by Tonya Bolden
When that Safeway Trails bus pulled into the DC bus terminal, Sarah and the other passengers were transferred to a bus operated by Carolina Trailways for the rest of their journey farther south. Sarah opted for a seat near the front.
No problem.
But hours later, on the other side of midnight, that Carolina Trailways driver pulled into the bus terminal in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. A new Mister Bus Driver took over.
Problem.
While checking passengers’ tickets, this white man ordered Sarah to the back of the bus so that a white Marine could have her seat. This was not only rude, but illegal, made so in 1946 after the ordeal another Black woman, Irene Morgan, had endured while traveling by bus.
En route home to Baltimore from Gloucester County, Virginia, Irene Morgan had refused the Greyhound bus driver’s request that she surrender her seat to a white person. This Mister Bus Driver was operating under a 1930 Virginia law that empowered bus drivers to add to or subtract seats from the “colored” or white sections, make passengers change their seats, and give anyone who didn’t cooperate the boot.
A postcard showing a Carolina Trailways bus at the terminal in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, where Sarah Keys was humiliated, then arrested.
Irene Morgan was kicked off that Greyhound bus and placed under arrest. Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP LDF took up her case.
In Morgan v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court determined that the 1930 Virginia law wasn’t applicable. In a 6–1 decision the court ruled that segregation in commercial interstate buses ran afoul of the US Constitution’s commerce clause. That clause gave the power to regulate commerce among states to Congress, not to states. In other words, a bus operating, say, only in Virginia could enforce Jim Crow seating, but a bus carrying passengers through more than one state could not.
Given Irene Morgan’s victory, how was it that six years later another Mister Bus Driver could demand that Sarah Louise Keys surrender her seat?
Because there was massive, sustained white resistance to fairness, to justice, to obeying certain laws.
In July 1946, weeks after the Morgan decision, the NAACP’s Crisis magazine printed a prescient article: “The US Supreme Court opinion in the Irene Morgan case . . . marks the beginning of the end of Jim Crow in this country. There will be resistance by whites in many areas. There will be demagogic statements by politicians and rabble-rousers. There will be timidity among many Negroes. Custom and habit, backed by state laws, have strongly conditioned both whites and blacks so that the overturn will not be sudden.”
A Supreme Court ruling is one thing, enforcement another. If bus drivers, if CEOs of bus companies, if board members of those companies refused to obey a ruling like that in Morgan v. Virginia . . .
Shattering the monster was painstaking work on the part of thousands of people. Bus companies refusing to obey a US Supreme Court ruling had to be caught in the act. Lawsuits had to be filed. People had to put their lives on the line.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1952, Sarah Louise Keys took a stand in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. She took a stand against custom and habit, against timidity. She refused to surrender her seat.
In reaction, Mister Bus Driver ordered passengers onto another bus.
All except Sarah. She was left behind that night, about ninety miles from home. But getting home wasn’t even an option. Sarah was arrested for disorderly conduct, carted off to jail.
No phone call.
No release until she paid a $25 fine the next day (equivalent to roughly $300 today).
Howard Law graduate and NAACP attorney Frank Reeves steered Sarah and her father, David, to Robertson & Roundtree.
David Keys, a Navy veteran, was an itinerant mason working in DC at the time. He was not a highly educated man, but he was smart and well-versed in Morgan v. Virginia. And it had been precisely to have his daughter spared hassles and humiliation that he had told her to buy a “through-line” ticket—that is, for straight-through service by Safeway Trails. No change in carrier. Now David Keys was determined to get justice for his daughter.
So was Dovey.
How could she not be after being yelled off that trolley car as a kid, after being kicked off that bus in Miami when she was a WAC, after what happened to Grandma Rachel and Mama when they took that train to attend her graduation from law school?
“That September afternoon of 1952 was the last day Julius and I passed like the proverbial ‘ships in the night,’ ” recalled Dovey. Before that September afternoon, they spoke by phone, left notes for each other. Although neither could afford to quit their second jobs, they now found a way to set “aside hours at the edges, in the early mornings and late afternoons, to map out the basis of” their lawsuit on Sarah Louise Key’s behalf.
Theirs was a full-on assault against the monster. They decided to sue both bus companies on four counts and seek $10,000 in damages on each count.
The first count was breach of contract involving Sarah’s “through-line” ticket.
The second count was violation of the Interstate Commerce Act’s ban on “undue and unreasonable prejudice.” This was the Supreme Court’s wording in its ruling in a 1950 lawsuit involving railroad dining cars.
The third count, wrote Dovey, was “for false arrest that had violated Sarah’s right to equal treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The fourth count was for “the mental anguish” Sarah had suffered from the time the bus driver in Roanoke Rapids ordered her out of her seat until she got out of jail the next day.
