Dovey Undaunted

  DOVEY

  UNDAUNTED

  A Black Woman Breaks Barriers in the Law, the Military, and the Ministry

  TONYA BOLDEN

  For Zakai Eliza Lee Brunson

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Those Poor Broken Feet

  2 God’s House

  3 Worthy Wish

  4 Miracle-Maker

  5 No

  6 No Glamour Girls Need Apply

  7 All-In

  8 Of Courage and Conviction

  9 Her Legacy to Me

  10 Shatter the Monster

  11 Of Sacredness

  12 A Calling

  13 Hurting in Every Way

  14 Incapable

  15 Minister in the Family

  16 No Words. Only Breathing

  17 Voir Dire

  18 Scared to Death

  19 Thank You, Sir

  20 To Simplicity

  21 Hair Is Not Like Fingerprints

  22 Exhibit A

  23 Adler Heels

  24 If Justice Is to Be Done

  25 Wept

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Sources

  Picture Credits

  Index

  DOVEY UNDAUNTED

  PROLOGUE

  “LAWYER, WHAT IS IT they say I done?”

  That was Ray on a late October day in 1964.

  Black.

  Twenty-five.

  Eighth-grade education.

  Construction worker.

  Husband.

  Father of five.

  Imprisoned in Washington, DC’s, main detention facility, the DC Jail.

  A year earlier, Ray had been sentenced to sixty days for shoplifting. Twice he’d been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.

  “Lawyer” was fifty-year-old Dovey J. Roundtree.

  “They say you killed a lady.”

  What spiraled through Ray’s mind is a mystery, and not many people cared.

  Not about his mind.

  Not about him.

  Ray was a nobody in society’s eyes.

  No stocks and bonds, no real estate, no bank accounts, no car. Nothing of value.

  Raymond Crump Jr. on the day of the murder at DC's Metropolitan Police Headquarters, 300 Indiana Avenue, NW.

  When arrested on Monday, October 12, 1964, he had on him only a buck and a half.

  The woman Ray was accused of killing on that chilly, clear DC day was definitely a somebody—a socialite, in fact.

  White. Blonde. Beautiful.

  “Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyer, prominent Georgetown artist and a niece of a noted conservationist, was shot to death yesterday as she was walking on the C&O Canal towpath near Georgetown,” reported DC’s Evening Star on October 13.

  That noted conservationist was the wealthy Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the US Forest Service and twice governor of Pennsylvania. His younger brother, Amos, Mary’s father, had been an esteemed attorney (and also wealthy). Mary’s mother, Ruth, an alumna of the elite, then all-woman Vassar College, was a former journalist.

  The victim, forty-three, divorced, and the mother of two boys away at prep schools in New England, was a Vassar alumna too. So was her sister, Tony, at the time married to Ben Bradlee, Newsweek magazine’s Washington Bureau chief.

  What’s more, the victim’s celebrity friends included former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whose husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been close friends with Ben Bradlee. President Kennedy had been assassinated eleven months earlier in Dallas, Texas, shot as his open-top Lincoln limousine cruised past a grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza.

  Henry Wiggins was an earwitness to the shooting of Mary Pinchot Meyer. This twenty-four-year-old Black employee of an Esso gas station and another guy were working on a car, a stalled Nash Rambler, across the road from the abandoned Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. At about 12:20 p.m. they heard screams.

  “At first we didn’t pay much attention,” Wiggins told a reporter. “You know that area down there—it could have been some kids playing. Or it might have been a bunch of winos fighting. Then all of a sudden I heard a shot and I started across the road.”

  As he went, he heard another shot.

  When Wiggins reached the low-rise stone wall separating the road from the footpath that hugs the C&O Canal, he saw a Black man standing over a white woman’s body, a man who soon ran off.

  Wiggins raced to his tow truck.

  Within minutes, a crowd of cops—Park Police, Metropolitan Police—some on foot, others in scout cars, sirens wailing, were on the scene.

  Wiggins was back too.

  A manhunt ensued, and shortly after 1 p.m. a detective spotted Ray near the crime scene.

