by Tonya Bolden
In 1940, a year before Pauli entered Howard Law, America had roughly 173,000 male lawyers. Of that number about 1,000 were Black men. Of the nearly 4,200 female lawyers, a mere 39 were Black women. So Pauli Murray was indeed a rare bird and Dovey was prepared to be one too. She decided to attend Howard Law, then devote herself to shattering the monster.
Going to law school was financially feasible thanks to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. Through it veterans honorably discharged who had served at least ninety days could get low-interest loans to begin businesses, low-interest mortgages for purchasing homes, and money for educational expenses. As a former WAC, Dovey could go to law school on the GI Bill.
The answer for black people, she told me . . . lay in the law.
The law wasn’t the only magnet in Dovey’s life while she was working out west to save the FEPC. There was also a man, Morehouse graduate William Andre “Bill” Roundtree. In her memoir Dovey wrote that, during her Spelman days, the two had chatted aboard trolley cars, gone to movies, enjoyed picnics and library study dates.
Light-brown-skinned Bill was, like Dovey’s Papa, “so tall and so handsome.” Like Dovey this native of Atlanta was not a member of the Black bourgeoisie. He came from a family of domestic workers and had been one himself. As a teen he was a servant in the home of a white assistant cashier at a bank. Bill was working as a houseman and yardman for the same employer when in 1942 he enlisted in the army, where he rose from private to lieutenant.
Though their romance had fizzled out after they graduated from college, during the war the two had kept in touch. After the war, a long-distance courtship ensued through phone calls.
As the law drew Dovey like a magnet, at first Bill cheered her on. Her plan to go to Howard Law became his plan too.
In December 1945, the couple met in Chicago to marry, she from her FEPC field work in Portland, Oregon, and he from Atlanta.
They married on Christmas Eve: Dovey in a powder-blue suit, Bill in his uniform. Their simple ceremony was held in the home of Baptist minister Ira M. Hendon and his wife, Belle. The Reverend Hendon pastored the church to which Dovey’s maid of honor and WAC mate Ruth Freeman belonged.
Married within just a few months of reconnecting?
Having not laid eyes on each other for years?
Dovey later chalked it up to “the madness of the postwar world, a time when the longing for normalcy eclipsed the common sense of otherwise sane souls.”
AFTER THE WEDDING, DOVEY returned to her FEPC work. Bill was close by her side during the rest of her Oregon campaign.
But something was very wrong. “The more I talked of ‘our’ law school plans as we prepared to leave Portland, the quieter he grew.”
After Dovey completed her work for the FEPC and the couple settled in Washington, DC, it became very clear to Dovey that something was very wrong. “Our days were filled with the pressing matter of securing jobs. But when we faced each other across the table in the evenings, our little efficiency apartment echoed in the way a home echoes when it is truly empty.”
In the summer of 1946 Dovey and Bill faced a hard truth. Marrying had been madness, a mistake.
As for law school, it “had been my dream, not his, he said.” Bill did not share her passion for a life devoted to the civil rights crusade. One day he told her that he planned to re-enlist in the army—“perhaps even go overseas again.”
The two soon separated.
This time for good.
________
IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1946, DOVEY was no longer living in that efficiency apartment but in Room A205 in Wake Hall on 24th and Oklahoma, a government dorm for veterans. This was the address she gave on an application for a job as an administrative assistant with the Office of Price Administration, a job she did not get. However, a year later she got her wish to go to law school.
11
OF SACREDNESS
“ARE YOU REGISTERING FOR your husband or your brother?”
That’s what a clerk in the registrar’s office at Howard University asked Dovey when she handed over the paperwork that would enable her to attend its law school on the GI Bill.
Remembered Dovey: “That a woman should have attained the rank of captain in the army seemed to confound her entirely, and her colleagues as well. One by one, they abandoned their posts at the counter and stepped over to scrutinize both me and my army papers, at which point the entire registration process ground to a halt.”
Dovey finally cut through the nonsense. “Do it just like you do it for the male veterans.”
