April 30, 2025 • 40 mins
Dovey Johnson Roundtree became a lawyer at a time when no one wanted Black women to amount to anything. She’d grown up with the KKK terrorizing her neighborhood. A lucky break landed her at Spelman. Her intellect got her into Howard Law. But it was her courage that made her take on the daunting case of Ray Crump Jr. — the Black man accused of killing Mary Pinchot Meyer.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Emmett Till was visiting Mississippi when he and his cousins
decided to go to a grocery store. Emmett was all
of fourteen, a black boy hanging out with other children.
A white woman would later say Emmett had whistled at her.
She also claimed he touched her. More than sixty years later,
she would recant her testimony. Emmett's body was found floating
(00:25):
in a river. The woman's husband and brother in law
kidnapped and brutally murdered him. His body was so mangled
his own mother could barely identify him. You probably heard
this story before, but I'm telling it to you again
because this was the racial landscape of nineteen sixties America,
(00:45):
the world Ray Crump was living in when he was
arrested for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. So if
you think about it, things could have gone way worse
for Ray.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
For some the fact that this actually was able to
go to trial instead of ending in terms of violence
like a white mob attacking him or attacking other African Americans,
some people saw that as a triumph.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
That's doctor Marcia Chatelaine.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
She's a professor of African American history at Georgetown University.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
That this was the best case scenario because there wasn't
a lynching or there wasn't some act of racial violence.
In terms of retaliation, she says, Ray's case wasn't litigated
in a vacuum. When a black man is arrested for
murdering a prominent white woman, it comes with the baggage
of our fraud racial history. The stereotypes of black men,
(01:44):
you know, being predatory towards white women has a long
history in the post Civil War era. So at the
very moment that African Americans are able to secure some freedom,
they are then characterized as violent and out of control.
And that just shows how deeply poisoned the nation's consciousness
(02:04):
was around these stereotypes.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
After his arrest, Ray's mother, Martha, knew her son was
in trouble, but she didn't have the money for a lawyer.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
She was a laundry woman.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Every day she commuted to the white part of Washington,
d C. And returned home to the black part, which
was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. On
the weekends. She was a regular at Second Baptist Church.
Now more than ever, she needed her prayers answered, and
they were at church she heard about a lawyer whose
reputation preceded her, a black woman named Dovey Johnson Rountree.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
She's constantly litigating because she's incredibly talented.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Dovey Rowntree is a real heroine.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
This is a woman who had to learn how to
be fearless and had to be daring at various stages
of her life.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Martha wanted Dovey to represent her son. People around d
said she was tenacious and clever, but Martha wanted her
for more than her legal smarts. She was black, and
Ray's mother felt she would be invested in her son's
case in a way a white lawyer wouldn't be. Martha
was banking on Dovey, thinking her child was as good
(03:18):
as anyone else's.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
The thing was.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Legal Aid had already offered Ray an attorney, a white guy,
an experienced guy, for free, but Martha wanted Dovey to
take her son's case, so she pleaded with her to.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Defend Ray save his life.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Now, at that time, Dovey and Martha had just the
facts about Mary's murder from the papers. A white woman
was shot to death. She was prominent part of Washington's elite.
It happened on the towpath in Georgetown, and a black
man was arrested. Martha was sure Ray wasn't the killer.
(03:57):
She thought he was too simple, too plain. She babied
her twenty five year old son like he was still
a kid, even though he was actually the oldest of
her three boys. If Dovey took on the case, the
cards would be stacked against her, and the deck was
already high. Here was a black female lawyer from the
segregated South asking a jury to acquit a black man
(04:21):
accused of shooting a white woman in nineteen sixty four.
With an eyewitness who said he saw the whole thing,
the task would be monumental. Dovey didn't take the case
at first, but she would because Martha's hope was true.
Dovey did think Ray was as good as any other man.
(04:42):
His black skin didn't make him inferior. Her Grandma Rachel's
experiences had taught.
Speaker 5 (04:48):
Her that.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
From luminary film, Nation entertainment, and neon hummedia, this is
murder on the towpath, A store worry of two incredible
women who never met, but whose lives became forever intertwined
by tragedy. I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien. Last week we
(05:16):
started to tell you about an affair Mary Pinchot Meyer
and JFK. But before we get to that, we need
to dig into the life of the woman who would
defend Mary's accused murderer, a woman who had no idea
about Mary's connections to the president and wouldn't for years.
In fact, at that time, very few people outside of
(05:38):
Mary's inner circle knew about the affair. When Ray was tried,
it was the case of a black man who had
killed a white woman. By the time of Mary's murder,
Dovey was fifty years old. She had her own law
practice with a colleague. She had accomplished so much in
a half century, even though she wasn't allowed to drink
(05:58):
from the same water fountain as white folks, She'd won
some high profile legal cases, including a bus segregation case
that laid the foundation for Rosa Parks. How had a
black woman in the segregated South gotten this far in
nineteen sixty four. Her story is even more unlikely than
(06:19):
it seems. Dovey was born in nineteen fourteen, after her
father passed away, Dovey's mother and two sisters moved in
with her grandparents in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Speaker 6 (06:32):
She was raised by her grandmother.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
That's Dovey's daughter, Charlene Pritchett Stephenson. She and Dovey met
at church, but they grew so close that Dovey would
eventually call Charlene her chosen daughter.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
Her father died when she was young, very young, and
so her grandmother raised them.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Her father died in the influenza epidemic of nineteen nineteen,
she was just five years old. They lived in Brooklyn,
a neighborhood in Charlotte that was the thriving center of
black life there. It was almost a city within a city,
complete with its own downtown. Dovey's family was poor, but
(07:14):
some of her neighbors had money. It wasn't uncommon to
find shotgun houses next to mansions.
Speaker 6 (07:20):
They struggled financially. Even if you didn't have they always
came up with a better way of doing something. And
you know, even though you may have been poor, it
was the love that pushed them forward. It was the
love and the nurture and the security.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
It was safety in that house.
Speaker 6 (07:40):
It was that bond that family had that they prayed together,
They believed in the scriptures and what they were taught
from the Sunday School and from church.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
So they were to me.
Speaker 6 (07:55):
They were rich.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
But in the nineteen twenties, the ku Kluck clan haunted Charlotte.
As a kid, Dovey remembered them riding through the neighborhood
keeping the hate, not the peace. Her grandma Rachel would
tell the children to get down on the floor. Dovey
would shutter the windows before she hopped under. Her grandmother
had reason to be terrified. The clan had murdered her
(08:19):
first husband. Dovey's grandfather, Rachel said goodbye to him one
day as he was heading north. He never returned. So
when the clan came around, black people like Dovey took cover.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
She experienced white supremacy firsthand as a child.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
That's historian Alexis Co.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
You know, if you think about some of your reformative
memories of fear, it's really something to consider the clan
being one of them.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
But Dovey had one distinct advantage in life.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Her grandmother Rachel.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
Well, the first thing I'm going to say about her
is shoes brand.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
That's Dovey Roundtree herself. In twenty eighteen, at the ripe
age of one hundred and four, but about a decade
before her passing, she sat down for an interview with
an organization called the National Visionary Leadership Project. She lit
up when she talked about her grandma.
Speaker 7 (09:16):
She was smart. She was very smart, very brilliant mind,
and she understood things. But she was a very beautiful woman.
She was small and long, curly hair, beautiful skin, almost
olive skin. She was beautiful.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Dovey talked about her grandmother as if she walked on water,
like she was superhuman. When you're a kid, that's how
many of us see our parents and grandparents.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
I know, I do.
