by Tonya Bolden
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed the use of people’s race, color, sex, religion, or country of origin as a reason to discriminate against them.
It banned discrimination in public places and spaces—from parks to restaurants.
It created the Commission on Civil Rights to investigate violations of civil rights and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to review complaints of discrimination in the workplace.
What’s more, universities and other entities receiving federal funding could have that funding cut off if they were found violating the law.
Later that summer, on August 20, 1964, Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, the cornerstone of his “War on Poverty.” Poverty was to be fought in a number of ways, including through government-funded job training by the agency known as Job Corps. From this act also arose VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), later renamed AmeriCorps VISTA, with its opportunities for jobs (as tutors, for example) in poor rural and urban communities, from Appalachia to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
ALONGSIDE THESE REASONS FOR great rejoicing were mingled for Dovey and like-minded souls too many occasions to weep and mourn.
Back on June 12, 1963, two months before the epic March on Washington, World War II veteran Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s chief of Mississippi branches, was assassinated. White supremacists shot him outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. His wife, Myrlie, and their three young children, Darrell, Reena, and James, rushed outside to see him bleeding on their front steps, watch him die.
Eighteen days after the March on Washington, on September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, more than a dozen Black people were wounded and four girls, ages eleven to fourteen, killed when Klansmen dynamited the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
Reasons for Dovey and others to weep and mourn didn’t end after the murder of Medgar Evers, didn’t end after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
On August 4, 1964, between the time of President Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Economic Opportunity Act, the corpses of three civil rights workers were found in an earthen dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi. One Black, James Chaney. Two white, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
Weeks earlier these three young men tried to get to the bottom of the torching of a Black church near that earthen dam. For that effort, they had been arrested on trumped-up charges, jailed, and handed over to Klansmen.
It was in this year of peril and promise, of triumphs and tragedies, that Dovey, undaunted, swung into action on behalf of hapless Raymond Crump Jr., imprisoned in the DC Jail.
14
INCAPABLE
“IF ANYONE BOTHERS YOU, I want to know about it right away. If you’re frightened, and I’m not here, call out my name, as loud as you can, and tell ’em, ‘My lawyer’s on her way.’ ”
Dovey handed Ray her business card. This was during their first meeting in the DC Jail, where he had been kept in solitary confinement.
Dovey had picked up quick on the “disgust the white prison guards felt for Ray.” She was worried sick that Ray might be psychologically and physically abused. She feared that any abuse might break Ray, who told her, “I don’t know nothin’ ” and “I don’t know why they got me,” and “I didn’t shoot nobody”—Ray who two years earlier had suffered a bad beating during a holdup. It left him prone to horrible headaches, even blackouts. And Dovey suspected that Ray’s mind was also messed up from alcohol abuse.
Ray feared for his safety too. He told Dovey that after he was brought to police headquarters, the arresting officer had beat on him when he professed his innocence.
Prisoner #138013 cried as Dovey tried to explain things to him, as she sought to make sense of what he was doing near the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath when Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered.
“Incapable.” That’s how Dovey summed up Ray.
“Incapable of clear communication, incapable of complex thought, incapable of grasping the full weight of his predicament,” and incapable of the murder. “The crime just didn’t fit him at all,” she said in an interview years later.
But there Ray sat in prison blues in the DC Jail, having been indicted by a grand jury on October 19. David C. Acheson, US Attorney for the District of Columbia, signed off on the charge that Ray “purposely and with deliberate and premeditated malice, did shoot Mary Pinchot Meyer with a pistol, causing injuries from which the said Mary Pinchot Meyer did die.”
“Purposely and with deliberate and premeditated malice” added up to the most serious of homicide charges, first-degree murder, punishable by death by electric chair in DC at the time.
Reporting on the grand jury’s verdict the next day, the Washington Post said that Ray had been “found coatless and shivering behind rocks in the woods not far from the scene of the shooting.” Cops had discovered a white jacket near the scene, which Ray’s relatives said was similar to a jacket he owned.