In September 1947 Dovey became a student at Howard Law, a first-rate school at a university with the motto Veritas et Utilitas: Truth and Service.
CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON WAS the person who had made Howard Law first-rate.
This tough, tenacious, and physically imposing member of DC’s Black elite was a graduate of Amherst College (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa 1915) and of Harvard Law, where he became the first Black student elected to the editorial board of its scholarly journal, Harvard Law Review. At Harvard Charlie Houston earned a bachelor of laws (LLB) degree in 1922 and an SJD (the equivalent of a PhD in law) in 1923. He capped that with a year of civil law studies in Spain, at the University of Madrid.
Houston began transforming Howard Law in 1929 after he was appointed its vice dean. By the time he stepped down in 1935 to become the NAACP’s general counsel, Houston had raised the standards for admission, developed a rigorous curriculum, and recruited the brightest minds he could find for his faculty.
Most important, Houston trained up a corps of law students to be crusaders, warriors against Jim Crow, believers like him that a lawyer was “either a social engineer”—a force for good—“or a parasite on society.”
Houston and his troops, including future US Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall (class of 1933), took on Jim Crow in the workplace, in transportation, and, most of all, in education, always with a tight focus on the fact that “separate” schools and such were almost never “equal.”
For example, Houston took up the cause of Donald Gaines Murray, an Amherst graduate. In 1935 Murray was denied admission to the University of Maryland’s law school solely because of his race.
But where was Maryland’s separate but equal law school for Black people? As a result of Houston’s deft handling of the young man’s lawsuit, Donald Gaines Murray was admitted to the University of Maryland’s law school.
For this victory and for his overall strategy for shattering the monster, Charles Hamilton Houston became known as “Mr. Civil Rights” and as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”
WHEN THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD DOVEY MAE Johnson Roundtree entered Howard Law in the fall of 1947, Houston was still waging legal attacks on Jim Crow, but he had stepped down as NAACP’s general counsel for health reasons. He had handed the reins over to Thurgood Marshall, founder in 1940 of America’s first civil rights law firm: the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund—the LDF for short.
At Howard, Dovey witnessed some of Marshall’s masterminding in the war on Jim Crow. She remembered him “and his band” of LDF attorneys practically taking over Howard’s campus at one point. They “set up camp in the library, mined its materials and amassed more, and convened in our moot courtroom on the evenings preceding their oral arguments before the Supreme Court for ‘dry runs’ of the cases.”
Weighing in was Professor James Madison Nabrit Jr., a graduate of Morehouse and of Northwestern University’s law school and a civil rights attorney who had had a successful practice in Houston, Texas.
Professor Nabrit, whose father had given Dovey a glowing recommendation for Spelman, was without a doubt one of Charlie Houston’s best recruits. And apparently a terror to first-year students.
“No one forgets the memorable and dramatic first meeting with Mr. James Madison Nabrit,” wrote one of Dovey’s classmates. Questions that freckled, ginger-haired, blue-eyed Nabrit lobbed at students “were baffl
ing, his pace was inexorable.” However, “as the days gathered themselves into weeks, we learned that no master could have a keener interest in his charges, no sage could stimulate the thinking processes more than this scholarly gentleman with the Texas drawl.”
Dovey was forever indebted to fine minds at Howard Law, including George E. C. Hayes, “the venerable master of civil procedure,” and labor law experts Joe Waddy and Howard Jenkins, but it was Nabrit, she said, “who made me a lawyer.”
It was through Nabrit that she came to her “earliest understanding of the Constitution, of its perversion, and of its promise.” She credited him with shaping not only her “approach to legal reasoning” but also her “vision of the law as a thing of sacredness.”
Civil procedure.
Labor law.
Civil rights law.
Criminal law.
Constitutional law.
Heady, tough (and at times dry) stuff, requiring long hours of study in the library and in her little apartment in Southeast DC.
During her early days at Howard, there were moments when Dovey felt as if she was “drowning.” This at a time when she was working two part-time jobs. What’s more, Dovey was dealing with diabetes, which can cause fatigue and brain fog and which left her with some eyesight problems.