Speaker 6 (09:47):
She loved her grandmother. Her grandmother was very strict, but
she showed her her love for the Lord, and she
was a very independent woman. She wanted her to reach
her full potential.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
As a girl.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Dovey didn't know how the outside world saw Rachel, how
society treated poor, uneducated black women like her. But Rachel
was determined to make a good life for her family.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
She could squeeze a dollar till it turned to ten,
and I don't care what your needs were. That dollar
was going to become a ten dollar bill, and then
she go to the market and she would get it
changed in and bring back a ten dollar bill for
you to see.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
If you were poor and black at the time, you
had to be resourceful.
Speaker 6 (10:35):
Grandma Rachel would make last soap and just taught her
different things about survival.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
It was a skill Rachel was determined to pass on
to Dovey. She was arming her grandchildren for battle because
Rachel knew how hard it was out there. She had
lived it. You see, Rachel was born to slaves. She
grew up when slavery was a ball, but the structures
were still in place.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
The farm where she lived. She had to call the owner.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Slave master, and when she was thirteen, that man tried
to rape her.
Speaker 7 (11:10):
He was trying to attack her and he just tore
her clothes off, and she fought.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Him, but he wouldn't relent. The man stomped on her
feet and crushed them.
Speaker 7 (11:20):
But he beat in one of the scars on her
leg until she took a grave.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
When she returned home, Rachel's mother wrapped her bloody feet
in bandages, but her feet would never recover.
Speaker 7 (11:32):
Her beat would just big, just swollen, and she didn't
get treatment. You know, well, I guess there was no treatment.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But that Rachel eventually learned to walk again, but her
feet would never be the same.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Here's Charlene again.
Speaker 6 (11:48):
The foot was very bad and it never healed, and
she kind of walked with a limp from then on.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Her swollen feet reminded her every day how that man
thought he had a right to her her. But she
never wanted to forget how discrimination had shaped her, misshaped
her really, and she felt obligated to pass that resolve
onto her children and grandchildren.
Speaker 6 (12:12):
Grandma didn't show any fear, so I think to me
that was instilled in her, even though we do have fears,
we struggle with things.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
She told them the story about her feet not once,
but regularly. It was one of their family lures, which,
if you think about it, is a pretty traumatic story
to tell such young girls. But for Rachel it was
probably her way of preparing them for the world.
Speaker 7 (12:38):
And for Dovey it gave me the opportunity to get mad.
If you can comprehend that, I wanted to do something,
and I like to think in my legal career, I
did do something the right injustice.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Sometimes pain is a catalyst. Before Dovey met Ray Crump,
she wasn't sure she'd take on the case.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
She was skeptical, which is understandable. Dove was a lawyer.
Being critical was her way.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
But everything changed when she met Ray in the DC jail.
Speaker 7 (13:18):
He couldn't give you a stretch sentence.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Talking about Ray is complicated. He's not alive to share
his own story. From everything we've read about him, it
seems like Ray's intellectual capacity wasn't fully there.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Dovey was no doctor, but that was her assessment.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
It sounds like if Ray were alive today, he might
have been considered intellectually disabled. That said, Dovey thought that
there was no way he could have plotted a murder.
Here's historian Alexis Co again.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
You know she believed him that he didn't do it
because I think she realized that this was an innocent
man who, if she didn't do something to help him,
would most certainly go to jail.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
In her memoir, Dovey vividly recounts her conversation with Ray.
She told him that his mother approached her and that
his family and friends at Second Baptist Church were praying
for him. But that day in jail, Ray was somewhere else.
He wasn't responding to Dovey at all. It was like
he was simultaneously there and gone. Finally, Ray spoke up, lawyer,
(14:29):
what is it they say I done? She grasped his
hands and wrapped them in hers. He was being charged
with first degree murder. It wasn't clear if he got
just how dire his situation was. Ray was disoriented and
physically shaking. All he wanted to know was if the
police were coming after him again. He said the police
(14:52):
officer who brought him to jail had beat him, and
when he claimed innocence, he was beaten again.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Dovey horrified.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
It didn't matter how many times she experienced the wrath
of Jim Crow, she never let herself become numb to it.
Dovey asked Ray point blank, did you kill that woman?
Ray cried, and then he responded, I didn't shoot nobody.
Dovey took him at his word. She took the case
(15:24):
for a simple fee of one dollar. If he didn't
do it, why did Ray tell the police he was
phishing when they found him at the crime scene. Later,
the police found his fishing gear in his home, not
by the towpath. Now on top of a murder charge.
The police caught him in a lie. Yes, Ray admitted
(15:46):
he lied, but he did it because he was afraid
his family would find out what really went on that
morning of October twelfth, especially his wife. Every day Ray
walked to the corner where he'd get a ride to
the day's construction job. But that morning, a woman he
knew named Vivian gave him a lift, and they weren't
(16:08):
going to a building site.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
They ended up at a liquor store.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
They picked up a bag of chips, some cigarettes, a
bottle of whiskey and headed to the canal. The two
of them walked to a bank where Ray liked to fish,
and then, as Ray told Dovey, some fooling around took place.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
I don't need to tell you more. You get the picture.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
After their date, Ray fell asleep on the rocks at
the water's edge.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
And by the time he woke up, he woke up
because he slipped into a river. It was cold, The
woman was gone, and he tried to just go catch
a bus home, but instead he found himself in deep shit.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yeah, I'll say he was down by the towpath that
day for a tryst, so relaxed, he'd fallen asleep after
they'd fooled around. Now he had woken up a suspect.
Suddenly the police had a lot of questions for him.
What was he doing in the area, Why was he wet?
That's when Ray got scared and blurted out the fishing story.
(17:08):
Now this was something. If Ray was telling the truth,
his lover would confirm the story.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
At first, Roundtree thought, okay, this is this is an
easy case in some ways to win because he's got
an alibi. He was, you know, with a woman, a
woman who wasn't his wife, but they were drinking, they're
fooling around, they fell asleep, he slipped into the river.
He wakes up, She's gone.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Ray's Adultree wouldn't win him the sympathy of jurors, that's
for sure. But if his lover was with him when
Mary was murdered, then his fling might just be a
good thing. All Duvey had to do was find this
Vivian woman, which she did. Vivian corroborated everything in a
phone call, down to the chips, whiskey and cigarettes.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
And you know, Vivian completely confirmed all these details, and
Roundtree things.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Great Ray had an alibi, there was a.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Hitch though she wouldn't appear in court because she was married.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
It was the first of many setbacks.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
And so I think that as the case went on,
she kept finding these wonderful leads in these things that
would discount the evidence that the prosecution had, and then
it would all fall apart.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Winning Ray his freedom wasn't going to be easy, but
Dovey was used to challenges. She'd spent her life overcoming them,
starting with getting her education. Dovey grew up poor. She
lost her father and her grandfather was killed. Eventually, Grandma
Rachel remarried and her husband, Reverend Clyde Graham, was a
(18:50):
preacher at one of Charlotte's largest black churches. But it
was still hard to make ends meet. Dovey's mother, Leela,
and her grandparents did what they could to get by.
Leela cleaned the home of a white family named the Hurlees.
According to her, they were good, decent white people. If
it weren't for the Hurlies, Stuvey wouldn't have gone to
(19:11):
her dream college, Spelman. That dream started in grade school.
Her eighth grade teacher, Miss Wimbush, told her about a
prestigious all women's historically black college and told her to apply.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
That's how Debby got in her head.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
But the school was in Atlanta, the home of the
Ku Klux Klan. There was no way Rachel wanted to
send her granddaughter there, and financially the school was out
of reach.
