a contradiction, wasn't it? You know, Even in the 1950s, for the most part, the city's government schools under the control of Congress. And here we go. Congress is like, oh, the city's the capital of the free world. Democracy, freedom. Oh, communists are this and bad and blah blah, blah. But most of the city's public facilities, transportation, housing, schools were segregated. Maybe not by law anymore, some of them, but like by practice. This was a very segregated city. It's another echo of that World War II sentiment. They're fighting tyranny abroad and living it at home. So they're fight for freedom, but like living in a segregated city.
- [83:59]
Beckett
Right. And a segregated law organization, the Bar association of the District of Columbia, refused to admit them because of their color. This organization not only would have offered them networking opportunities, but they had an absolutely extensive law library that you could use if you were members of the organization, but had to pay to use every single time if you weren't. And Dovey and Julius were denied membership there for another six years before they could become members. This was a new venture. They had hung up their shingle together, but it wasn't paying their bills. They were specializing in civil rights law. Their clients were not very wealthy. They didn't get huge settlements, so they each had to work other jobs while they were establishing their law practices. Dovey worked a day job at the Department of Labor and worked the practice at night. And Julius worked nights at the post office and he worked days at their law firm.
- [85:04]
Susan
I will tell you that Julius had worked a night shift at the post office all through his entire Howard career, which I find astonishing, especially when you
- [85:14]
Beckett
see he was going to undergrad and law school at the same time time and did it in four years with a wife and having two children and oh yeah, a book.
- [85:23]
Susan
He's a driven man. Thanks, Mrs. Robertson, for that.
- [85:27]
Beckett
Right.
- [85:28]
Susan
As the practice grew, however, they were able to transition full time to the law. So they are able to work at their actual profession after not very long. Dovey Roundtree's most significant case was what ultimately became Sarah Keys Evans versus the Carolina Coach Company. So what did this involve? Forcing African Americans to ride in the back of the bus. You know something as a child of the south that Dovey was extremely familiar with. And there was an echo, if not a carbon copy of Dovey's own Miami incident During World War II, in this
- [86:04]
Beckett
case, Sarah Keys was a whack, just like Dovey had been. And just like Dovey, she had been told to give up her. Her reserved seat for a white soldier. I mean, this hit so close to
- [86:19]
Susan
home for Dovey, she refused to get up off the bus. And so the bus company literally rolled up a second bus, an empty one, de aborted all the existing passengers but her onto the new bus, which drove away. You're not going to get up. Well, yeah.
- [86:32]
Beckett
And left her alone.
- [86:33]
Susan
And then when she objected to being left there, the clerk literally said, and don't you know where you are?
- [86:41]
Beckett
Yeah.
- [86:42]
Susan
And she was arrested for loitering after they left her. Yep.
- [86:47]
Beckett
She was in jail for 13 hours and ultimately ordered to pay a $25 fine for disorderly conduct. But unlike Dovey's mother and grandmother, who had started their journey in North Carolina, Sarah Keys had started her journey in New Jersey. And it wasn't until she got into North Carolina that she was faced with these issues.
- [87:09]
Susan
And there had been a case in 1946, it's called Morgan vs. Virginia. And there was a ruling passenger segregation was illegal on interstate travel. So if you're an African American who starts your ride in the north, you may remain in whatever seat you'd taken at the beginning of the trip. That's precedent. One would think Sarah Keys just wanted to forget about it, you know, I think after she finally made it home. But her father made it very clear, doing nothing, not acceptable. We're going to handle this. And they met with Dovey Rowntree in Washington. She'd been recommended by a former professor because her story mirrored this case so strongly. She said, it was as though I sat looking in a mirror. And Dovey said later, if she'd been left to her own devices as a rookie, she might not have felt brave enough to take on this case because it was big and there was a big cabal, you know, against her. But Julius pushed her. He said, the winds are blowing in our direction. This is exactly in your wheelhouse. You are never going to find anything closer to your heart. Isn't this why you became a lawyer in the first place? Exactly. Yeah. And then the district court actually declined to hear the case. And finally they had to have a hearing at the Interstate Commerce Commission. And this was not ideal. It was an 11 member commission, and they had a reputation, and I quote, as the Supreme Court of the Confederacy because of their history of ruling in favor of segregation. And then they rolled up to that hearing, and only one commissioner Bothered to come. How much of an insult is that? How shocking, how shocking. That commissioner's like the bus driver just asked her to switch seats. What's your problem? Yeah, she was furious. She wanted a new hearing. And you know what? She reached out to a member of Congress who represented Harlem in New York City. As she pulled that network in other high powered individuals, she applied pressure for a hearing with a full slate of the commissioners. And she got it.