The grand jury witnesses included US Army Lieutenant William Mitchell, who testified to jogging past the victim shortly before she was murdered and seeing a man trailing her down the towpath. The grand jury also heard from Esso employee Henry Wiggins, who had sped from the scene of the crime to the nearest Esso station to call the cops, who soon picked him up and drove him back to the crime scene. Before the grand jury, Wiggins once again identified Ray as the man he had seen standing over the victim’s body.
The success of the Soviet Union's space ship Voskhod (Sunrise), racial tensions in Britain, President Lyndon Johnson on the campaign trail and criticism of him by the Republican Party's presidential candidate are among the things the Evening Star thought worthy of front-page coverage, along with the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer the day before.
That grand jury indictment had come at the speed of light. Three days after the murder, on October 15, the US Attorney’s Office was presenting its case against Ray before a grand jury. Assistant US Attorney Charles T. Duncan told the Washington Post that in a homicide case a prosecutor typically waits for the coroner’s findings before moving on to the grand jury stage. However, the US Attorney’s Office “is not bound by such procedure,” said the Post. The newspaper also reported that the “disclosure of the prosecution’s stepped-up timetable [on October 14] came as a simple, half-hour funeral service was held for Mrs. Meyer on what would have been her 44th birthday.” The service was held in Washington Cathedral’s Bethlehem Chapel. Some three hundred people attended.
ON OCTOBER 30, DOVEY appeared with Ray during his arraignment before US District Court Judge Luther W. Youngdahl. Ray entered a plea of not guilty. The trial date was set for the week of January 11, 1965.
Not wanting Ray to languish for two months in the DC jail—“an old stone building some compared to a dungeon,” wrote Nina Burleigh in her book about Mary Pinchot Meyer, A Very Private Woman—Dovey sought to get Ray released on bond and found herself before Judge Burnita Shelton Matthews, who, in 1949, had become the first woman appointed to any district court. Matthews was no fan of Black people, according to George Peter Lamb, a Legal Aid lawyer assigned to Ray before Dovey stepped in. “Judge Matthews,” said Lamb, “believed all blacks were guilty and the reason they were guilty was because they were indicted, and therefore they should plead guilty.”
Regarding Ray as a “danger to the community,” Judge Matthews denied bail.
Black guilt was uppermost in the minds of many white Washingtonians in majority-Black DC. But where so many Black people faced sub-par schooling, sub-standard housing, and lockout from decent jobs, was it any wonder that crime was on the rise?
“In June 1963 the New York Times ran a series of stories about the racial problems in Washington, DC,” wrote Burleigh. “The first one opened with anecdotes about street violence instigated by black perpetrators: an Ohio tourist beaten and robbed by ‘a band of fast-moving Negro girls’; an elderly clergyman beaten to death by four black youths for $1.29; two college girls from Pennsylvania raped by a gun-wielding black male. Violence wa
s a symptom of the urban decay behind the postcard facade of the capital city.”
Two months before the New York Times articles, Agnes Meyer (no relation to Mary Pinchot Meyer), whose husband owned the Washington Post, had warned of an “explosion” if the plight of the poor in DC wasn’t addressed. This was in the wake of two race riots at sporting events.
Against this backdrop, many white people in DC were hard-pressed to believe Ray innocent. And many Black people in DC were no doubt hard-pressed to believe that he would get a fair trial.
In fighting for Ray, Dovey filed a writ of habeas corpus, Latin for “you should have the body” (or the person) in court. She was asking for a hearing to determine if Ray was being illegally detained. For one thing, he claimed that he had been beaten while in police custody. But her main contention was that Ray never had a preliminary hearing, a day in court before a US Commissioner (now a magistrate judge) to establish that there was indeed a case to be made for holding Ray and proceeding to the grand jury stage. “I held that without a preliminary hearing, my client’s detention was illegal.”