  Soaking wet.

  Tipsy.

  Blood on his right hand.

  He was questioned.

  Cuffed.

  Identified by Wiggins.

  Hauled to the police department’s headquarters.

  Booked.

  Placed in a lineup.

  Identified by Wiggins again.

  A week later Raymond Crump Jr. was indicted for first-degree murder.

  AT FIRST, WORD WAS that Mary Pinchot Meyer’s murder stemmed from a botched robbery.

  “Robbery Motive Seen in Shooting of DC Artist,” the Washington Post told its readers on October 13. But a day later the Evening Star reported, “Rape Weighed as Motive in Death of Mrs. Meyer.” That same day a Washington Post front-page story explained the switch: the victim’s pocketbook and wallet had been found in her studio, where an electric fan was still “blowing on a newly finished painting.”

  Robbery?

  Rape?

  Ray’s mother, Martha Crump, believed in her bones that her son, the oldest of three, had not killed that white lady, let alone tried to rob or rape her. At her pastor’s urging, Mrs. Crump pleaded with Dovey J. Roundtree to take her son’s case. Roundtree’s reputation was legend in the Black community. Martha Crump’s pastor called her a “righteous lawyer.”

  At first, Dovey doubted Ray’s innocence. From what she had heard and read, the government’s case against him was strong, very strong.

  But at the end of their first meeting in the DC Jail on that late October day, Roundtree was convinced that Ray was many things—definitely none too bright—but no murderer. So she, long a champion and defender of nobodies—the poor, the shunted-aside, the brutalized, the degraded, the broken—was ready to fight like a tiger for Ray.

  And she had this hanging over her head: if her defense failed, if a jury found Ray guilty of first-degree murder, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

  Or he could draw his last breath in a small chamber on the fourth floor of the DC Jail.

  Strapped into its electric chair.

  Riding the lightning.

  1

  THOSE POOR BROKEN FEET

  DOVEY MAE JOHNSON ROUNDTREE came from fighting stock, was mentored and molded, inspired, pushed forward, blessed by warriors throughout her life. First and foremost was her maternal grandmother, Rachel Graham.

  Born poor.

  Born after the Civil War, in the early 1870s.

  Born in the South during Reconstruction, when in the face of fierce and steaming racism, legions of courageous people, Black and white, strove through speeches, rallies, and, most important, through political and legal maneuvers to make America catch up to its creed.

  In December 1865 chattel slavery had been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Four months later came the nation’s first civil rights act. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 established that, except for Native Americans living on reservations, all people born in the United States were citizens of the nation with “full and equ
al benefit of all laws.”

  Republican Congressmen were responsible for this law at a time when many abolitionists and civil rights activists made up the Republican Party.

  But a law could be easily repealed. Not so with a constitutional amendment. Through Republican efforts, in 1868 came the Fourteenth Amendment. To birthright citizenship was added naturalized citizenship. What’s more, the amendment banned states from denying anyone within their borders “life, liberty or property without due process of law” and “the equal protection of the laws.”

  Hope for a just America surged even more in February 1870 when Black men gained the right to the national vote through the Fifteenth Amendment.

  Five years on, in 1875, when Dovey’s Grandma Rachel was a toddler, came another civil rights act. This one declared that all people in the nation were entitled to equal treatment in hotels and restaurants, on railroad cars and such.

  But in 1883, when Grandma Rachel was about ten, the US Supreme Court declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional.

  And on May 18, 1896, in the case Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation—Jim Crow—meaning separate railroad cars, water fountains, schools, parks for white and Black people—was all perfectly legal.

  If these facilities were equal in quality.

  That was a big “if.” Separate-but-equal was generally nonexistent if white people had a say in the creation of and maintenance of those parks, those schools, those water fountains, those railroad cars. What Black people got was second-rate.

  The backlash against progress didn’t manifest itself just in legal decisions. Violence was a much-used tool.

  Shootings.

  Whippings.

  Beheadings.

  Hangings.

  Burnings (of persons and property).