“The two lines connected in Washington, DC,” Dovey explained. “Therein lay our argument for jurisdiction in the federal district court in the District of Columbia.” Dovey and Julius served papers on both carriers on November 19, 1952, but met with no success. The suit against the southern carrier, Carolina Coach (doing business as Carolina Trailways), didn’t stick because the company was incorporated in Virginia and headquartered in North Carolina, and so serving it papers in DC was “improper.” As for the northern carrier, Safeway Trails, the company argued in a hearing before the US district court that it wasn’t responsible for what happened to a passenger on another bus line. The court agreed and also ruled that the case was outside its jurisdiction. The case was dismissed on February 23, 1953.
But hope was in the air!
Around this same time the NAACP was working on a case challenging racial segregation in interstate railroad travel. This case, NAACP v. St. Louis–San Francisco Railroad, became combined with Robertson & Roundtree’s Keys v. Carolina Coach. Their cases went not before the US Supreme Court but before the Interstate Commerce Commission, the federal agency charged at the time with regulating certain carriers engaged in transportation between states, including trains and buses.
AS OFTEN HAPPENS, THIS lawsuit took time. While the NAACP, Dovey, Julius, and Sarah Louise Keys and her father waited for a verdict, they eagerly followed another case that would send shock waves throughout the nation.
Brown v. Board of Education.
On May 17, 1954, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown, a consolidation of five lawsuits that shone the spotlight on the degradation endured by so many Black children attending public schools because of Jim Crow.
In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court declared that segregated public schooling was unconstitutional.
It had to end.
“Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. Education, he said, was “the very foundation of good citizenship.” But how could a child be expected to succeed in life if given a sub-par education? When it came to government-funded education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” had “no place,” Warren declared. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Public school desegregation in the South and in parts of the North would be a long-drawn-out and, at times, bloody affair, but the Brown decision was a watershed moment. As Charles Johnson, pres
ident of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, remarked shortly after the ruling, “If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions, it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life.”
ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1955, a year and a half after Brown and three years after Robertson & Roundtree took on Sarah Keys’s case, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled racial segregation unlawful on trains and buses traveling between states and in waiting rooms serving interstate transportation. “The disadvantages,” said the ruling, “to a traveler who is assigned accommodations or facilities so designated as to imply his inherent inferiority solely because of his race must be regarded under present conditions as unreasonable.”
“This is just the greatest thing for me and my people,” Sarah Keys told the New York Age a few days later. By then she was no longer a WAC but a hairstylist in New York City. “It’s a wonderful thing,” Sarah added, “for the whole American people as well.” In an interview with the New York Times, she thanked the NAACP and Robertson & Roundtree. Sarah said that Dovey and Julius “spent a great deal of their time and money on the case,” as had she and her father.
Six days after the ICC ruling, veteran activist Rosa Parks made her famous stand in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, the hard-fought protest that greatly contributed to the end of the city’s Jim Crow bus system and catapulted Baptist minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. onto the national stage.
By then, Julius had quit his job at the post office and Dovey hers with the Labor Department. Both were devoted to full-time practice.
Of course Dovey kept up with other protests, other lawsuits aimed at shattering the monster that not only humiliated and degraded Black Americans, from cleaners to prominent clerics and lawyers, but also harmed white Americans.
Jim Crow kept alive in so many a false sense of superiority.
It blinded legions to how hatred was soiling their souls.
It kept multitudes from catching hold of Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community, of a day, as he would later say, when “nobody will shout ‘White Power!’—when nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’—but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.”
ONE OF THOSE OTHER lawsuits in the fight for civil rights that Dovey followed was that of a young man from Selma, Alabama: Howard Law student Bruce Carver Boynton, the godson of the scientist and environmentalist George Washington Carver and the son of voting-rights activists Amelia and Samuel Boynton.
While heading home for the holidays one winter’s night in 1958, Bruce Boynton, twenty-one, was jailed and fined ten dollars for trespassing.
This happened during a layover in Richmond, Virginia. Boynton had gone into the whites-only section of the restaurant in the Trailways bus station and ordered a cheeseburger and a cup of tea.
Boynton was an interstate passenger. His case, yet another one quarterbacked by Thurgood Marshall, went all the way to the US Supreme Court. On December 5, 1960, the court ruled that segregation had no place in interstate bus and train transportation. Period.
Not on the buses and trains.
Not in depot waiting rooms.
Not in depot restaurants.
The Boynton decision inspired the Freedom Riders, that incredibly brave band of young women and men, Black and white, who, beginning in the spring of 1961, tested Morgan, tested Keys, tested Boynton, by boarding interstate buses in the North. The buses were heading south, where the Freedom Riders faced rebel yells, Confederate flags, and wanton violence.
On September 23, 1961, the ICC did what it should have done years ago. After some arm-twisting by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s younger brother), the ICC announced that the desegregation of bus and rail travel had to be obeyed. If not, the ICC would exercise its right to fine offending companies or revoke their licenses, put them out of business.
“Whites Only,” “No Colored Allowed”—by November 1, 1961, all those kinds of signs had to go.