Speaker 7 (19:38):
I loved Spelman, although they called it a rankodanc University
of College because you know, for people who had money. Well,
I didn't have any money. I went on a hope
of the prayer.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Higher education was expensive back then too, not to mention
an out of state private school tuition plus room and
board were eight times the cost of attending a local
black college in North Carolina, and for a black family
during the Great Depression, almost impossible. But Dovey would end
(20:11):
up there. She even wrote about it in her admissions
essay to the school, how going to Spelman would be
like winning the lottery. The letter comes to us courtesy
of the Spelman College Archives. She wrote, I have been
obsessed with the thought of continuing my education. Every year,
I have hoped and prayed that my worthy wish would
(20:32):
be possible, but money held me back. Alas I have
found the only way to conquer such a difficulty was
not in the praying and wishing, but in the rising
above the obstacle. I'm gonna stop right there, because it's
in this moment in Dovey's life where we see a
pattern emerge. Over the course of her life, Dovey was
(20:52):
often faced with the most impossible of hurdles. Then someone
would step in and give her a chance. Sometimes those
people were black, sometimes white. Dovey was brilliant, but it
was the nineteen thirties. Brilliant for a black woman wasn't enough.
Sometimes still not enough. Here's Georgetown professor doctor Chatelaine.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Because of the racial and gender discrimination of her day.
Working hard wasn't enough that she had to rely on
the kindness of others. She had to recognize the breaks.
She had to do all of these things in order
to accomplish her goals.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
As luck would have it, the Hurlies, the white family
her mother worked for, were moving to Atlanta, the very
city where Spelman is, and the Hurlees wanted to live
in housemaids. They wanted to help Leela and Dovey give
them jobs and some security. Everything had lined up. Now
Dovey wouldn't have to pay room and board at Spelman.
(21:50):
Mother and daughter would work side by side for two
years save enough money for Spelman's tuition, and then Leela
would return home while Dovey kept working for the family,
all while Dovey was still in school. The two moved
to Atlanta in the fall of nineteen thirty two, and
Dovey enrolled in Spelman two years later. Dovey was in awe.
(22:14):
The campus was simultaneously inspiring and humbling. She marveled at
the imposing white columns and the magnolia and dogwood trees
that sprinkled the campus.
Speaker 7 (22:26):
And ultimately I found Spelman wasn't working school. There were
as many people there working as I was working your
way through college. A joyous at Victor.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
It didn't take long for her teachers to notice her.
Speaker 7 (22:43):
And I met two people, Miss may Neptune of o'howl,
Miss Spern Rockefeller, and when you go to Spelman, if
you got to meet somebody to meet at Rockefeller.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Miss may Neptune taught English literature at Spelman. She was
sixty years old and six feet tall. Miss Neptune had
a presence. She wore a tight gray bun and wore
thick rim glasses and she could spot a revolutionary woman
because she was one herself. Miss Neptune was a white
woman from the North who believed everyone had an equal
(23:18):
right to education. She made her students think and gave
them the space to write honestly about the world.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
One of the first.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Assignments was to write an essay on democracy. Dovey took
a chance and wrote what she really thought about being
black in America. She wrote about how democracy had gone wrong,
that she wasn't living in the land of the Free.
Miss Neptune was white, but Dovey had a hunch she could.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Be frank with her.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
After all, this professor had uprooted her life to teach
black women in the South. Miss Neptune read the paper
she returned Dovey's essay scrawled in red ink. She asked
if she would like to write for the campus newspaper.
She thought Dovey would be good at it, and that
was how the Campus Mirror found their new star reporter.
Speaker 7 (24:08):
And it just in large shit me. I was into everything.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
But things at home took a turn for the worse.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Missus Hurley seemed to change ever since Dovey started school
at Spelman, and she grew cold and distant. It was
as if she thought Dovey had broken a promise. This
is how Dovey saw it. Missus Hurley wanted to make
something of her. She didn't expect Dovey would make something
of herself. They didn't want an up aty housemaid. Here's
(24:39):
Charlene again. She calls dove Nana.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
It seemed like it was a type of jealousy. And
when Nana would tell, you know, she was talking about
wanting to go to school, and she said she kind
of made her think that she was highlinded to have
those explorations of wanting to go off to school. Why
don't you just, you know, do what you're doing, taking
care of houses and things of that, you and the children.
You know, you a little colored girl. You don't need
(25:05):
to be thinking about that. That was the thing that
she would tell her.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Dovey was always one small step away from getting into
trouble with her employer. One day, missus Hurley accused her
of stealing. She said Dovey was a thief. We don't
know exactly what set missus Hurley off, but in her memoir,
Dovey was adamant she was wrongly accused and there was
simply no evidence she stole anything. That didn't stop Missus
(25:32):
Hurley from marching Dovey straight to the police. Missus Hurley
didn't need much evidence to get Dovey in trouble. Her
word against Dovey would be enough. She was a white,
stately homeowner, and Dovey was just a black twenty year
old who served at her pleasure. Suddenly, Dovey was experiencing
what happens to black and brown folks even today. Even
(25:55):
if you do everything right, it might not matter. Dovey
was arest did and take into the jailhouse.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
For many African American college students, they felt this steep
poignancy of being part of this incredible legacy of historically
black colleges, but still experiencing segregation. If they went out
to a downtown shop to buy a dress, or if
they had to take a train home to see their parents,
they had to sit in a Jim Crow.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Or colored car. That's doctor Chatelaine again.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
And they also knew that, regardless of how well they
did academically or socially, they could always be relegated to
second class citizenship.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
At the jailhouse, a guard told Dovey she could call someone.
Her mother was back in North Carolina. There was only
one person in Atlanta she trusted in such a dire situation,
Miss Neptune. By that evening, a white lawyer arrived at
the jail for Dovey. Miss Neptune and Miss Rockefeller had
sent him. He point blank asked Dovey if she'd stolen anything.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
She said no.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
The next morning, the police released Dovey. As a black woman,
she could have easily stayed locked up for a good while.
The police probably didn't believe Dovey, but they believed the
white people around her. Dovey's legal troubles may have been
behind her, but her financial ones were far from over.
(27:24):
Where would she get the money to pay for her
housing for the rest of her tuition to live.
Speaker 6 (27:29):
She wasn't going to be able to come back because
she wasn't financially able.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
She would have to leave Spelman, maybe teach until she
could make enough money to pay for all her expenses.
She confided in Miss Neptune that she would have to
leave school. Miss Neptune said to meet her the next
morning at Miss Rockefeller's office. When she arrived, she was
told some arrangements had been made Dovey's college expenses would
(27:59):
be covered until her graduation. Miss Neptune wasn't a woman
of means. She was on a modest teacher's salary, but
she had gone into her savings to help pay off
Dubby's tuition. The loan cost Miss Neptune she would be
penny pinching for a long while, but she had seen
(28:22):
something in Dovey that was undeniable. She gave her protege
the money she needed to become the woman who would
one day defend Ray Crump. Dovey asked Miss Neptune how
she could repay her Miss Neptune told her to pass
it on. Pass it on became a way of life
for Dovey.
Speaker 6 (28:43):
And that's why she was always talking about paying it forward.
She always wanted to give that because people helped her
in her life, and so she felt it an honor
and a duty to do the same.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
She wanted to right the wrongs in the world, to.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Be kind when life wasn't kind to her, and to
defend the defenseless, like Ray Crump. After Mary's murder, local
residence well white Georgetown residents were scared. One DC local
named Charles wrote in the paper that the murder.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Was a grim reminder that our city of Washington is
not a safe place from crime day or night, as
the senseless slaying of Mary Pinchot Meyer proved.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
This was their thinking.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
If a murder in broad daylight could happen to someone
as prominent as Mary, what hope did the rest of
them have. The police also had incentive to wrap up
this case and put all of this unease to rest.