  Torture and murder of Black men, women, and children, along with righteous white people, came at the hands of die-hard white supremacists. Many were members of the White Man’s League, the Ku Klux Klan, and other paramilitary terrorist outfits.

  DURING THESE DAYS OF freedom gained, freedom denied, Dovey Mae’s Grandma Rachel was rendered a girl with broken feet.

  “They were gnarled and twisted and horribly misshapen, with the bones sticking out in strange ways.” Dovey Mae’s first look at “those poor broken feet” scared her to death. And she never forgot the anguish that swept across her beloved grandmother’s face when, several years later, she explained how her feet got that way.

  Rachel was thirteen, living near Henrietta, North Carolina, where her pa worked on a farm, when the white man who managed that farm tried to rape her.

  “I ran and fought every way I knew how. And I hurt him.”

  We don’t know how she hurt that man, only how the brute hurt her.

  With young Rachel in his clutches, he “stomped, hard as he could, on my feet—to keep me from runnin’ for good, he told me. But I kept runnin’. Wasn’t nothing to do but fight him, hard as I could. He wasn’t goin’ to have his way with me.”

  The bones of her feet were never set right. So Grandma Rachel, a petite woman, walked “with a swaying awkwardness that late at night became a limp.” At eventide, with a day’s labor behind her—cooking, canning, making soap, making starch, scrubbing clothes, gardening, sweeping floors—Grandma Rachel tended to her paining feet with steaming hot foot soaks followed by a gentle rubdown with a homemade ointment of turpentine and mutton tallow.

  DOVEY MAE WAS FIVE years old when she first laid eyes on Grandma Rachel’s broken feet. This was about sixty miles east of Henrietta, in Charlotte, North Carolina, a cotton mill town nicknamed Queen City.

  That’s where Dovey Mae was born, on April 17, 1914, and where she lived, at 505 South Long Street, until shortly after a devastation on October 27, 1918.

  Her papa, James Eliot Johnson, died.

  Papa, twenty-six, was a casualty of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. It infected about a half-billion people, killing roughly 675,000 Americans and an estimated 25 million people worldwide.

  Along with Dovey Mae, age four-and-a-half, Mr. Johnson left behind his wife, Lela, and three other daughters. The youngest were Rachel, just two months old, and Eunice, two years younger than Dovey Mae. Two years older than Dovey was Beatrice, known as Bea, the daughter of James and his first wife, who died before James and Lela married.

  “I was too young to grasp the terrible sweep of the influenza epidemic,” Dovey Mae later wrote. “I understood only that my tall handsome papa, who one moment had been riding me on the handlebars of his bicycle in the autumn sunshine, was gone, and my mother was crying.”

  2

  GOD'S HOUSE

  AFTER DOVEY’S PAPA DIED, home was nearby at Grandma Rachel and Grandpa Clyde’s house, 613 East Boundary Street. That was the parsonage of the church Grandpa pastored, East Stonewall African Methodist Episcopal Zion, a member of one of America’s oldest historically Black denominations, the oldest being the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

  East Stonewall AME Zion was a family affair. Grandma Rachel baked the communion bread, made the communion wine, kept the altar linens pristine. Mama led the choir with her “rich alto.” As for Grandpa, the Reverend Clyde Leonard Graham, he was a powerful preacher. His sermons made an everlasting impression on Dovey Mae—“a rich tapestry of Holy Scripture and political protest, all strung together in a way that shot through you like something electric.”

  That electrifying preacher, Grandma Rachel’s second husband, was also a dutiful, generous family man. He had raised Dovey Mae’s mama and her two brothers as if they were blood, just as Mama was doing with Bea.

  ________

  GRANDMA RACHEL AND GRANDPA CLYDE’S home, which now housed a family of seven, wasn’t a large, sprawling place but a shotgun house: a narrow, rectangular one-story dwelling.

  No halls. One room led into the next. (Think of a railroad car.) On hot, humid summer days, with front and back doors open, heavenly breezes could rush through it, bringing relief from the heat.