On November 9, before US District Court Judge George L. Hart, Dovey got a hearing on her petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The US Attorney’s office argued that a preliminary hearing was moot because Ray had already been indicted. The judge agreed. There is no law that says a defendant is absolutely, positively entitled to a preliminary hearing.
“Release Bid Is Refused in Slaying,” the Washington Post told its readers the next day.
Dovey quickly filed an appeal.
A “shrewd move,” wrote Peter Janney in his book about the murdered woman, Mary’s Mosaic. Dovey “knew that the appeal wouldn’t be decided for months, and the delay would afford her legal team much-needed time to prepare for trial. She also hoped that the media scrutiny focused on her client would abate in the intervening months.”
Operating out of a row house at 1822 11th Street, NW, Dovey was her law firm, but she pulled in able minds to assist as need be. For Ray’s case she had Purcell Moore, private investigator. There was also a cousin of Dovey’s, Jerry Hunter, a Howard Law student. Along with legwork, he probably also helped out with some of the thinking, researching, and cross-checking—as was surely the case with Dovey’s co-counsels, all Howard Law grads: Jerome Shuman and Alan V. Roberson, both in their late twenties, and George F. Knox Sr., in his forties.
No doubt with input from her team, on November 12 Dovey filed a motion for a psychiatric evaluation to determine if Ray was competent to stand trial and if he was in his right mind on the day of the murder. That motion was granted the following day, and on Monday, November 16, 1964, a deputy marshal transferred Ray from the DC Jail to St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he was to stay for no more than sixty days.
During these tense and challenging November days, Dovey, undaunted, was dealing with another hole in her heart.
15
MINISTER IN THE FAMILY
BACK ON NOVEMBER 1, around the break of dawn, Mama had telephoned with the news that Grandma Rachel, ninety-one, had died. Like Grandpa Clyde, she, too, had suffered from a kidney disorder.
On the day of the funeral, Dovey led the grand procession from that house on East Hill Street to the church Mama and Grandma Rachel then attended, Ebenezer Baptist. Dovey led the way because “I was the minister in the family, Mama said.”
Mama wasn’t speaking figuratively.
Back in 1959, when hospitalized for a hysterectomy caused by fibroids, Dovey had a lot of time to think. She was feeling that the law was “not enough” for her, that there was “something else” that she should be doing.
Another calling.
To serve humanity not only as a lawyer, but also as an ordained minister.
After her release from the hospital, Dovey went to Queen City to recuperate and to tell Mama and Grandpa Rachel about this second calling. Back in DC, Dovey began taking night classes at Howard’s divinity school.
This was a Dovey with a law practice no longer lean but booming and a Dovey still battling diabetes. Because of it, she reached a point when she had to ask judges for permission to have with her in courtrooms a thermos of orange juice (to prevent her blood sugar from dropping dangerously low). Dovey was loath to do this for fear of appearing weak in the still male-dominated field of law. But she needed that orange juice—needed a shot of sugar. Otherwise she might pass out or, worse, fall into a diabetic coma.
Despite health problems, despite operating a one-woman law practice, Dovey remained undaunted. She carried on with her studies of what was for her Divine Law, something she’d been steeped in all her life.
Thanks to Grandpa Clyde, whose preaching had been “a rich tapestry of Holy Scripture and political protest, all strung together in a way that shot through you like something electric.”
Thanks to Grandma Rachel, ever prayerful, who had baked the communion bread, made the communion wine, made pristine the altar linens.
Thanks to Mama leading the choir in her rich alto.
Thanks to Spelman with its motto “Our Whole School for Christ.”
And back when Mama told little Dovey Mae how much she was like Papa, she had also told her that she would one day “live out his legacy, walk where he could not, do the things of which he’d only dreamed.”
On November 30, 1961, Dovey was ordained as an itinerant deacon in the AME Church. Two years later as an AME itinerant elder. Once again Dovey was a pioneer. It wasn’t until 1960 that the AME Church, founded in 1816, began ordaining women to itinerant orders, in which a person can be assigned to minister at different churches.
