Dovey Johnson Roundtree (April 17, 1914 - May 21, 2018) is an African-American civil rights activist, an ordained minister, and a lawyer. His victory in 1955 before the Interstate Trade Commission in the case of the first bus desegregation proposed prior to the ICC resulted in the sole explicit refusal of a "separate but equal" doctrine in the field of interstate bus transport by a court or federal administrative body. That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (64 MCC 769 (1955)), the Dovey Roundtree arguing with his legal partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson, was summoned by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the 1961 Freedom Riders' campaign in his successful struggle to force the Commission Interstate Trade to enforce its rules and end Jim Crow's law on public transport.
A protà © à © gà ©  © aktiv aktiv aktiv aktiv aktiv aktiv aktiv aktiv Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary Mary.. In 1961 he became one of the first women to receive full ministerial status in the African Episcopal Methodist Church, who had just begun ordaining women on a level other than a mere preacher in 1960. With his controversial claim to the all-white Bar Girl in the District of Columbia on in 1962, he broke the color line for minority women in the Washington legal community. In one of Washington's most sensational and protected murder cases, United States v. Ray Crump, attempting in the summer of 1965 on the night of the Watts riots, Roundtree won the acquittal for black workers accused of the murder of Georgetown socialite (and former wife of a CIA officer) Mary Pinchot Meyer, a woman with a romantic bond with President John F Kennedy.
The founding partner of the Washington, DC law firm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Parker in 1970 after the death of his first legal partner Julius Robertson in 1961, Roundtree is a special legal consultant to the AME Church, and General Counsel for the National Council of Negro Women. She is the inspiration for the depiction of actress Cicely Tyson about the maverick civil rights lawyer in the television series "Sweet Justice", and the recipient, along with retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, of 2000 female attorney attorney Margaret Bar American Achievement Award. In 2011 the scholarship fund was made in its name by Captain Charlotte of the National Alumnae Association of Spelman College. Roundtree also received the 2011 Torchbearer Award from the Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia, an organization he integrated in 1962. In March 2013, affordable elderly living facilities in the Southeast Washington DC community where he serves are named "The Roundtree Residences" for respect him. He turned 100 in April 2014 and died at the age of 104 in May 2018.
Video Dovey Johnson Roundtree
Early life and influence
Roundtree was born Dovey Mae Johnson in Charlotte, North Carolina, the second eldest of four daughters James Eliot Johnson, a printer in the local office of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Zion, and Lela Bryant Johnson, a tailor and domestic. Following his father's death in an influenza epidemic in 1919, Roundtree and his mother and sister lived with his maternal grandmother, Rachel Bryant Graham, and her husband, Reverend Clyde L. Graham, pastor of the Zion Church of AME. Although Rachel Graham has only third grade education, she has had a major influence in the black community of Charlotte, and through her involvement in the colorful women's club movement she formed a friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune, who at that time traveled extensively through the South as head of the National Association Colored Women's Club, a precursor to the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune's vision inspired Roundtree to excel academically, rose above poverty and Jim Crow, targeted a medical career, and worked through Spelman College from 1934 to 1938, at the height of the Great Depression.
It was Bethune to whom Roundtree changed in 1941, as the threat of World War II resulted in an unprecedented amount of work for African Americans in the country's "defense of preparedness" program. Resigned from his South Carolina teaching position he had taken college graduation in 1938, he sought Bethune in Washington, D.C. for assistance in getting jobs in the burgeoning defense industry. Bethune immediately tapped him for the select group of 40 African-American women who became the first people trained as officers in the newly created Armed Forces of the Armed Forces.
Maps Dovey Johnson Roundtree
Army service
Roundtree openly challenged the racial discrimination he faced in a very separate Army even though he recruited other African-American women to WAAC on his Southern Ujung assignments. Traveling in uniform in the winter of 1943 without the protection of the Army, he was expelled from a Miami bus and forced under threat of arrest to give his seat to a white marine. He insisted in his recruitment, bringing African-American women into the Corps in such numbers that even though women served in separate units, the grounds were laid for an interracial army four years before President Harry Truman mandated military desegregation by Executive Order 9981 in 1948.