- [89:09]
Beckett
Here's a very condensed version of what happened with Sarah Key's case. It wasn't finally resolved for another three years. There was lots of legal maneuvering going on, especially on the bus company's part. Oh, our home offices are. Aren't there? They're here. Oh, we can't accept your subpoena for this reason. You know, back and forth. Eventually they combined Sarah's case with one that the NAACP Legal Fund was working on involving the San Francisco Railroad, and they put them together. And ultimately the ruling said the disadvantages to a traveler who is assigned accommodations or facilities so designated as to imply his inherent inferiority solely based on. Based on his race must be regarded under present conditions as unreasonable.
- [89:58]
Susan
So Dovey Roundtree brought in a legal victory for Sarah Keys. And that case was hailed as a major breakthrough for the civil rights movement. It's a landmark case, and I'm very sorry to say Dr. Bethune just missed it. She just missed the triumph of this decision. She had died earlier this year. It was 1955, and she did not live to see her protege win in this way. But honestly, Dr. Bethune always had had faith that it was possible and that it would come and that it was inevitable.
- [90:25]
Beckett
And she did see Brown vs Board of Education resolved.
- [90:29]
Susan
As for the decision, practically speaking, though local bus companies south of the Mason Dixon Line continued to make their own rules and the ICC did nothing about it. Just like in the Brown vs Board of Education case, in fact, in which the Supreme Court actually worried that the ruling would be unenforceable. That's sort of what happened in this case. Oh, sure, there's a ruling, but unless it was enforced, it wasn't going to have any teeth.
- [90:51]
Beckett
Just six days after the ruling and the Sarah Keys case, Rosa Parks refused to move her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama. And if you don't know what happened there, we do have an episode on that.
- [91:04]
Susan
Well, it took the. This is jumping forward again. It took the civil rights movement and the freedom writers of the 1960s to really force change. 436 people participated in at least 60 separate Freedom Rides where integrated passengers rode interstate buses into the deep south. And I will say violence was rampant. Police arrested riders for any number of offenses. Unlawful assembly, trespassing, any offense they could concoct, really. And often, the police let white mobs, including the KKK, attack the riders without intervening. But finally, on May 29, 1961, under Attorney General Robert f. Kennedy, the justice department ruled there must be enforcement of the court's rulings, in which he cited Debbie roundtree's Sarah keys case as a major precedent. So this eventually put a permanent end to segregation and travel across state lines. So hooray. And. And he reached back, back into case law and cited her case. So they were taking names on the national stage, but they were doing something even more radical on a local level. Remember, Susan said black lawyers could not use the law library, and that's. That's a hamper. But guess what else they couldn't use the courthouse bathrooms, the courthouse cafeterias. And then, typically, black clients, historically had been given to white attorneys because people believed a white attorney was their only real shot at justice. Well, Dovey and Julius refused to play that game. They stood beside their black clients, black attorneys, in front of white judges and white juries, and they just took them on and won. Over and over and over. They. They got significant settlements in negligence suits in particular. One of their biggest cases was against a D.C. psychiatric facility. They won the literal highest amount allowed in that kind of case. And one case by one case, they began chipping away at expectations for black clients across the city and opened doors for other black attorneys to do the same thing. They had long since not had equal footing in the courtroom, and they were making it happen by hook or by crook, you know, one case at a time. She said that Julius was an amazing mentor. She called him, quote, a man with the rare ability to relate to a woman as an equal. And she said he saw talent and grit in her that she hardly even saw herself.