As a member of the ministerial staff at her church in Southeast DC, Allen Chapel AME, Dovey could preach, perform weddings, preside at funerals, baptize, teach Sunday school. So, yes, when Grandma Rachel was laid to rest, Dovey was indeed the minister in the family.
Beside her marched Mama, her sisters Rachel, Eunice, Bea, their husbands, other family. Behind them marched troops of neighbors. “The whole neighborhood echoed with the mighty sound of her home-going, and despite my sadness, my heart sang.”
Grandma Rachel was not the first woman warrior Dovey lost. In 1955, Mary McLeod Bethune suffered a fatal heart attack. In January 1964, nine months before Grandma Rachel passed, Mary Mae Neptune, also ninety-one, died in a nursing home in Cambridge, Ohio, after “a long illness,” an obituary said.
After Grandma Rachel’s funeral, despite her sadness, Dovey returned to DC in fighting form for Ray Crump Jr., well aware that “a million eyes” were on his case, one of the biggest in DC’s history.
16
NO WORDS. ONLY BREATHING.
ON JANUARY 13, 1965, day sixty of Ray’s stay at St. Elizabeths, the hospital’s superintendent, Dr. Dale C. Cameron, released the findings.
Ray was competent to stand trial. Psychiatrists also concluded that on the day of the murder he was not “suffering from a mental disease or defect.”
Ray was transferred back to the DC Jail where he “deteriorated daily,” remembered Dovey, where the “guards’ hatred for him was so palpable.”
Dovey visited Ray daily, praying with him, praying, too, that her and his mother’s visits would keep him safe. Dovey was no doubt praying for herself, also, for strength in what was an uphill battle.
In preparing for Ray’s defense, Dovey was being stymied by the district attorney’s office.
“Four months after the murder itself,” wrote Peter Janney, Dovey “still hadn’t been able to get a clear statement from the government’s lawyers, and therefore she wasn’t sure whether a murder weapon had even been recovered.” Assistant US Attorney Charles T. Duncan, a Black man in his early forties, who was, wrote Janney, “normally an ebullient man and quite friendly with Dovey,” was now giving Dovey the brush-off.
“I’ve called you a couple of times,” she said to Duncan when she ran into him in the courthouse one day.
“It’s just a straight case,” Duncan replied. “They caught him. He was down there.”<
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“So were a lot of other people,” said Dovey.
To get the information she needed, Dovey filed a motion asking for the names and addresses of all people who allegedly witnessed any of the facts charged in the indictment, who were at or near the scene of Ray’s arrest, who were at or near the scene of the crime. She also asked for the “name, make, caliber and serial number” of the murder weapon, a list of items obtained from Ray’s home or person, and a list of items “alleged to have been used by the Defendant in connection with the crime charged.”
In return, Dovey received a long list of potential prosecution witnesses. She also learned that the US Attorney’s Office had a zippered jacket, a sweatshirt, a sport shirt, a dark-colored plaid cap, a pair of corduroy pants, a pair of black shoes, and an open pack of cigarettes, hair specimens and a hair sample. The hair specimens were found on the cap and the jacket. The hair sample was taken from Ray in jail. This was something he had protested and something Dovey had tried and failed to prevent.
These items were “either obtained from the defendant or allegedly belonged to him,” said the prosecution’s written response to Dovey’s request. “Allegedly” referred to items found near the crime scene: the cigarettes, cap, and jacket. The other clothing was taken from Ray in jail.
Two .38-caliber lead bullets also allegedly belonged to Ray. But in the documents she received, Dovey learned that the US Attorney’s Office didn’t have the murder weapon.
Page one of the prosecution's exhibits.
An even bigger shock was the name and signature of the person listed below that of US Attorney David Acheson, an indication of the prosecutor she’d be up against at trial. It wouldn’t be the “normally ebullient” and “friendly” Charles T. Duncan but rather Assistant US Attorney Alfred L. Hantman.
“Oh, brother! What are they doing to me!” Dovey said to herself.