The US attorney exponentially sped up the typical procedures for
a criminal case in DC. The grand jury judge indicted
(29:54):
Ray solely on the basis of Henry Wiggins's eyewitness testimony.
Wiggins he was about one hundred and twenty feet away
when he saw Ray. Now, typically a preliminary hearing happens
before a grand jury hearing. Alexis Co says, that's not.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
What happened here.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
It's clear they wanted to ram through this process fast.
Speaker 4 (30:17):
There was no preliminary hearing, which is, you know, sort
of unheard of. There was no warrant for the clothes
they took from him. They cut hair from his head
without his lawyer's permission.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
This enraged Dovey.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
It wasn't fair in the meantime, Ray's mental state was
deteriorating by the day. He was in solitary confinement in
the DC jail. Dovey petitioned the court that Ray wasn't
mentally fit to defend himself at trial, but the psychiatrist
reports that otherwise he was mentally competent. It was decided
(30:53):
their case was going to trial. There was nothing else
to do but to prepare herself the best she could.
How was she going to prove Ray's innocence? The answer,
she thought lay in the towpath.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Dovey and her.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Law partners, George Knox and Jerry Hunter went to the
scene of the crime. Throughout those cold days in November
and December of nineteen sixty four. The three of them
retraced Mary's steps on the towpath. I've been there in
the winter. You can walk the towpath and count exactly
(31:31):
how many steps it takes to get from the bridge
to Mary's studio. That's exactly what Dovey and her law
partners did that day. They walked back and forth from
Foundry Underpass to Fletcher's boat house.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
They role played.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
One would play Mary, the other her killer, and sometimes
one of them would play the role of a jogger
who had passed Mary right before her murder. He'll become
important later in our story. Dovey and her law partner
even re enacted the gunshots. Instead of using guns, they
smashed paper bags to see if Henry Wiggins would have
been able to hear the pops from three quarters of
(32:08):
a mile away on Canal Road.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
We actually tried this ourselves.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Our producers, Katherine and Natalie, came with me to the
towpath in Georgetown today. There's a bike path below the
towpath next to the Potomac. It's a similar distance between
where Henry would have been and the murder scene. Could
people hear the bag popping from that far away?
Speaker 4 (32:33):
By the way, there's a cyclist down on the path
who looked.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Up that really found it like a gun.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
That really sounded like a gun shot.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Dovey and her colleagues were getting creative, but they would
do anything to give Ray a fighting chance. By the
time she reached her thirties, Dovey had already faced injustice.
Missus Hurley had wrongly accused her of stealing a farm
owner had maimed her grandmother. The clan had terrorized her family.
(33:07):
Hate seemed to be spreading at a global level too.
It was the nineteen forties. Fascism was a cancer sweeping
through Europe, and Dovey.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Was hell bent on stopping it.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
She joined the army, becoming part of the first class
of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two
and eventually becoming a captain. But she noticed the hypocrisy.
She was fighting for freedom abroad while she lacked those
freedoms at home every day. Dovey wasn't one to let
(33:39):
all these injustices stand. She wanted to do something about it.
That's how she ended up at Howard University School of
Law in nineteen forty seven. She was just one of
five women in her class. Not everyone was thrilled that
Dovey had arrived. On her first day, when she registered
for classes, the receptionist asked her if she was registering
(34:00):
for her husband or her brother. The message was clear,
she didn't belong there.
Speaker 7 (34:06):
You ain't marriagine nobody but your law. I tell a
lot of women law students that we took men's places.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
And Dovey being Dovey, while she was attending law school,
battling racism and sexism. She also had two part time jobs. Eventually,
her male classmates couldn't help, but notice she was brilliant.
Dovey said. They actually asked to study with her.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
I got me a nice little bob and everything's going
on well, and hear this round me? Where do you study?
Speaker 3 (34:38):
I study in my home.
Speaker 7 (34:39):
Where do you study it? Because you seem to have
a grip on this thing, I said, bring your own sandwiches.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
She did have a grip on the law.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Every week, Dovey and about six other students met at
her house to study together. Dovey graduated in nineteen fifty.
It was one of the proudest moments in her life.
Even graduation was bittersweet. Yes, she had achieved, but how
far had she come given that segregation was still the
(35:08):
law of the land.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
By now.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Grandma Rachel was in her eighties, but she wouldn't miss
Dovey getting her diploma. Rachel and Leela took the train
up from North Carolina to attend the ceremony. Dovey went
to Union Station to meet them. As soon as Dovey
saw her mom and her grandmother, she knew something was wrong.
Grandma Rachel was crying. Trouble had found them on the train.
(35:33):
Dovey reserved seats for her family, but by the time
they got there, all of the seats in the black
car were taken packed with families. Luggage was overflowing onto
the aisle. Meanwhile, the white seats were half empty. When
they went to sit there, the conductor yelled at them.
He refused to honor their reserve.
Speaker 7 (35:52):
Seats, so they put them in the back.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
They had to go back to the black section of
the train and stay for the ten hour ride.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
I can't even imagine how it would feel that you're
with your children and someone humiliates you in front of them,
and there is nothing that you can do.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Rachel stood on her mangled feet for the whole trip
from North Carolina to Virginia and Maryland. She held on
to seat edges and leaned any way she could to
give her feet a break. By the time they got
to Washington, Grandma Rachel collapsed on the toilet seat in
the bathroom. She stayed there until the train pulled into
(36:32):
Union Station.
Speaker 7 (36:33):
So, of course, when they got there and Grandma's legs
were swollen, the mama's crying as soon as she saw
me she started these steers. That's the way she worked me.
You know, you know I was gon fly, which I did.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
They caught a cab back to Dobby's apartment.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
When they were safely home, Dovey looked at Rachel's feet.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
They were bloodied and bruised.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Dovey called a doctor, but she also called her law partner.
This this was about more than Rachel's health. This was
a matter of the law.
Speaker 6 (37:04):
And that I think is what propelled her really to
fight for justice and motivated her to do what she
had to do to make change, to bring about a
positive change, to make a difference.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
The Southern Railway needed to be held accountable.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
I decided to file a suit against the Southern ray
roof ball I could get.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Several weeks later, just after graduating from law school, Dovey
marched into the US District Court for DC to file
a breach of contract complaint the railway denied Dovey's mother
and grandmother's seats when seats were available. It took a year,
but eventually the Southern Railway settled with her. Dovey bit
(37:49):
her lip and teared up. She cried in front of
the defendant's attorney and the judge. Yes, it was a
lot of money at the time, but it hurt her
to see her mother and grandmother's pain reduced to a
monetary value. Fifteen years later, she'd march into that building
again to defend Ray. It had been a long time,
(38:12):
but the memory of her grandmother's injustice was fresh. This time.
She wasn't looking for financial compensation. She wanted justice for
Ray Crump. Next time, on Murder on the Towpath, Dovey
was preparing to go to trial to save Ray Crump
and continue her life's work of defending the defenseless, of
(38:34):
passing it on.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
But what did.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Dovey or anyone really know of the woman he was
accused of killing. It was obvious Mary had been well
connected in certain DC circles. She was related to Ben Bradley,
she walked with Jackie Kennedy. But could those connections have
played a role in her death?
Speaker 5 (38:53):
You know, they would pick up little bits and pieces
here and there, and the danger of that kind of
war women in their society for the men is that
they're gonna blab it.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
What if Mary's murder wasn't so random after all? From
luminary Murder on the Toepath is a production of Film
Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Humm Media. Our executive
producers are me Solidad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and
(39:30):
Jonathan Hirsch.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Lead producer is Shara Morris.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Senior editor is Katherine Saint Louis.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Music and composition by Andrew Eapen, sound design and mixing.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
By Scott Smmerville. Fact checking by Laura Bullard.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Sarah Vacciano, Rose Arsa, Kate Michigan,
Tanner Robbins, and Mikayla Celella.