- [93:37]
Beckett
At first, Debbie had a feeling that there was something else she was supposed to be doing in her life. She was doing all this amazing work for civil rights through her law practice. But she would go to her church, and she felt a calling, and it took her a while to put it into words. It took her even longer to say them out loud, and a little time longer than that to be able to believe them. She was, we've talked about it, part of the African Methodist Episcopal church in her neighborhood, Allen Chapel. For years, she taught Sunday school, and finally one day, she went to the main pastor and said, I think I'm supposed to be a minister now. Women were not ministers in the AME Church. They had roles, but not as ministers. And her pastor basically said, I've been waiting for this, Dovey. You've been preaching every time you speak. He told her how things that she had talked about to her Sunday school classes had reached out within the community. He gave her exact situations, and he said, you know what? Yeah, being a lawyer and a preacher might have some situations that she's going to need to overcome. These are two roles that take on a lot of time in your life,
- [94:51]
Susan
but I really think you can do it.
- [94:53]
Beckett
And I'm going to put you in touch with the head of the divinity school at your alma mater, Howard University. Let's get you into the ministry. So in addition to all these civil rights cases and all these other legal cases, she's covering divorces and family law as well. She's also studying to be a minister at divinity school.
- [95:14]
Susan
All of that leading to the fact that when she was 47, she became one of the very first women to receive full ministerial status in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She wasn't the very first. They had just begun ordaining women the year before. So she was in the. Definitely the first class of women ministers in that church. That same year, her legal partner, Julius Robinson, died of a heart attack. And, oh, didn't that leave her out in the wind a little bit? Jane Crow, of course, reared its ugly head again. She wrote, at a time when a female lawyer of any race was regarded skeptically. I had derived a significant measure of credibility from my association with Julius. There were times after he died when I felt truly vulnerable.
- [96:08]
Beckett
She ultimately decided that she needed to be her own practice, not join anybody else's. She purchased an abandoned funeral home at 1822 11th Street Northwest in Washington, D.C. she renovated it to be her home and her office and began her solo practice. So if you live at 1822 11th Street Northwest in Washington, D.C. you're in the right place to learn about the history of your house.
- [96:38]
Susan
With her controversial admission to the all white Women's Bar of the District of Columbia the year she was 48, she broke the color barrier in that institution and in the Washington legal community. I'm very sorry to say that this reminds me of the fight for suffrage and in fact, reminded me both of first and second wave feminism where the white victims of Jane Crow. Thanks, Pauli Murray. I'm using that all the time. Jane Crow. They want to pull the ladder out behind them and not help their sisters. Of color. Well, despite the objections of a few board members, the body as a whole voted her in.
- [97:31]
Beckett
I gave my son Noah a Lola blanket for Christmas, and he is obsessed with it. He loves this thing. He has two cats, Yankee and Pepper. The other day, he sent me a picture of Yankee and Pepper all cuddled up together on his Lola blanket. And quite honestly, I'm a little shocked that he's willing to share that with them. I wonder if he kicks them off at night.
- [97:56]
Susan
I would. Now, Lola is the world's number one blanket, and I can totally see why. I am amazed at how comfortable it is. It's like what you wish your cozy haven would have been like as a kid. And this is like the exact time when it's a little chilly outside, but it's sunny and you cuddle up with your cats in your hot tea and your book. Like, if you looked up bliss in the dictionary, it would be this whole scenario. And that said, it's like a very 1930s faux fur. It's very amazing. So obviously it goes in my antique Leiden house, but then I got one for my sister who has a very contemporary aesthetic. And sure enough, doesn't it transform and fit in there, too? It just goes with any decor.
- [98:44]
Beckett
It does. We're coming up on wedding season. It makes an amazing gift. Lola has over 20,000. 20,000 five star reviews, and thousands of people are gifting this blanket. It's a wonderful gift, not only for someone else, but also for yourself.
- [99:00]
Susan
They also make weighted blankets if you would like more of a calming therapeutic situation. There's also matching pillows. For a limited time, our listeners can get 40% off select Lola blankets products with Code Chicks at checkout.
- [99:16]
Beckett
Just head to lolablankets.com and use code Chicks. After your purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support the show and tell them that we sent you.