But Dovey received a lot of encouragement from members of the Howard Law family.
One of those people was attorney Ollie Mae Cooper. Dovey remembered her as a “mother hen and ally-in-chief to us women students.” Cooper had graduated from Howard Law, magna cum laude, in 1921. “You can do it,” Cooper told Dovey.
Fellow law student Julius Winfield Robertson was another source of inspiration and encouragement. Julius became a mentor and very good friend.
TOWERING, BOOMING-VOICED JULIUS ROBERTSON was the author of a 1944 pamphlet, This Bird Must Fly, a scathing attack on Jim Crow, calling for it to fly high and away, quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Like Dovey, Julius was a child of the South: born in Greensboro, Georgia, and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. Like her, he had faced hard times. Forced to leave college during the Great Depression, Julius at one point served as a post commandant in Mississippi at a camp of the Civilian Conservation Corps, another of FDR’s New Deal initiatives. After Julius moved to DC he became a civil servant, first as a messenger for the Department of Labor.
This big bear of a man was a husband and father of four when in 1945, at age twenty-eight, he entered Howard Law. In 1948, Julius graduated at the top of his class.
Two years later, on Friday, June 9, 1950, it was Dovey Mae Johnson Roundtree’s turn to once again don cap and gown. Of the thirty-six students in Howard Law’s class of 1950, she was one of only three women.
During her days at Howard Law Dovey had taken on more than just her coursework. We learn from her yearbook that in her second year she received a research award and was appointed to the Howard Law Review. As a senior, she was class vice president. She was also a member of a social and professional networking group, the Portia Club, and of Epsilon Sigma Iota Legal Sorority.
In that yearbook, opposite “Major Interest,” some students had listed “General Practice” or “Business and Labor Law” or “Criminal Law.” For Dovey it was “Civil Rights.”
AS GRADUATION DAY NEARED, Dovey’s surpassing joy was that Mama and Grandma Rachel would be there to witness her triumph. Dovey had scraped together enough money to send them round-trip Southern Railway tickets, ones stamped “Reserved Seat.”
But when Dovey met Mama and Grandma Rachel at Union Station—no joy.
“Grandma was limping, and my mother, disheveled and agitated, walked alongside her, dragging the luggage and looking wildly about in all directions.”
Grandma Rachel, who decades earlier had been rendered a girl with “those poor broken feet”. . .
Grandma Rachel, who had “a swaying awkwardness” in her gait “that late at night became a limp” . . .
Grandma Rachel had stood during the entire train ride.
Mama too.
From Charlotte, North Carolina, to Concord, to Salisbury, to High Point, to Greensboro, to Reidsville, then on into Virginia, through Danville, Lynchburg, Monroe, Charlottesville, Alexandria, then into Union Station in DC.
A roughly ten-hour journey.
Grandma Rachel was near eighty. Mama in her fifties.
Those tickets stamped “Reserved Seat” meant absolutely nothing.
Grandma Rachel and Mama had to stand for all that time because the Jim Crow car was packed, not a seat to be had, and no one willing to stand in their stead.
They had to stand, too, because when they tried to sit in a half-empty car for white people, the conductor yelled them back into the coach for Black people.
Shortly before the train reached Union Station, Grandma Rachel “collapsed on the closed seat of the toilet in the bathroom at the front of the car, and stayed there,” wrote Dovey.
WITH GRANDMA RACHEL AND MAMA in her apartment, Dovey examined those poor broken feet. “They were bruised and bleeding.” They needed more than a steaming hot soak and massage. With trembling hands Dovey telephoned her doctor.
Spitting mad, Dovey was consumed with getting justice for her family.
“All through the whirlwind of graduation weekend, with Mama and Grandma rallying to cheer me as I marched proudly into Howard’s Rankin Chapel to claim my diploma, my mind moved endlessly over the facts of their case and my chances of winning a lawsuit in their behalf against the Southern Railway.”
In the end, with Grandma Rachel in no shape to go through a trial and begging Dovey to just leave the matter alone, Dovey acquiesced, accepting a settlement of a few hundred dollars on Mama and Grandma Rachel’s behalf. This was in late 1951.