Emmett Till was visiting Mississippi when he and his cousins
decided to go to a grocery store. Emmett was all
of fourteen, a black boy hanging out with other children.
A white woman would later say Emmett had whistled at her.
She also claimed he touched her. More than sixty years later,
she would recant her testimony. Emmett's body was found floating
(00:25):
in a river. The woman's husband and brother in law
kidnapped and brutally murdered him. His body was so mangled
his own mother could barely identify him. You probably heard
this story before, but I'm telling it to you again
because this was the racial landscape of nineteen sixties America,
(00:45):
the world Ray Crump was living in when he was
arrested for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. So if
you think about it, things could have gone way worse
for Ray.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
For some the fact that this actually was able to
go to trial instead of ending in terms of violence
like a white mob attacking him or attacking other African Americans,
some people saw that as a triumph.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
That's doctor Marcia Chatelaine.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
She's a professor of African American history at Georgetown University.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
That this was the best case scenario because there wasn't
a lynching or there wasn't some act of racial violence.
In terms of retaliation, she says, Ray's case wasn't litigated
in a vacuum. When a black man is arrested for
murdering a prominent white woman, it comes with the baggage
of our fraud racial history. The stereotypes of black men,
(01:44):
you know, being predatory towards white women has a long
history in the post Civil War era. So at the
very moment that African Americans are able to secure some freedom,
they are then characterized as violent and out of control.
And that just shows how deeply poisoned the nation's consciousness
(02:04):
was around these stereotypes.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
After his arrest, Ray's mother, Martha, knew her son was
in trouble, but she didn't have the money for a lawyer.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
She was a laundry woman.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Every day she commuted to the white part of Washington,
d C. And returned home to the black part, which
was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. On
the weekends. She was a regular at Second Baptist Church.
Now more than ever, she needed her prayers answered, and
they were at church she heard about a lawyer whose
reputation preceded her, a black woman named Dovey Johnson Rountree.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
She's constantly litigating because she's incredibly talented.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Dovey Rowntree is a real heroine.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
This is a woman who had to learn how to
be fearless and had to be daring at various stages
of her life.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Martha wanted Dovey to represent her son. People around d
said she was tenacious and clever, but Martha wanted her
for more than her legal smarts. She was black, and
Ray's mother felt she would be invested in her son's
case in a way a white lawyer wouldn't be. Martha
was banking on Dovey, thinking her child was as good
(03:18):
as anyone else's.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
The thing was.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Legal Aid had already offered Ray an attorney, a white guy,
an experienced guy, for free, but Martha wanted Dovey to
take her son's case, so she pleaded with her to.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Defend Ray save his life.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Now, at that time, Dovey and Martha had just the
facts about Mary's murder from the papers. A white woman
was shot to death. She was prominent part of Washington's elite.
It happened on the towpath in Georgetown, and a black
man was arrested. Martha was sure Ray wasn't the killer.
(03:57):
She thought he was too simple, too plain. She babied
her twenty five year old son like he was still
a kid, even though he was actually the oldest of
her three boys. If Dovey took on the case, the
cards would be stacked against her, and the deck was
already high. Here was a black female lawyer from the
segregated South asking a jury to acquit a black man
(04:21):
accused of shooting a white woman in nineteen sixty four.
With an eyewitness who said he saw the whole thing,
the task would be monumental. Dovey didn't take the case
at first, but she would because Martha's hope was true.
Dovey did think Ray was as good as any other man.
(04:42):
His black skin didn't make him inferior. Her Grandma Rachel's
experiences had taught.
Speaker 5 (04:48):
Her that.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
From luminary film, Nation entertainment, and neon hummedia, this is
murder on the towpath, A store worry of two incredible
women who never met, but whose lives became forever intertwined
by tragedy. I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien. Last week we
(05:16):
started to tell you about an affair Mary Pinchot Meyer
and JFK. But before we get to that, we need
to dig into the life of the woman who would
defend Mary's accused murderer, a woman who had no idea
about Mary's connections to the president and wouldn't for years.
In fact, at that time, very few people outside of
(05:38):
Mary's inner circle knew about the affair. When Ray was tried,
it was the case of a black man who had
killed a white woman. By the time of Mary's murder,
Dovey was fifty years old. She had her own law
practice with a colleague. She had accomplished so much in
a half century, even though she wasn't allowed to drink
(05:58):
from the same water fountain as white folks, She'd won
some high profile legal cases, including a bus segregation case
that laid the foundation for Rosa Parks. How had a
black woman in the segregated South gotten this far in
nineteen sixty four. Her story is even more unlikely than
(06:19):
it seems. Dovey was born in nineteen fourteen, after her
father passed away, Dovey's mother and two sisters moved in
with her grandparents in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Speaker 6 (06:32):
She was raised by her grandmother.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
That's Dovey's daughter, Charlene Pritchett Stephenson. She and Dovey met
at church, but they grew so close that Dovey would
eventually call Charlene her chosen daughter.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
Her father died when she was young, very young, and
so her grandmother raised them.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Her father died in the influenza epidemic of nineteen nineteen,
she was just five years old. They lived in Brooklyn,
a neighborhood in Charlotte that was the thriving center of
black life there. It was almost a city within a city,
complete with its own downtown. Dovey's family was poor, but
(07:14):
some of her neighbors had money. It wasn't uncommon to
find shotgun houses next to mansions.
Speaker 6 (07:20):
They struggled financially. Even if you didn't have they always
came up with a better way of doing something. And
you know, even though you may have been poor, it
was the love that pushed them forward. It was the
love and the nurture and the security.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
It was safety in that house.
Speaker 6 (07:40):
It was that bond that family had that they prayed together,
They believed in the scriptures and what they were taught
from the Sunday School and from church.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
So they were to me.
Speaker 6 (07:55):
They were rich.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
But in the nineteen twenties, the ku Kluck clan haunted Charlotte.
As a kid, Dovey remembered them riding through the neighborhood
keeping the hate, not the peace. Her grandma Rachel would
tell the children to get down on the floor. Dovey
would shutter the windows before she hopped under. Her grandmother
had reason to be terrified. The clan had murdered her
(08:19):
first husband. Dovey's grandfather, Rachel said goodbye to him one
day as he was heading north. He never returned. So
when the clan came around, black people like Dovey took cover.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
She experienced white supremacy firsthand as a child.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
That's historian Alexis Co.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
You know, if you think about some of your reformative
memories of fear, it's really something to consider the clan
being one of them.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
But Dovey had one distinct advantage in life.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Her grandmother Rachel.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
Well, the first thing I'm going to say about her
is shoes brand.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
That's Dovey Roundtree herself. In twenty eighteen, at the ripe
age of one hundred and four, but about a decade
before her passing, she sat down for an interview with
an organization called the National Visionary Leadership Project. She lit
up when she talked about her grandma.
Speaker 7 (09:16):
She was smart. She was very smart, very brilliant mind,
and she understood things. But she was a very beautiful woman.
She was small and long, curly hair, beautiful skin, almost
olive skin. She was beautiful.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Dovey talked about her grandmother as if she walked on water,
like she was superhuman. When you're a kid, that's how
many of us see our parents and grandparents.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
I know, I do.
Speaker 6 (09:47):
She loved her grandmother. Her grandmother was very strict, but
she showed her her love for the Lord, and she
was a very independent woman. She wanted her to reach
her full potential.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
As a girl.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Dovey didn't know how the outside world saw Rachel, how
society treated poor, uneducated black women like her. But Rachel
was determined to make a good life for her family.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
She could squeeze a dollar till it turned to ten,
and I don't care what your needs were. That dollar
was going to become a ten dollar bill, and then
she go to the market and she would get it
changed in and bring back a ten dollar bill for
you to see.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
If you were poor and black at the time, you
had to be resourceful.
