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Defense lawyer and warrior for civil rights, 104
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, a Washington, D.C., criminal defense lawyer and courtroom warrior for civil rights who played a critical early role in the desegregation of interstate bus travel and mentored several generations of black lawyers, died May 21 at an assistedliving facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was 104.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said Jerry Hunter, her cousin and law partner.
In a career that spanned nearly half a century, Roundtree defended predominantly poor AfricanAmerican clients - as well as black churches, community groups and the occasional politician. She was, former Fisk University President Walter Leonard once told The Washington Post, “a legal-aid clinic before there were legal-aid clinics.”
Her best-known case involved the black day laborer accused in the 1964 killing of Georgetown socialite and painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, who reportedly had an affair with President John F. Kennedy. She won him an acquittal despite what initially appeared to be damning witness testimony.
Roundtree’s handling of the high-profile legal matter was later praised by Robert Bennett, who observed the proceedings as a clerk for the judge and decades later represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Roundtree, Bennett recalled in his memoir “In the Ring” (2008), “had a motherly warmth” and a “low-key, casual style” that appealed “not only to the mind but also the heart and soul of the jurors.”
“It was as if she was pleading for her own son,” Bennett added, “not a guilty defendant.”
Interviewed for a book about the trial, “A Very Private Woman” (1998), by political reporter Nina Burleigh, Roundtree explained that the case had additional significance for her because the defendant, Raymond Crump Jr., was a black man accused of murdering a white woman.
“I think in the black community there was a feeling that even if Crump was innocent, he was a dead duck,” she said. “Even if he didn’t do it, he’s guilty. I took that as a personal challenge. I was caught up in civil rights, heart, body, and soul, but I felt law was one vehicle that would bring remedy.”
Bennett and Burleigh were among those convinced that Crump - a penniless alcoholic whom Roundtree described in her autobiography as “incapable” of “clear communication” or “complex thought” - was wrongly freed. He was later convicted of assault and arson, and the Meyer case remains unsolved.
Washington Mayor Walter Washington appointed Roundtree to the D.C. board of higher education in the early 1970s, and his successor as mayor, Marion Barry, considered her a trusted adviser, going so far as to call her one of his “Washington mothers.”
In addition, she mentored younger black lawyers - including Charles Ogletree, now a professor at Harvard Law School - and preached at southeast Washington’s Allen Chapel AME Church, where she worked as a minister for 35 years before retiring to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1996.
In a phone interview, Katie McCabe, a Washington journalist who co-wrote Roundtree’s 2009 autobiography, “Justice Older Than the Law,” said Roundtree “transformed the legal canvas in Washington” by demonstrating that a black lawyer could win major cases before white judges and predominantly white juries.
When Roundtree and her first legal partner, Julius Winfield Robertson, began taking cases in the early 1950s, there were few black lawyers in Washington and even fewer black female lawyers.
Those who did practice were banned from using the cafeteria, restrooms or law library at the District Courthouse, and legal organizations such as the Women’s Bar Association of D.C. - which Roundtree integrated in 1962 - had whites-only policies.
African-American clients who brought personal injury or negligence suits were euphemistically “referred uptown” - directed to white lawyers who had a better chance of winning over judges. The “uptown” lawyers then paid black lawyers a fee for referring their clients. SunSentinel.com/obituaries | ssobits@SunSentinel.com | 954-425-1010 To purchase an obituary: placeanad.sunsentinel.com/obituary