The airlines became the last travel industry to end Jim Crow. The Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 had banned Delta, American, and other airlines from racial discrimination—in the air. But on the ground, Black travelers still had to put up with “White” and “Colored” spaces, from restaurants to restrooms, in airport terminals across the South, including in the nation’s capital.
It took a different set of lawsuits and court orders to rid airport terminals of Jim Crow. The last holdout was Shreveport, Louisiana’s airport. It finally capitulated in the summer of 1963.
By then Attorney Dovey J. Roundtree had become, she said, “a different person, a different sort of lawyer, in fact, from the one who’d battled the ICC. I am not sure that I chose that path, so much as it chose me.”
13
HURTING IN EVERY WAY
THE PATH THAT DOVEY CHOSE—or that chose her—did not lead to bigger, bolder civil rights cases that made front-page news. It led her to serve the voiceless, the powerless, Black people without money, without the inner resources that Sarah Louise Keys had because of her education, her military training, her father’s steadfast support.
Dovey’s path led her to the broken.
“To our doorstep came clients who were hurting in every way human beings can hurt—mothers fighting for their children, fathers fighting for their jobs, teenagers who’d been preyed upon by the adults charged with their care, husbands and wives in bitter child custody battles, victims of violent crimes.”
There was twenty-one-year-old Barbara Vanison, left brain-damaged after her husband fractured her skull with a hatchet.
Barbara’s husband, Maurice, twenty-five when he wielded that hatchet, had been a patient at the city-owned psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeths, in Southeast DC. Maurice, who made no secret of wanting to do bodily harm to his wife (and to her mother as well), had been moved from a maximum security ward to a minimum security ward from which he escaped. St. Elizabeths hadn’t bothered to notify the police that a dangerous man was on the loose. In 1957 Robertson & Roundtree sued the government for negligence and won for Barbara the hefty settlement of $25,000 (about $225,000 in today’s dollars.)
Dovey and Julius had taken Barbara’s case after other attorneys turned it down “as hopeless,” said the Evening Star.
In September 1957 that same DC newspaper reported on a fifteen-year-old unwed mother with the mind of a child, who had thrown her newborn baby down an elevator shaft. This girl had been sent to a facility for children with mental disabilities in Laurel, Maryland, instead of jail “on a motion by Assistant Corporation Council Francis Murphy with the consent of the girl’s lawyer.” That lawyer was Dovey Roundtree.
Dovey had also served as the court-appointed lawyer for one of three boys (two were nine years old; one was ten) arrested for setting fires at their elementary school. “Attorney Dovey Roundtree,” reported the Evening Star in early April 1958, “told the judge she intends to file motions soon questioning the circumstances” of her client’s “arrest and the subsequent interrogation by police.”
A few months later Dovey was the defense attorney in a case involving three boys arrested for break-ins. Cops had gone to the home of one, a thirteen-year-old, around five o’clock in the morning. They ordered him out of his bed, then hauled the child off to a police precinct for questioning without his parents. After the boy’s alleged confession, he was sent to DC’s Receiving Home for Children, a dilapidated detention center in Southeast DC. A few years earlier a group of concerned citizens who visited the place had been appalled by what they found—for one thing, “ninety-one children jammed into space designed for 43.”
To our doorstep came clients who were hurting in every way human beings can hurt . . .
Then came the day when “our doorstep” ceased to be.
In early November 1961, while arguing a case in the district court, Julius fell ill, went home. The next day, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was forty-five.
F
ORTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD DOVEY SOLDIERED ON in that calling to serve as legal advocate, counselor, and sometimes friend to the voiceless, the powerless, the resourceless, the broken. She did this work at a time when good seemed to have injustice by the tail.
September 30–October 1, 1962: in Oxford, Mississippi, segregationists battled with lawmen who included federal marshals President Kennedy had dispatched to uphold the right of twenty-nine-year-old Air Force veteran James Meredith to become the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. It was a right Meredith had won in a lawsuit handled by NAACP LDF attorneys.
November 20, 1962: President Kennedy issued Executive Order 11063, which banned discrimination in housing owned by the government, partially funded by the government, or built in part with federal funds.
August 28, 1963: About a quarter-million people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, whose chief organizers included Dovey’s mentors Anna Arnold Hedgeman and A. Philip Randolph and where Martin Luther King Jr. stirred millions around the world with his speech about a dream.
Back of King’s dream of an America anchored in equality and harmony was a right-now dream of a potent civil rights bill aimed at changing the practices of white people whose hearts were hardened against Black people.
This legislation was “the order of the day at the great March on Washington last summer,” King wrote in an article that appeared in January 1964 in the Black-owned New York Amsterdam News. King’s piece was titled “A Look to 1964.”
By then Kennedy had been assassinated. The Oval Office was now occupied by his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. This Texan had a vision of a “Great Society” that demanded “an end to poverty and racial injustice,” he declared during a speech in the spring of 1964.
That summer, on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This statute was so much more muscular than the one enacted and then declared unconstitutional when Grandma Rachel was a child.