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May 22, 2018

Lawyer and Civil Rights Pioneer Dovey Johnson Roundtree Dies at 104
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And lawyer and civil rights pioneer Dovey Johnson Roundtree has died at
the age of 104. Throughout her legal career, Roundtree shattered gender
and racial barriers and successfully challenged Jim Crow laws and
segregation. She was also among the first black women to train as an
officer in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and among the first women to
be ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. This is Dovey
Johnson Roundtree speaking about her experience working for then-NAACP
lawyer Thurgood Marshall in the preparations for Brown v. Board of
Education. Thurgood Marshall would go on to become the first
African-American Supreme Court justice.

Dovey Johnson Roundtree: "We were always looking for the pattern. Where
are we going? Can we go there? Why can't we go now? And sometimes the
answer was, 'Well, we got to wait for this theory to be exhausted, and
get to the Supreme Court. And we have to wait for that.' So a lot of
things went into the pattern of getting it to the Supreme Court. You get
some reading of how courts in between would be reacting to the theory,
say, of non-discrimination in education. See that didn't just happen.
You had to come up a long way with a number of states to get it right so
that when it hit the Supreme Court they only had one question that they
needed to be answered. Because courts like to deviate. Go down here and
stay 10 years. You know? Then a lot of heads get beat over. A lot of
losses be sustained. But that's the way the legal system is."

That was Dovey Johnson Roundtree. She died on Monday at the age of 104.


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