- [99:26]
Susan
Wrap yourself in luxury with Lola blankets. 1964, her 50th year, started out very poorly. She lost two of her most ardent supporters, to whom, in different respects, she owed her life, really. May Neptune died in January, and her grandmother died later that year in November. I know that's a blow.
- [100:07]
Beckett
We all need a Grandma Rachel.
- [100:09]
Susan
Yeah, right. That will fight our battles and always be on our side.
- [100:13]
Beckett
Or be a Grandma Rachel.
- [100:15]
Susan
Ooh. You know, she was known for filling the holes of sadness with cinnamon rolls. And I'm a pretty good baker.
- [100:26]
Beckett
Many times in Dovey's autobiography, she talks about Grandma Rachel at events. Would make hot gingerbread smothered in applesauce.
- [100:36]
Susan
Which is a common. I just don't know about that, but I'm willing to give it a go.
- [100:41]
Beckett
Yeah, me too.
- [100:41]
Susan
We once in Paris had hot gingerbread smothered in pate de foie gras. And I will tell you, that is a thumbs down.
- [100:48]
Beckett
No, no, no.
- [100:50]
Susan
That was what we were eating on that boat, Susan.
- [100:52]
Beckett
Oh, I didn't eat it. Well, yeah, no, you're the winner. I took, like, a bite, and I was like, no, that's a no from me. Me. Yeah.
- [101:00]
Susan
That is an unfortunate combination. Don't try that at home. Well, Dovey soon found herself with a request from a woman at church to please take the case of my son, a murder suspect. Now, Dovey didn't specialize in criminal law, at least she hadn't so far. She thought, however, that she better take the case because no one else would. She wrote, I think in the black community, there was a feeling that even if this man was innocent, he was a dead duck. Even if he didn't do it, he's guilty. I took that as a personal challenge. I was caught up in civil rights, yes, heart, body and soul. But I felt law was one vehicle that could bring this man remedy.
- [101:42]
Beckett
What had happened was In October of 1964, Mary Pinshaw Meyer, who was a Washington socialite, she was the ex wife of a CIA operative. Mary Meyer was taking her daily walk on what is called the towpath. It is a walking bike trail along a canal. She did this every day while she was on that walk. That day, she was shot dead. A witness in the area claimed to have seen a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman. Forty minutes later, when the police were in the area, they arrested a man named Ray. He was a quarter of a mile from the murder scene. He was sort of wearing what was described. He was definitely a black man, and so he must be their guy. Dovey met with him after his mother's plea to her to take this case. And she just had a conversation, and she said, ray, did you do this? And he's basically, I don't even know what they're accusing me of, and he's crying. And after their meeting, she said she'd take the case because she believed that he had some sort of intellectual disability. There is so much more to this case. We're going to recommend a podcast at the end, a series for you true crime people to listen to the whole thing. But essentially what the prosecutor had was circumstantial evidence. A Defendant who. Who didn't really match the description. When it came down to it, he had the same skin color, and that was it. They found no murder weapon. They didn't have much to go on, but they felt that they had the guy in Ray Crump. The jury selection began on July 19, 1965. And I'm giving you dates for a reason. On July 19, 1965, the trial only lasted eight days. Dovey only called three witnesses, and she didn't give an opening statement at the very beginning. So the prosecution was like, oh, this woman doesn't know what she's doing. But with those three witnesses and some very specific questions to some of the witnesses of the prosecution. Eleven days after that jury selection, the verdict was delivered. And Ray Crump was, according to the jury, not guilty.
- [104:09]
Susan
It almost seemed like the prosecutors just wanted to clean. Like, I just want this to move on as fast as possible. We're going to find a fall guy. Because her, in her closing arguments, she said, you hold in your hands the life of a man, a little man, if you please. When you go into the jury room, you'll take with you his image. And you must answer to yourself, does this man weigh 185 pounds? Is this man 5ft 8 inches tall? Like, just that fact alone, he didn't even meet the description.
- [104:40]
Beckett
Right.
- [104:40]
Susan
He was a teeny, tiny little dude. Common sense prevailed, but it might not have. Dovey had a good point. You know, they were throwing him to the wolves. They just wanted this case closed. And it was like, why did they want this case closed? Well, after the triumph, after everything had been cleared up and her client had been exonerated, I mean, I'm talking a decade later, some further news came out about the victim.