Speaker 6 (10:35):
Grandma Rachel would make last soap and just taught her
different things about survival.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
It was a skill Rachel was determined to pass on
to Dovey. She was arming her grandchildren for battle because
Rachel knew how hard it was out there. She had
lived it. You see, Rachel was born to slaves. She
grew up when slavery was a ball, but the structures
were still in place.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
The farm where she lived. She had to call the owner.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Slave master, and when she was thirteen, that man tried
to rape her.
Speaker 7 (11:10):
He was trying to attack her and he just tore
her clothes off, and she fought.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Him, but he wouldn't relent. The man stomped on her
feet and crushed them.
Speaker 7 (11:20):
But he beat in one of the scars on her
leg until she took a grave.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
When she returned home, Rachel's mother wrapped her bloody feet
in bandages, but her feet would never recover.
Speaker 7 (11:32):
Her beat would just big, just swollen, and she didn't
get treatment. You know, well, I guess there was no treatment.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But that Rachel eventually learned to walk again, but her
feet would never be the same.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Here's Charlene again.
Speaker 6 (11:48):
The foot was very bad and it never healed, and
she kind of walked with a limp from then on.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Her swollen feet reminded her every day how that man
thought he had a right to her her. But she
never wanted to forget how discrimination had shaped her, misshaped
her really, and she felt obligated to pass that resolve
onto her children and grandchildren.
Speaker 6 (12:12):
Grandma didn't show any fear, so I think to me
that was instilled in her, even though we do have fears,
we struggle with things.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
She told them the story about her feet not once,
but regularly. It was one of their family lures, which,
if you think about it, is a pretty traumatic story
to tell such young girls. But for Rachel it was
probably her way of preparing them for the world.
Speaker 7 (12:38):
And for Dovey it gave me the opportunity to get mad.
If you can comprehend that, I wanted to do something,
and I like to think in my legal career, I
did do something the right injustice.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Sometimes pain is a catalyst. Before Dovey met Ray Crump,
she wasn't sure she'd take on the case.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
She was skeptical, which is understandable. Dove was a lawyer.
Being critical was her way.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
But everything changed when she met Ray in the DC jail.
Speaker 7 (13:18):
He couldn't give you a stretch sentence.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Talking about Ray is complicated. He's not alive to share
his own story. From everything we've read about him, it
seems like Ray's intellectual capacity wasn't fully there.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Dovey was no doctor, but that was her assessment.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
It sounds like if Ray were alive today, he might
have been considered intellectually disabled. That said, Dovey thought that
there was no way he could have plotted a murder.
Here's historian Alexis Co again.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
You know she believed him that he didn't do it
because I think she realized that this was an innocent
man who, if she didn't do something to help him,
would most certainly go to jail.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
In her memoir, Dovey vividly recounts her conversation with Ray.
She told him that his mother approached her and that
his family and friends at Second Baptist Church were praying
for him. But that day in jail, Ray was somewhere else.
He wasn't responding to Dovey at all. It was like
he was simultaneously there and gone. Finally, Ray spoke up, lawyer,
(14:29):
what is it they say I done? She grasped his
hands and wrapped them in hers. He was being charged
with first degree murder. It wasn't clear if he got
just how dire his situation was. Ray was disoriented and
physically shaking. All he wanted to know was if the
police were coming after him again. He said the police
(14:52):
officer who brought him to jail had beat him, and
when he claimed innocence, he was beaten again.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Dovey horrified.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
It didn't matter how many times she experienced the wrath
of Jim Crow, she never let herself become numb to it.
Dovey asked Ray point blank, did you kill that woman?
Ray cried, and then he responded, I didn't shoot nobody.
Dovey took him at his word. She took the case
(15:24):
for a simple fee of one dollar. If he didn't
do it, why did Ray tell the police he was
phishing when they found him at the crime scene. Later,
the police found his fishing gear in his home, not
by the towpath. Now on top of a murder charge.
The police caught him in a lie. Yes, Ray admitted
(15:46):
he lied, but he did it because he was afraid
his family would find out what really went on that
morning of October twelfth, especially his wife. Every day Ray
walked to the corner where he'd get a ride to
the day's construction job. But that morning, a woman he
knew named Vivian gave him a lift, and they weren't
(16:08):
going to a building site.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
They ended up at a liquor store.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
They picked up a bag of chips, some cigarettes, a
bottle of whiskey and headed to the canal. The two
of them walked to a bank where Ray liked to fish,
and then, as Ray told Dovey, some fooling around took place.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
I don't need to tell you more. You get the picture.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
After their date, Ray fell asleep on the rocks at
the water's edge.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
And by the time he woke up, he woke up
because he slipped into a river. It was cold, The
woman was gone, and he tried to just go catch
a bus home, but instead he found himself in deep shit.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yeah, I'll say he was down by the towpath that
day for a tryst, so relaxed, he'd fallen asleep after
they'd fooled around. Now he had woken up a suspect.
Suddenly the police had a lot of questions for him.
What was he doing in the area, Why was he wet?
That's when Ray got scared and blurted out the fishing story.
(17:08):
Now this was something. If Ray was telling the truth,
his lover would confirm the story.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
At first, Roundtree thought, okay, this is this is an
easy case in some ways to win because he's got
an alibi. He was, you know, with a woman, a
woman who wasn't his wife, but they were drinking, they're
fooling around, they fell asleep, he slipped into the river.
He wakes up, She's gone.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Ray's Adultree wouldn't win him the sympathy of jurors, that's
for sure. But if his lover was with him when
Mary was murdered, then his fling might just be a
good thing. All Duvey had to do was find this
Vivian woman, which she did. Vivian corroborated everything in a
phone call, down to the chips, whiskey and cigarettes.
Speaker 4 (17:55):
And you know, Vivian completely confirmed all these details, and
Roundtree things.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Great Ray had an alibi, there was a.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Hitch though she wouldn't appear in court because she was married.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
It was the first of many setbacks.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
And so I think that as the case went on,
she kept finding these wonderful leads in these things that
would discount the evidence that the prosecution had, and then
it would all fall apart.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Winning Ray his freedom wasn't going to be easy, but
Dovey was used to challenges. She'd spent her life overcoming them,
starting with getting her education. Dovey grew up poor. She
lost her father and her grandfather was killed. Eventually, Grandma
Rachel remarried and her husband, Reverend Clyde Graham, was a
(18:50):
preacher at one of Charlotte's largest black churches. But it
was still hard to make ends meet. Dovey's mother, Leela,
and her grandparents did what they could to get by.
Leela cleaned the home of a white family named the Hurlees.
According to her, they were good, decent white people. If
it weren't for the Hurlies, Stuvey wouldn't have gone to
(19:11):
her dream college, Spelman. That dream started in grade school.
Her eighth grade teacher, Miss Wimbush, told her about a
prestigious all women's historically black college and told her to apply.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
That's how Debby got in her head.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
But the school was in Atlanta, the home of the
Ku Klux Klan. There was no way Rachel wanted to
send her granddaughter there, and financially the school was out
of reach.
