[From the Dust Jacket]
Dovey Johnson Roundtree tackled law school in the late 1940s at a time when women lawyers — were rare. She went on to largely devote herself to representing the underprivileged and the underserved.
She is most famous for her successful 1965 defense of a Black man accused of the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a socially prominent white Washington, D.C. woman. Ray Crump, a poor alcoholic, was picked up by police after an eye-witness claimed to have seen him standing over Meyer’s body. Crump was rushed to trial despite the lack of a murder weapon or any physical evidence linking him to the victim. Dovey skewered the prosecution’s witnesses and won Crump’s acquittal.
Dovey had also been a member of the legal team that brought a pioneering bus desegregation case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, cinching a ruling that paved the way for bus and railroad desegregation.
Beyond breaking barriers in law, Dovey was among the first class of Black women to enter the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II. In the 1960s, she became one of the first ordained female ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Tracing her childhood in Jim Crow North Carolina and adulthood in the nation’s capital with lyrical, celebratory prose, Tonya Bolden portrays a woman who believed the law should serve the people, and places her firmly in the context of the twentieth-century civil rights movement and Black history and culture.
Ages 9 to 12 | 224 Pages
Hardcover | Norton Young Readers | 2021 | ISBN: 978-1324003175