[1] That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (64 MCC 769 (1955)), which Dovey Roundtree brought before the ICC with her law partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson, was invoked by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the 1961 Freedom Riders' campaign in his successful battle to compel the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce its rulings and end Jim Crow laws in public transportation.
Bethune's vision inspired Roundtree to excel academically, rise above poverty and Jim Crow, target a medical career, and work her way through Spelman College from 1934 to 1938, at the height of the Great Depression.
[11] It was Bethune to whom Roundtree turned to in 1941, as the threat of World War II generated unprecedented numbers of jobs for African Americans in the country's "defense preparedness" program.
Resigning from the South Carolina teaching position she had taken up on college graduation in 1938, she sought out Bethune in Washington, D.C. for assistance in obtaining employment in the burgeoning defense industry.
[12] Roundtree publicly challenged the racial discrimination she confronted in the rigidly segregated Army even as she recruited other African-American women for the WAAC on assignment in the Deep South.
[13] Roundtree first entered the civil rights arena in October 1945 in a nine-month postwar assignment with black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who was staging a national campaign to make the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) a permanent entity.
Her FEPC involvement brought her into contact with the person who would inspire her to take on the law as her life's mission: Constitutional lawyer Pauli Murray, an impassioned civil rights activist and legal academic who later founded the National Organization for Women.
[14] From 1947 to 1950, she immersed herself in the assault on school segregation being mounted by Thurgood Marshall and Howard Law professors James Nabrit Jr. and George E. C. Hayes which in 1954 culminated in the epochal Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The case originated in a complaint by an African-American WAC private named Sarah Louise Keys, who had been forced by a North Carolina bus driver to yield her seat to a white Marine.
The Keys case challenged the right of a private bus carrier to impose its Jim Crow laws on black passengers traveling across state lines.
[17] Though hailed by the press as a historic breakthrough and a "symbol of a movement that cannot be held back," the Keys case lay dormant from 1955 to 1961, its intent largely blunted by the ICC commissioner who had dissented from the majority opinion, South Carolina Democrat J. Monroe Johnson.
[11] It was not until the summer of 1961, when the violence resulting from the Freedom Riders' campaign prompted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to take action against the ICC that the impact of the Keys case was felt.
[11][20] The sudden death of her partner Julius Robertson of a heart attack in November 1961 marked a turning point for Dovey Roundtree, who as an African-American woman found herself a sole practitioner in a legal community still dominated by men.
[22] It was Roundtree's successful defense of the Black laborer accused of the 1964 murder of Kennedy mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer that solidified her reputation in the Washington, D.C. legal community.
[11] Against the elaborate circumstantial case presented by US Attorney Alfred Hantman and his legal team, Roundtree pitted a single fact: Crump's diminutive size.
Roundtree's autobiography, initially released with the title Justice Older than the Law, written with National Magazine Award-winner Katie McCabe, won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.