- [105:06]
Beckett
First, the National Enquirer reported this, but then it was backed up by an article in the Washington Post. And they reported that Mary had been having an affair with President John Kennedy at the time of his assassination. That would have been just the year before. So Mary Meyer knew stuff about the
- [105:27]
Susan
president go forward yet another 20 years. This time there is a man named Ben Bradley who has appeared on this show before. He was second in command to Katherine Graham at the Washington Post. He was the managing director and then the executive director. Well, he was also the brother in law of the victim. He wrote an autobiography called A Good Life in 1995. And Dovey read it and was very surprised by some information. When Mary Meyer was murdered, Bill Bradley received a telephone call and it told him to go to her house, find her diary and destroy it what? When he took his wife. I wouldn't take my wife. But when he and his wife came, came to his sister in law's house, they found a CIA counterintelligence specialist already there, trying to break into the house, trying to pick the lock. And Ben Bradley is like, wtf? Although I don't think they said that. Then he used his key and he went right to where he thought the diary was, pocketed it and left. Like, I don't even know what that was. And when he and his wife looked through this diary, they. I saw that it had a lot of details about that affair with President Kennedy. And he wrote in that, and I quote, this was in no sense a public document. So he did destroy the diary. Another account that was given by the Los Angeles Times stated that Mary herself had asked a friend, if anything ever happened to her, to put that diary in the hands of a certain CIA operative named James, James Angleton, and ask him to destroy it. Was that the man that had been at the front door who made the initial phone call? A lot is up in the air either way. The diary was incriminating and it was destroyed. So now you're going to have to look at that case differently. Like, why did they want Mary Meyer silenced and what powerful entity wanted it done? You know, the answer is still unknown, probably will never be known. But one thing that is certain, her client, Ray Crump, in no way should have been tried for that case. She even said if she had had any of this information during the prosecution of this case, she would have brought it up. But she was not privy to any of that information because this case was
- [107:47]
Beckett
so high profile and it was a murder case. Suddenly she was inundated with murder cases. She was not a civil rights attorney. For the most part, she was a criminal attorney. But she said that she was very proud to have covered all of those cases. She said, to win acquittal for other men who, like Ray, had no chance at all. I believe, too, that the wall of prejudice that had kept me and my black colleagues at the margins of the system truly began to crumble in the months following the Crump acquittal.
- [108:23]
Susan
So for decades, Dovey was a fixture in Washington, D.C. courtrooms. After about nine years of solo operation, she was the founding partner of the law firm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Parker. Not only that, she gathered toward her young attorneys of color, and she wanted to serve them the way that she had been shepherded throughout her career, passing it on as Ms. Neptune had asked her to do. She's now serving as a mentor.
- [108:53]
Beckett
She never remarried and she never had children. There were people in her life that she considered like children that she helped raise. Her family was the congregation at the Allen Chapel American Methodist Episcopalian Church, where she continued to preach for years.
- [109:12]
Susan
In the early 1970s, the mayor of Washington, D.C. appointed her to the D.C. board of Higher Education. And then the man that followed him as mayor, Marion Berry, considered her a trusted advisor. And he actually started to call her one of his, quote, Washington mothers. So among her children, in addition to other attorneys, the clients, the family at church, she had Several mayors of D.C. right, right. That's a big family.
- [109:42]
Beckett
It is. And it was a very, very full life.
- [109:44]
Susan
When she moved into the 1980s, she started to close up her criminal practice and she started working more on family law. And she was also the special consultant for legal affairs for the AME Church and continued until she retired to be the general counsel to the National Council of Negro Women. As she had so long ago promised Dr. Bethune.
- [110:09]
Beckett
At the age of 82, Dovey retired fully from legal work. This was 1996. She was due, wasn't she? Her health?
- [110:19]
Susan
Yes.
- [110:19]
Beckett
Her health had never been great. She had had diabetes diagnosed a long, long time ago. And diabetes starts to do things to your organs. You don't necessarily die from diabetes. You die from things. Organ failure that is associated with it. And her vision was starting to go and she went entirely blind. But she moved back to her hometown of Charlotte and began to work on what I consider a splendid memoir.
