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My Grandmother, the Segregated Trolley, and Me
In this excerpt from the late civil rights lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree’s memoir, we learn about her early brush with Jim Crow
A lawyer and unsung hero of the civil rights movement, Dovey Johnson Roundtree successfully helped desegregate interstate bus travel in 1955. She famously defended Raymond Crump Jr., a Black man, against charges that he’d murdered a White socialite named Mary Pinchot Meyer. Roundtree was also one of the first commissioned officers in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and one of the first women to be ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Roundtree died in 2018 at the age of 104; this excerpt about her own early brush with segregation on public transportation comes from her memoir Mighty Justice, which is being published posthumously.
Every evening, in the tiny kitchen of the old frame shotgun house where I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, my grandma Rachel marked the day’s end by a ritual etched in my memory with a clarity that belies the 80 years since then.
She ceased to rush, as she did endlessly in the hours between dawn and darkness, and she commenced to draw water and lay out clean towels and mix an ointment she made of turpentine and mutton…