Legal career
The first Roundtree entered the civil rights arena in October 1945 in a nine-month postwar work with black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who was holding a national campaign to make the FEPC as a permanent entity. The involvement of FEPC made him in touch with the man who would inspire him to take the law as his life mission: Constitutional lawyer Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist and law academy who later founded the National Organization for Women. Inspired by Murray's belief that the greatest instrument for social change is law, Roundtree enrolled at the Howard University School of Law in the fall of 1947, one of only five women in his class. From 1947 to 1950, he immersed himself in a school separation attack paired by Thurgood Marshall and Howard Law professor James Nabrit Jr.. and George EC Hayes who in 1954 culminated in the Supreme Council of Vocal Education Brown v. Board decision.
Desegregation of bus travel
In 1952, during the first year of his legal practice, Roundtree, along with his colleague and mentor, Julius Winfield Robertson, took the case of a bus desegregation that would make legal history: Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1955). The case comes from a complaint by an African-American private WAC named Sarah Louise Keys, who had been forced by a North Carolina bus driver to give her seat to a white marine, as did Roundtree himself in 1943 while recruiting for the Army.. The Key Case challenged the rights of private bus operators to impose Jim Crow's law on black passengers traveling across state borders.
When this issue was dismissed by the US District Court for the District of Columbia on a jurisdictional basis, Roundtree and Robertson filed their complaint with the Interstate Trade Commission, the federal administration body charged with the enactment of the Interstate Trade Act. Rejected by the Commission on their first pass, they filed an exception, arguing that the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board , inherited in May of the same year, delegitimizes segregation not only in public education, but in public transport as well. On November 7, 1955, in a historic decision in which the ICC abandoned its long history of adherence to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Commission prohibited separate but equal for the first time in the field of interstate bus travel. In the case of Locks, and in the case of the NAACP's companion railway that had lodged immediately after the Keys ( NAACP v. St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company 297 ICC 335 (1955), the ICC decided with precedent and decided that the language nondiscrimination of the Interstate Trade Act prohibits segregation itself.
Although praised by the press as a historic breakthrough and "irrevocable motion symbol," the case Lock was dormant from 1955 to 1961, its objectives were largely collected by ICC commissioners who disagreed with majority opinion, South Carolina Democrat J. Monroe Johnson. It was not until the summer of 1961, when violence resulting from the Freedom Riders campaign prompted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to take action against the ICC that the impact of the key case was felt. On May 29, 1961, in response to protests by civil rights leaders, Kennedy issued a petition for the Justice Department where he quoted the Keys and the case of the NAACP companion train, along with the Supreme Court of 1960 Boynton v. Virginia resigned and called on the ICC to enforce the verdict it had imposed in 1955. Under pressure from the Attorney General, the Commission finally acted on its own and in September 1961 permanently terminated segregation on a cross-country journey. Washington Washington, DC Washington DC, Washington DC, Washington DC, Washington DC, Washington DC, Washington DC, Washington DC, Washington DC.
While fighting against civil rights battles at the national level, Roundtree and his colleague Julius Robertson undertook to represent black clients in civil and criminal matters in a separate courtroom in Washington, DC. By the time black lawyers had to leave the courthouse to use the bathrooms and black clients were routinely referred to white lawyers to maximize their chances in court, Roundtree and Robertson broke the tradition. They pressed cases of black clients before white magistrates and judges and won, winning considerable recovery in cases of accidents and negligence. Their 1957 victory in the case of negligence against the Washington, DC, psychiatric facility, which resulted in the maximum allowable recovery under the Tort Federal Claim Act at the time, was widely regarded as a turning point not only for black clients in the State Capital but for lawyers black too.
The sudden death of his partner Julius Robertson from a heart attack in November 1961 marked a turning point for Dovey Roundtree, who as an African-American woman found himself as the only practitioner in the male-dominated legal community. "Whenever a female lawyer of any race is considered skeptical, I have gained a significant measure of the credibility of my association with Julius," he later wrote, adding that behind Robertson's death, "there are times when I feel really vulnerable. "Supported by his ordination into the ministry of the African Methodist Episcopal Church on November 30, 1961, Dovey Roundtree went on to develop emerging legal practice, working as a sole practitioner for nine years before establishing the second law firm, Roundtree Knox Hunter and Parker, in 1970.