- [110:47]
Susan
Even after she had stopped at the active practice of law, she continued to speak up and advocate for kids and families. You know, that was dear to her heart. She wrote, I have battled in my time for so many kinds of justice. Fought for integration in the army, pressed for racial fairness before the Interstate Commerce Commission, argued for the rights of hundreds upon hundreds of men and women in courts of law. But no battle of my half century at the bar has been so urgent to or so important to me as the one for the next generation.
- [111:20]
Beckett
In 2008, she was helped to the polls so she could vote for Barack Obama in the presidential election.
- [111:28]
Susan
Wow.
- [111:29]
Beckett
Her. Her memoir was first published in 2009. It was first titled Justice Older than the Law. It was republished in 2019 and retitled Mighty Justice My Life and Civil Rights. She was honored with numerous legal awards for both her law work and her ministry work. But my personal favorite is the 2011 Janet B. Reno Torchbearer Award from the Women's Bar association of the District of Columbia. That was the group that had kept her out due to her race for years.
- [112:05]
Susan
Duffy's health never really improved and she became more and more frail toward the end of her life. On May 21, 2018, Dovey Johnson Roundtree died in Charlotte at the age of 104 years old. She was buried at Beatty's Ford Memorial gardens in Charlotte, North Carolina. In June 2020, during the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd. We all remember what was happening then. The CEO of Netflix named Reed Hastings Ratings and his wife Patty Quillen funded a scholarship. It was a 40 million dollar donation to Spelman College to establish a scholarship fund. Spelman chose to name it for Dovey Johnson Roundtree also. In addition to that, they donated $80 million to two other institutions. This donation, part of which is named after her, was the largest single donation that has ever been made to historically black colleges and universities.
- [113:09]
Beckett
Wow.
- [113:10]
Susan
And now, as usual, it's time for media and let's go ahead and start with books.
- [113:14]
Beckett
There aren't a lot of biographies out there on Dovey, but one that I found that I really liked and it's a middle grade book. It's called Dovey A Black Woman Breaks Barriers in the Law, the Military and the Ministry by Tanya Bolden.
- [113:30]
Susan
Well, speaking of middle grade books, we spoke earlier and we'll say the names again, but we spoke earlier about Dovey's autobiography which she co wrote with a woman named Katie McCabe. There is a young reader's edition of her autobiography called Mighty justice the Untold Story of Civil Rights Trailblazer. Dovey Johnson Roundtree. The thing I like about this, I listened to it in an audiobook. It's probably on Audible. I listened to it on Google Play and it is narrated by one of my favorite of all time audiobook narrators. Her name is Bonnie Turpin, spelled B A H N Interpret.
- [114:08]
Beckett
She actually narrates the actual memoir too. She's fantastic. That one is called Mighty Justice My Life and Civil Rights and that's by Dovey and Katie McCabe.
- [114:19]
Susan
Just in case you're looking at a books or half price books or somewhere online, don't be tricked. There is a book called Justice Older Than the Law the Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree. And that is the same book that is just the original title. I don't want anyone to buy things
- [114:37]
Beckett
to us, you know. Yeah. There is also a really beautiful children's book. It's called We Wait for the the Story of Young Dovey Johnson Roundtree and Her Grandmother's Enduring Love, also by Dovey and Katie McCabe with illustrations by Raisa Figueroa.
- [114:56]
Susan
There is a book I recommend, Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary by Juan Williams. If you would like to get a little background on one of Dovey's mentors. As for movies, there is a movie from very recently 2025 called Dovey's Promise. I have not seen it, but yet I do believe there is scope for another major motion picture.
- [115:22]
Beckett
Oh absolutely. Big budget, high production value. Absolutely. I didn't get to see it either either. Usually one of us sees it and this time we. We didn't get to.
- [115:31]
Susan
So yeah, if you are of a certain age of TV watching, there is a TV show sort of short lived technically one season, but since it's from the 90s, it's a 22 show season. So a modern three season, you know, Sweet justice with Cecily Tyson as a lawyer who would is very much openly based on Dovey, Johnson Roundtree and guess who else? It stars Melissa Gilbert, who the children of the 70s will know as the OG and forever real Laura Ingalls Wilder.