Speaker 7 (19:38):
I loved Spelman, although they called it a rankodanc University
of College because you know, for people who had money. Well,
I didn't have any money. I went on a hope
of the prayer.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Higher education was expensive back then too, not to mention
an out of state private school tuition plus room and
board were eight times the cost of attending a local
black college in North Carolina, and for a black family
during the Great Depression, almost impossible. But Dovey would end
(20:11):
up there. She even wrote about it in her admissions
essay to the school, how going to Spelman would be
like winning the lottery. The letter comes to us courtesy
of the Spelman College Archives. She wrote, I have been
obsessed with the thought of continuing my education. Every year,
I have hoped and prayed that my worthy wish would
(20:32):
be possible, but money held me back. Alas I have
found the only way to conquer such a difficulty was
not in the praying and wishing, but in the rising
above the obstacle. I'm gonna stop right there, because it's
in this moment in Dovey's life where we see a
pattern emerge. Over the course of her life, Dovey was
(20:52):
often faced with the most impossible of hurdles. Then someone
would step in and give her a chance. Sometimes those
people were black, sometimes white. Dovey was brilliant, but it
was the nineteen thirties. Brilliant for a black woman wasn't enough.
Sometimes still not enough. Here's Georgetown professor doctor Chatelaine.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Because of the racial and gender discrimination of her day.
Working hard wasn't enough that she had to rely on
the kindness of others. She had to recognize the breaks.
She had to do all of these things in order
to accomplish her goals.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
As luck would have it, the Hurlies, the white family
her mother worked for, were moving to Atlanta, the very
city where Spelman is, and the Hurlees wanted to live
in housemaids. They wanted to help Leela and Dovey give
them jobs and some security. Everything had lined up. Now
Dovey wouldn't have to pay room and board at Spelman.
(21:50):
Mother and daughter would work side by side for two
years save enough money for Spelman's tuition, and then Leela
would return home while Dovey kept working for the family,
all while Dovey was still in school. The two moved
to Atlanta in the fall of nineteen thirty two, and
Dovey enrolled in Spelman two years later. Dovey was in awe.
(22:14):
The campus was simultaneously inspiring and humbling. She marveled at
the imposing white columns and the magnolia and dogwood trees
that sprinkled the campus.
Speaker 7 (22:26):
And ultimately I found Spelman wasn't working school. There were
as many people there working as I was working your
way through college. A joyous at Victor.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
It didn't take long for her teachers to notice her.
Speaker 7 (22:43):
And I met two people, Miss may Neptune of o'howl,
Miss Spern Rockefeller, and when you go to Spelman, if
you got to meet somebody to meet at Rockefeller.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Miss may Neptune taught English literature at Spelman. She was
sixty years old and six feet tall. Miss Neptune had
a presence. She wore a tight gray bun and wore
thick rim glasses and she could spot a revolutionary woman
because she was one herself. Miss Neptune was a white
woman from the North who believed everyone had an equal
(23:18):
right to education. She made her students think and gave
them the space to write honestly about the world.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
One of the first.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Assignments was to write an essay on democracy. Dovey took
a chance and wrote what she really thought about being
black in America. She wrote about how democracy had gone wrong,
that she wasn't living in the land of the Free.
Miss Neptune was white, but Dovey had a hunch she could.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Be frank with her.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
After all, this professor had uprooted her life to teach
black women in the South. Miss Neptune read the paper
she returned Dovey's essay scrawled in red ink. She asked
if she would like to write for the campus newspaper.
She thought Dovey would be good at it, and that
was how the Campus Mirror found their new star reporter.
Speaker 7 (24:08):
And it just in large shit me. I was into everything.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
But things at home took a turn for the worse.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Missus Hurley seemed to change ever since Dovey started school
at Spelman, and she grew cold and distant. It was
as if she thought Dovey had broken a promise. This
is how Dovey saw it. Missus Hurley wanted to make
something of her. She didn't expect Dovey would make something
of herself. They didn't want an up aty housemaid. Here's
(24:39):
Charlene again. She calls dove Nana.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
It seemed like it was a type of jealousy. And
when Nana would tell, you know, she was talking about
wanting to go to school, and she said she kind
of made her think that she was highlinded to have
those explorations of wanting to go off to school. Why
don't you just, you know, do what you're doing, taking
care of houses and things of that, you and the children.
You know, you a little colored girl. You don't need
(25:05):
to be thinking about that. That was the thing that
she would tell her.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Dovey was always one small step away from getting into
trouble with her employer. One day, missus Hurley accused her
of stealing. She said Dovey was a thief. We don't
know exactly what set missus Hurley off, but in her memoir,
Dovey was adamant she was wrongly accused and there was
simply no evidence she stole anything. That didn't stop Missus
(25:32):
Hurley from marching Dovey straight to the police. Missus Hurley
didn't need much evidence to get Dovey in trouble. Her
word against Dovey would be enough. She was a white,
stately homeowner, and Dovey was just a black twenty year
old who served at her pleasure. Suddenly, Dovey was experiencing
what happens to black and brown folks even today. Even
(25:55):
if you do everything right, it might not matter. Dovey
was arest did and take into the jailhouse.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
For many African American college students, they felt this steep
poignancy of being part of this incredible legacy of historically
black colleges, but still experiencing segregation. If they went out
to a downtown shop to buy a dress, or if
they had to take a train home to see their parents,
they had to sit in a Jim Crow.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Or colored car. That's doctor Chatelaine again.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
And they also knew that, regardless of how well they
did academically or socially, they could always be relegated to
second class citizenship.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
At the jailhouse, a guard told Dovey she could call someone.
Her mother was back in North Carolina. There was only
one person in Atlanta she trusted in such a dire situation,
Miss Neptune. By that evening, a white lawyer arrived at
the jail for Dovey. Miss Neptune and Miss Rockefeller had
sent him. He point blank asked Dovey if she'd stolen anything.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
She said no.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
The next morning, the police released Dovey. As a black woman,
she could have easily stayed locked up for a good while.
The police probably didn't believe Dovey, but they believed the
white people around her. Dovey's legal troubles may have been
behind her, but her financial ones were far from over.
(27:24):
Where would she get the money to pay for her
housing for the rest of her tuition to live.
Speaker 6 (27:29):
She wasn't going to be able to come back because
she wasn't financially able.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
She would have to leave Spelman, maybe teach until she
could make enough money to pay for all her expenses.
She confided in Miss Neptune that she would have to
leave school. Miss Neptune said to meet her the next
morning at Miss Rockefeller's office. When she arrived, she was
told some arrangements had been made Dovey's college expenses would
(27:59):
be covered until her graduation. Miss Neptune wasn't a woman
of means. She was on a modest teacher's salary, but
she had gone into her savings to help pay off
Dubby's tuition. The loan cost Miss Neptune she would be
penny pinching for a long while, but she had seen
(28:22):
something in Dovey that was undeniable. She gave her protege
the money she needed to become the woman who would
one day defend Ray Crump. Dovey asked Miss Neptune how
she could repay her Miss Neptune told her to pass
it on. Pass it on became a way of life
for Dovey.
Speaker 6 (28:43):
And that's why she was always talking about paying it forward.
She always wanted to give that because people helped her
in her life, and so she felt it an honor
and a duty to do the same.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
She wanted to right the wrongs in the world, to.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Be kind when life wasn't kind to her, and to
defend the defenseless, like Ray Crump. After Mary's murder, local
residence well white Georgetown residents were scared. One DC local
named Charles wrote in the paper that the murder.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Was a grim reminder that our city of Washington is
not a safe place from crime day or night, as
the senseless slaying of Mary Pinchot Meyer proved.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
This was their thinking.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
If a murder in broad daylight could happen to someone
as prominent as Mary, what hope did the rest of
them have. The police also had incentive to wrap up
this case and put all of this unease to rest.
The US attorney exponentially sped up the typical procedures for
a criminal case in DC. The grand jury judge indicted
(29:54):
Ray solely on the basis of Henry Wiggins's eyewitness testimony.