  For the longest while folks said shotgun houses, once abundant in Charlotte and in other parts of the South, were so named because a shot fired from the front door could whiz right through the open back door. Now people say that this style of house originated in West Africa, that “shotgun” is a garbling of “togun” or “shogun,” a West African word for “gathering place” or “God’s House.”

  In Grandma and Grandpa’s God’s House money was often scarce: “We pieced out our existence in pennies, it seemed to me,” remembered Dovey Mae.

  Pennies, nickels, dimes, and dollars came from Grandpa’s small neighborhood grocery store. From Grandma doing laundry for well-off white folks. From Mama cooking and cleaning in white folks’ homes. Donations from parishioners helped, and as Dovey Mae and her sisters grew older they pitched in with earnings from this-and-that odd jobs. How much easier, lighter, life might have been had tall, handsome Papa lived. And not just on the financial front. His death “left a hole” in Dovey Mae’s heart, a void that would be with her always.

  Papa’s heart for God remained with Dovey Mae too. Her father, operator of the printing press at the AME Zion Publishing House, had been in charge of Sunday school at the family church. One of Dovey Mae’s prized possessions was his small black devotional. In it he had written: “By all let it be known that I, James Eliot Johnson, have loved the teaching of Sunday school.”

  A section of Charlotte's Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1940s. The four houses to the right of the pole are shotgun houses.

  Dovey Mae relished Mama’s talk about how much she was like Papa: “I spoke like him, she told me often, used my hands in the way he did, had his ability to command the attention of a roomful of people.”

  THINGS FAR FROM GODLY stayed with Dovey too: stings, slaps, stabs to psyche and soul wrought by Jim Crow.

  For her—child, teen, woman—segregation was detestable. Whether forced to take a back seat in a trolley car or enduring the stench of “garbage
in the back-alley entrance to segregated movie theaters,” she always “felt personally violated.”

  She’d never forget the spring day when she was six or seven and had the treat of going with Grandma Rachel into town to tend to some business. Grandma had a tight grip on her hand as they walked to the trolley stop. Then, when the trolley car pulled up, opened its doors, a joyful Dovey Mae broke free, bounded up the stairs, plopped down in an empty seat right behind the driver.

  “Get that pickaninny out of here!” Mister Trolley Car Driver yelled. “You know she can’t sit there.”

  Dovey Mae was also still a child on a fearsome night when shutters slammed shut, a kerosene lamp was hastily put out, and Dovey huddled in the darkness with her sisters crying. Outside, hoofbeats thundered and men howled, lashing their horses. Grandma paced with a grip on her broom.

  Klansmen rode on by that night without harming Dovey Mae’s home and family, but different Klansmen had done damage to Grandma Rachel when she was a young wife and mother. Her first husband, John Bryant, had gotten himself in their crosshairs for reasons that remained a mystery. To live, he fled, never heard from again.

  JIM CROW AND WHITE terror didn’t render Dovey Mae bitter, beat-down, broken. That was thanks to the prayer and praise song that pulsed through her home where, unlike money, love was never scarce. And there was Grandma’s staunch proclamation that her children were “as good as anybody.”

  Soothing too was the yummy smell, yummy taste of Grandma’s gingerbread and other baked goodies. With some summer days came pre-dawn forays into the woods for blackberries—“and Grandma knew how to find the ripest, the best.”

  Come any Sunday morning—the “grand procession.”

  With Mama and her sisters, Dovey Mae walked tall behind Grandpa Clyde and Grandma Rachel from the parsonage to their church. “Behind us marched the whole world—the dozens of families who made up Grandpa’s flock, wending their way through the clay streets and alleyways of the neighborhood known as Brooklyn.”

  Long before Dovey Mae was born, when this largely Black neighborhood, this heart of Black Charlotte, was called Logtown, it earned high marks. The Charlotte Observer reported that a public health officer found the place “to be in a cleaner and healthier condition than any other part of the city.” Its residents seemed “to vie with each other in keeping their premises free from all garbage and filth, and in improving and beautifying their yards.”