- [116:06]
Beckett
Oh, that's funny.
- [116:07]
Susan
We've mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder twice in this episode.
- [116:10]
Beckett
Hilarious. Really weird actually, if you're into watching things. We talked about this with Odetta. There is a YouTube channel called the National Visionary Leadership Project and they interview in a series of interviews black leaders from the 20th century. I didn't do the math. Black leaders from the 20th century. And there is a series of interviews with Dovey on that. And if you love your true crime podcasts, there's one called Murder on the Towpath. It's an eight part series with Soledad o', Brien, the journalist. So it's very good. It's a very good series. So if you like your true crime, that's a good one for you.
- [116:50]
Susan
Well, okay. To go along with that particular case, two things. If you would like to read the Ben Bradlee autobiography that is available from also the late 90s. And then also I have a link to an article from the Los Angeles Times that I referred to called Recovering Mary Meyer's Diary. I have a link also to her obituary. And also this is greatness. There is an entire series of websites under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution under the umbrella title Brown, Brown vs Board of Education. Separate is not equal. And you can fall down rabbit hole after rabbit hole to the center of the earth.
- [117:33]
Beckett
Nice. And if you find yourself in Topeka, you can always go to the Brown versus Board of Education national historical site. But we have links to all this on our show notes.
- [117:43]
Susan
And guess where you can't go in Topeka anymore.
- [117:45]
Beckett
Where?
- [117:45]
Susan
Because it would be good. A good twofer. You cannot go to the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka anymore. Close. And you know why? Because they moved it to Las Vegas. But you know what? Really? That's where it should be.
- [117:57]
Beckett
Was he from Topeka?
- [117:58]
Susan
So one of the major collectors was.
- [118:00]
Beckett
Yeah, I have nothing else.
- [118:02]
Susan
And in closing, how about part of a letter that First Lady Michelle Obama wrote after the release of Dovey Roundtree's autobiography, And I quote, Ms. Roundtree set a new path for the many women who followed her and proved once again that the vision and perseverance of a single individual can help to turn the tides of history. She has clearly demonstrated that even in the face of enormous challenges, an unblinking belief in equality and justice will spur real change. I'm inspired by Ms. Roundtree and hope that her story continues to motivate all Americans to fight for our shared values. It is on the shoulders of people like Dovey Johnson Roundtree that we stand today, and it is with her commitment to our core ideas, feels that we will continue moving toward a better tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
- [118:51]
Beckett
Bye.
- [118:52]
Susan
If you liked what you heard today, especially if you hadn't heard of our subject before, please tell a few friends about us or leave a review for us on your favorite podcatcher. Check out all of our archives and links to the things we talked about today at our website, thehistorychicks.com do join us if you would like, for our trips to the castles of the Loire Valley Valley and an exploration of the history of Italy. Go to likeminds travel.com to check out our itineraries and reserve your spot. The song at the end is Baby, get up by an artist called Luna. And we will see you next time.
- [119:32]
Song Performer
Carry emotions the weight of the ocean you keep climbing mountains too blind to see it's not getting you closer to where you wanna be in your life. The weight on your shoulders time to put it down. You fall and you break? You got battles to take but you figure it out yeah when you fall and you break you got change just to make. Now see the light at the end of the tunnel it's right there now just look up and follow Take one step at a time Bab with you all the way so baby get up now don't you stay down down, down, down, down now lift yourself up Baby, baby get oh baby get up. The bright is shining, the darkest sky is good so used to be hiding behind your fears. But from my perspective, you got just what it takes. You're in control here. Don't you forget. You fall and you break you got battles to take on but you figure it out yeah when you fall and you break you got changes to make now see the light at the end of the tunnel it's right there now just look up and follow take one step at a time babe with you all the way baby get up no don't you stay down. Baby, baby get so baby get up so baby get up don't you stay down down, down, down, down, down,
- [121:47]
Beckett
Down.
- [122:01]
Song Performer
See the light at the end of the tunnel it's right there and I just look up and follow take one step at a time I'm with you all the way right so baby get up don't you stay down go and lift yourself up Baby, baby get, get up.