Wiggins he was about one hundred and twenty feet away
when he saw Ray. Now, typically a preliminary hearing happens
before a grand jury hearing. Alexis Co says, that's not.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
What happened here.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
It's clear they wanted to ram through this process fast.
Speaker 4 (30:17):
There was no preliminary hearing, which is, you know, sort
of unheard of. There was no warrant for the clothes
they took from him. They cut hair from his head
without his lawyer's permission.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
This enraged Dovey.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
It wasn't fair in the meantime, Ray's mental state was
deteriorating by the day. He was in solitary confinement in
the DC jail. Dovey petitioned the court that Ray wasn't
mentally fit to defend himself at trial, but the psychiatrist
reports that otherwise he was mentally competent. It was decided
(30:53):
their case was going to trial. There was nothing else
to do but to prepare herself the best she could.
How was she going to prove Ray's innocence? The answer,
she thought lay in the towpath.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Dovey and her.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Law partners, George Knox and Jerry Hunter went to the
scene of the crime. Throughout those cold days in November
and December of nineteen sixty four. The three of them
retraced Mary's steps on the towpath. I've been there in
the winter. You can walk the towpath and count exactly
(31:31):
how many steps it takes to get from the bridge
to Mary's studio. That's exactly what Dovey and her law
partners did that day. They walked back and forth from
Foundry Underpass to Fletcher's boat house.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
They role played.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
One would play Mary, the other her killer, and sometimes
one of them would play the role of a jogger
who had passed Mary right before her murder. He'll become
important later in our story. Dovey and her law partner
even re enacted the gunshots. Instead of using guns, they
smashed paper bags to see if Henry Wiggins would have
been able to hear the pops from three quarters of
(32:08):
a mile away on Canal Road.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
We actually tried this ourselves.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Our producers, Katherine and Natalie, came with me to the
towpath in Georgetown today. There's a bike path below the
towpath next to the Potomac. It's a similar distance between
where Henry would have been and the murder scene. Could
people hear the bag popping from that far away?
Speaker 4 (32:33):
By the way, there's a cyclist down on the path
who looked.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Up that really found it like a gun.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
That really sounded like a gun shot.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Dovey and her colleagues were getting creative, but they would
do anything to give Ray a fighting chance. By the
time she reached her thirties, Dovey had already faced injustice.
Missus Hurley had wrongly accused her of stealing a farm
owner had maimed her grandmother. The clan had terrorized her family.
(33:07):
Hate seemed to be spreading at a global level too.
It was the nineteen forties. Fascism was a cancer sweeping
through Europe, and Dovey.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Was hell bent on stopping it.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
She joined the army, becoming part of the first class
of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two
and eventually becoming a captain. But she noticed the hypocrisy.
She was fighting for freedom abroad while she lacked those
freedoms at home every day. Dovey wasn't one to let
(33:39):
all these injustices stand. She wanted to do something about it.
That's how she ended up at Howard University School of
Law in nineteen forty seven. She was just one of
five women in her class. Not everyone was thrilled that
Dovey had arrived. On her first day, when she registered
for classes, the receptionist asked her if she was registering
(34:00):
for her husband or her brother. The message was clear,
she didn't belong there.
Speaker 7 (34:06):
You ain't marriagine nobody but your law. I tell a
lot of women law students that we took men's places.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
And Dovey being Dovey, while she was attending law school,
battling racism and sexism. She also had two part time jobs. Eventually,
her male classmates couldn't help, but notice she was brilliant.
Dovey said. They actually asked to study with her.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
I got me a nice little bob and everything's going
on well, and hear this round me? Where do you study?
Speaker 3 (34:38):
I study in my home.
Speaker 7 (34:39):
Where do you study it? Because you seem to have
a grip on this thing, I said, bring your own sandwiches.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
She did have a grip on the law.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Every week, Dovey and about six other students met at
her house to study together. Dovey graduated in nineteen fifty.
It was one of the proudest moments in her life.
Even graduation was bittersweet. Yes, she had achieved, but how
far had she come given that segregation was still the
(35:08):
law of the land.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
By now.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Grandma Rachel was in her eighties, but she wouldn't miss
Dovey getting her diploma. Rachel and Leela took the train
up from North Carolina to attend the ceremony. Dovey went
to Union Station to meet them. As soon as Dovey
saw her mom and her grandmother, she knew something was wrong.
Grandma Rachel was crying. Trouble had found them on the train.
(35:33):
Dovey reserved seats for her family, but by the time
they got there, all of the seats in the black
car were taken packed with families. Luggage was overflowing onto
the aisle. Meanwhile, the white seats were half empty. When
they went to sit there, the conductor yelled at them.
He refused to honor their reserve.
Speaker 7 (35:52):
Seats, so they put them in the back.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
They had to go back to the black section of
the train and stay for the ten hour ride.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
I can't even imagine how it would feel that you're
with your children and someone humiliates you in front of them,
and there is nothing that you can do.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Rachel stood on her mangled feet for the whole trip
from North Carolina to Virginia and Maryland. She held on
to seat edges and leaned any way she could to
give her feet a break. By the time they got
to Washington, Grandma Rachel collapsed on the toilet seat in
the bathroom. She stayed there until the train pulled into
(36:32):
Union Station.
Speaker 7 (36:33):
So, of course, when they got there and Grandma's legs
were swollen, the mama's crying as soon as she saw
me she started these steers. That's the way she worked me.
You know, you know I was gon fly, which I did.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
They caught a cab back to Dobby's apartment.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
When they were safely home, Dovey looked at Rachel's feet.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
They were bloodied and bruised.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Dovey called a doctor, but she also called her law partner.
This this was about more than Rachel's health. This was
a matter of the law.
Speaker 6 (37:04):
And that I think is what propelled her really to
fight for justice and motivated her to do what she
had to do to make change, to bring about a
positive change, to make a difference.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
The Southern Railway needed to be held accountable.
Speaker 7 (37:23):
I decided to file a suit against the Southern ray
roof ball I could get.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Several weeks later, just after graduating from law school, Dovey
marched into the US District Court for DC to file
a breach of contract complaint the railway denied Dovey's mother
and grandmother's seats when seats were available. It took a year,
but eventually the Southern Railway settled with her. Dovey bit
(37:49):
her lip and teared up. She cried in front of
the defendant's attorney and the judge. Yes, it was a
lot of money at the time, but it hurt her
to see her mother and grandmother's pain reduced to a
monetary value. Fifteen years later, she'd march into that building
again to defend Ray. It had been a long time,
(38:12):
but the memory of her grandmother's injustice was fresh. This time.
She wasn't looking for financial compensation. She wanted justice for
Ray Crump. Next time, on Murder on the Towpath, Dovey
was preparing to go to trial to save Ray Crump
and continue her life's work of defending the defenseless, of
(38:34):
passing it on.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
But what did.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Dovey or anyone really know of the woman he was
accused of killing. It was obvious Mary had been well
connected in certain DC circles. She was related to Ben Bradley,
she walked with Jackie Kennedy. But could those connections have
played a role in her death?
Speaker 5 (38:53):
You know, they would pick up little bits and pieces
here and there, and the danger of that kind of
war women in their society for the men is that
they're gonna blab it.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
What if Mary's murder wasn't so random after all? From
luminary Murder on the Toepath is a production of Film
Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Humm Media. Our executive
producers are me Solidad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and
(39:30):
Jonathan Hirsch.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Lead producer is Shara Morris.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Senior editor is Katherine Saint Louis.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Music and composition by Andrew Eapen, sound design and mixing.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
By Scott Smmerville. Fact checking by Laura Bullard.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Sarah Vacciano, Rose Arsa, Kate Michigan,
Tanner Robbins, and Mikayla Celella.
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