By then, Dovey had furthered her legal education by taking classes at Georgetown University, and in December 1950, Dovey had taken the grueling two-day bar examination. On December 17, the eve of day one, for inspiration she listened to a radio broadcast of the annual Spelman-Morehouse Christmas Carol Concert.
Two months later, on February 24, 1951, Dovey’s name appeared in DC’s Evening Star in an article headlined “14 Women Included Among 295 Passing Bar Examinations.” Of the 449 people who took the exam, 154 or nearly 35 percent failed to pass it.
Then, a week after her thirty-seventh birthday, on April 21, 1951, Dovey was sworn in as a member of the Washington, DC, bar.
Dovey J. Roundtree, Esquire, soon wrote to Florence Read, announcing that she had been “busy at it since” and had even earned “a fee or two.” This was as a junior partner at a firm at 1931 Eleventh Street, NW, headed by three Black men: Lindsey W. Caine, Jesse W. Lewis, and her buddy Julius Robertson.
Dovey also told Read that she planned “to pull out of this organization within the next eight months” to establish a new firm with Julius.
12
A CALLING
EARLY DAYS WERE LEAN for the law firm of Robertson & Roundtree.
A basket of eggs.
A mess of collards.
That’s how some clients paid for services, such as drafting wills and handling a small-claims court case, perhaps a tenant-landlord dispute in which the plaintiff wasn’t suing for tens of thousands of dollars, but maybe a few thousand, even a few hundred.
Despite business being lean, one of the first things Dovey did was repay another debt to another Mary: Mary McLeod Bethune, then headquartered in a grand townhouse at 1318 Vermont, NW.
When Dovey went to that townhouse to repay her debt, she didn’t give Bethune a stack of bills, but a pledge: for the rest of her life she would give the National Council of Negro Women free legal services. “It was, in my mind, the least I could do by way of paying her back. She’d brought me into an army that for all its discrimination had given me a voice and a role in shaping history.”
________
DRAFTING WILLS AND UNTANGLING deceased people’s estates were Robertson & Roundtree’s bread and butter. “We took every case th
at came our way,” remembered Dovey, “provided we could do so honestly, and worked it stem to stern, researching and cross-checking each other with enough fanaticism for a half dozen lawyers.”
Their firm, with office space consisting of a room in one or another row house on Eleventh Street, NW, was “an almost round-the-clock operation.” Julius worked at the post office nights and managed their practice by day. Dovey managed it in the evenings. By then, she worked days at the Department of Labor as an attorney-adviser.
During these lean days, Dovey and Julius were denied membership in the Bar Association of the District of Columbia (BADC) with its networking opportunities and its extraordinary law library housed in the district courthouse, space for which the BADC paid no rent. If Dovey, Julius, and any other Black lawyers wanted to use this library, they had to pay an eight-dollar annual fee. BADC, formed in 1871, opened its doors to white female attorneys in 1941. It would keep them shut to Black attorneys until 1958.
When Dovey and Julius did have business at the district courthouse, they had to leave the building if they needed a lunch break or if nature called. The courthouse bathrooms and cafeteria were whites-only.
In the face of obstacles and discrimination, Dovey and Julius remained committed. For them being a lawyer wasn’t about fame and flash, wasn’t about bringing in bundles of cash and acquiring things a lot of money can buy. Being a lawyer was “a calling.”
Veritas et Utilitas.
A significant opportunity for Dovey and Julius to cleave to that calling, to be lawyers of truth and service, came on a September afternoon in 1952, a day on which DC was still in the grip of summer heat, with folks seeking relief with hand fans, electric fans, and long, tall glasses of ice water.
The case concerned the trampling of the rights of a WAC: Private First Class Sarah Louise Keys.
BACK IN JULY, TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Sarah Louise Keys, a receptionist and information clerk at Fort Dix, New Jersey, boarded a Safeway Trails bus in nearby Trenton. She was on leave and at the start of a roughly twenty-hour journey to Washington, North Carolina, where her family lived.