In 1962, he damaged another barrier by nominating him as a member of the White Bar Association of White Bar District of Columbia by lawyer Joyce Hens Green (later an Associate Judge in US District Court for the Circuit District of Columbia). The nomination sparked a storm of controversy, with some members of the Association's board vehemently opposing Roundtree's candidacy. Only when Green demanded a vote by full membership, Roundtree recognized Bar Women as the first black member.
Ray Crump
The successful Roundtree defense of black workers accused of murder in 1964 for the alleged mistress Kennedy Mary Pinchot Meyer who strengthens his reputation in the Washington legal community, D.C. For a dollar, Roundtree took the defense of Ray Crump, Jr., who was accused of shooting Meyer's execution style as he walked along C & amp; O Canal. Crump, found by police wandering along the street strewn near the crime scene, was arrested on behalf of an eyewitness who claimed Crump was similar to the black man he had seen standing on Meyer's body shortly after the murder. He was later indicted without a preliminary hearing. Convinced that Crump's limited mental capacity made him incapable of such stealth killings and rigor, Roundtree took over the United States administration in a July 1965 trial in which the victim's fame attracted the attention of many lawyers, law students and journalists of the United States District Court.
Against the profound depth of case presented by US Attorney Alfred Hantman and his legal team, Roundtree pitted one fact: the small size of Crump. At five feet and three and a half inches and 130 pounds, Roundtree argues, Crump is four to five inches shorter and at least 50 pounds lighter than the man described by eyewitnesses. Stunningly cast in the palace with the brevity and simplicity of his thirty-minute case, Roundtree only summoned three witnesses, each of whom gave testimony about the good nature of Crump, and he presented but only one exhibition: Raymond Crump himself. The freed crumps continue to live what has been described as "a horrible criminal life."
The verdict of innocence in this case remains open to speculation of possible CIA involvement in the Meyer killing. This also reinforced Roundtree's reputation among Washington lawyers and judges, and resulted in his appointment being a high-profile murder case, including John Griffin's 1977 plea in a sensational court over his alleged role in the murder of Hanafi Muslim children at DC residence.. See 1973_Hanafi_Muslim_massacre.
Advocacy for children and families
In his final years of practice, Roundtree faked a unique role for himself, combining his ministry duties at the AME Allen Chapel Washington Church, located in one of the city's harshest neighborhoods, with his legal practice, focusing on family and ecumenical law.. Through religious organizations and legal groups, he became a public advocate for the welfare of small children, who he believed were threatened by social violence and family disintegration. He continued in this role after retiring from active legal practice in 1996.
Awards and honors
Roundtree is respected by local and national bar associations and legal and religious institutions. He received the 1995 Distinguished Alumna Award from Howard Law Alumni of Greater Washington, National Bar Association of Charlotte E. Ray Award 1995, Enlightenment Founder Day Spirit Spelman College 1996, Bar Woman Bar Margaret Award 2000 from American Prestation Award, Award Living Legacy 2004 from Howard University School of Divinity, and the 2006 Excellence Award from Charlotte, North Carolina Chapter of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund.
After retiring to his home in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1996, Roundtree joined black parents like John Hope Franklin, Coretta Scott King and Maya Angelou in creating an oral history of his life for the Internet through the National Visionary Leadership Project, founded by Camille Cosby and journalist Renee Poussaint. The 2004 interview with Poussaint appeared on the Project website at www.visionaryproject.org/roundtreedovey/
Roundtree's autobiography Justice Older than the Law, coauthored with National Magazine Award Winner Katie McCabe, won the 2009 Forest Memorial Book Prize Letitia Woods Brown from the Association of Black Woman Historians.
Roundtree was honored by First Lady Michelle Obama on the occasion of her 2009 autobiography liberation, Justice Older than the Law, which Roundtree co-authored with Washington journalist Katie McCabe and who won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Woman Historians. In a letter published on July 23, 2009, honoring Roundtree at the Women in Military Service for the American Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the First Lady quoted Roundtree's historic contribution to law, the military and the ministry, and stated: "Being on the shoulders of such people Dovey Johnson Roundtree that we hold today, and with its commitment to our core ideals that we will continue to move towards a better tomorrow. "
Note
References
External links
- Challenging System: Two Women Soldiers Fight for Equality.
- Roundtree Dovey: Visionary Video, video interview with Renee Poussaint journalist.
- Roundtree Dovey. Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, PBS, March 3, 1999.
- Senior Residence of Round Tree of Residence Named for Dovey Visionary Bundle.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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