Mary's Mosaic (17 page)

Grandma Rachel’s courage had left an indelible impression on the young Dovey Mae Johnson, perhaps never more so than the day the pair took a trolley to downtown Charlotte. The inquisitive little girl wanted to see how the driver steered the vehicle and punched the tickets, so she took the seat behind him. “Get that pickaninny out of here!” the white driver yelled. “You know she can’t sit there.” Grandma Rachel took her granddaughter by the hand, yanked the stop cord, and, once descended, walked with her the entire way into town and back again. She was very quiet until much later that evening, when, with her family gathered at the table, she announced, “Something bad happened to Dovey Mae today.” They listened by the light of the kerosene lamp, the family Bible open in front of Grandpa Clyde. “The mean old conductor man on the trolley car called her a bad name,” she said. “I want to tell you all something. Now hear me, and hear me good. My chillun is as good as anybody.”
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During the years of struggle that followed, Dovey never forgot her grandmother’s words that night.

That day was a galvanizing moment for Dovey Mae. Many years earlier, her grandmother had had a galvanizing moment of her own. When she was still a girl, Rachel had been attacked by the white overseer of a Greensboro farm where her parents had been slaves. “He was meanin’ to bother me,” she told her granddaughter. “I ran and fought, and he stomped on my feet to keep me from runnin’ for good, he said. But I kept runnin’. He wasn’t going to have his way with me.”
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The broken bones in Rachel’s feet never set correctly, and every night after that, she had had to soak her feet and massage them with a homemade salve of mutton tallow and turpentine, just to be able to endure the discomfort of wearing shoes. When Dovey learned this about her grandmother a few years
after the incident on the trolley, she better understood something her grandmother used to always say: “No matter what any sign said, what anyone whispered or shouted at you, if you walked tall, no one could bring you down.”
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Grandma Rachel was Dovey Johnson’s beacon. Dovey listened carefully to what her grandmother told her, and she heard loud and clear that the path forward was one of education. Rachel had regaled her grandchildren with stories of her friend, author and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who had worked her way from the cotton fields of South Carolina to found a black women’s college in Florida. She would go on, during the 1930s, to be appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special adviser for minority affairs and director of African American Affairs in the National Youth Administration.

When Dovey was in seventh grade, Mary McLeod Bethune came to speak at Charlotte’s Emancipation Day celebration. Grandma Rachel took the entire family to the event. “Mary, I want you to meet my grandchildren,” she said to her old friend. After the event, Grandma Rachel took her granddaughter Dovey aside. “She’s somebody,” Grandma Rachel told Dovey, referring to her friend Mary Bethune, “and you can be somebody too.”
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Dovey Mae Johnson attended Spelman College, where she worked three jobs, juggled majors in English and biology to prepare her for the medical career she envisioned, and edited the school newspaper. While there, she met Bill Roundtree, a student at Morehouse College, Spelman’s brother school. The approaching war and other circumstances would keep them from marriage until some years later.
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Dovey Johnson graduated from Spelman in 1938. In 1941, she became Mary McLeod Bethune’s personal assistant in Washington, D.C. The job blew open the young woman’s horizons, introducing her to the day’s leaders, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. With the onset of World War II, Bethune selected her young protégé as one of the forty black women to train in the first class of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC).
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“You are not doing this for yourself,” Bethune told Dovey. “You are doing it for those who will come after you.” Despite her initial ambivalence, Dovey distinguished herself in the fight for a racially integrated WAAC regiment. The experience set her on a path to pursuing a career in justice and legal protection for those who needed it most. Law would become her life’s focus and passion—so much so, it overshadowed her short-lived marriage to Bill Roundtree, which ended in divorce in 1947.
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Studying law at Howard University was an awakening for Dovey Roundtree. As her biographer, Katie McCabe, wrote of Dovey’s passion for the law, “There
was a simplicity about it, and an intricacy, and a logic. Closely reasoned opinions, precedents, constitutional principles—these, woven together, made a kind of sense that imposed itself on the scattered reality of human existence.”
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In addition to her regular law courses, Dovey did legal research for the NAACP legal team, which was headed by future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.

She passed the D.C. bar exam in December 1950 and was sworn in a few months later, in April 1951. She immediately set about developing a private law practice. Many of her clients came from her church. She allowed the poorest among them to barter for her legal services. In the ten years during which Dovey practiced with her law partner, Julius Robertson, before his untimely death in 1961, the two established a thriving practice. After Robertson’s death, Dovey, who had led the vanguard of women ordained to the ministry in African Methodist Episcopal Church that same year, went on to make a name for herself as a one-woman legal aid society and a force to be reckoned with. By the fall of 1964, Dovey Roundtree was a sought-after defense attorney.

S
o when Reverend Brown contacted her in October 1964 and asked if he could bring a member of his church to her office, attorney Dovey Roundtree had already formed an opinion about the “Towpath Murder” from the front-page newspaper accounts that she had read. “The case sounded cut and dried and all but decided, what with all these so-called eyewitnesses,” she recalled in a 1990 interview by the late author Leo Damore. She had read the newspaper reports that a tow truck driver near the scene, Henry Wiggins, had identified Ray Crump as the man standing over the corpse. She had also read about the jogger, Lieutenant William L. Mitchell, who had come forward the next day and told police he’d seen a black man dressed like the man Wiggins had described, trailing Mary Meyer as she walked along the canal.

“I met Crump’s mother and his wife,” Roundtree told Damore. “They were all fearfully upset and very worried that something was going to happen to Ray Jr. His mother just worried me to death. She called me day and night. She was afraid there was going to be a killing in the D.C. jail—which eventually became one of my concerns. He was in the D.C. jail, and they had predominately white guards in those days. And those in charge, the captains of the supervisors, were all white men.”
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On her very first trip to the D. C. jail to meet Ray Crump, Dovey found him to be a diminutive little man. “He was no taller than me—I’m five feet four inches—and maybe 140 pounds,” she recalled in 1990. “I never saw anybody
as frightened as this man was! Crump was crying; he was pitiful. And to me, he was in a stupor. He asked me that question many times: ‘What was really going on?’ He didn’t know what happened. I had to tell him. He didn’t know a woman had been murdered.”
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She asked him to try to remember everything he did on the day of the murder.

But Crump couldn’t remember very much, and what he did remember he had a hard time expressing. Roundtree was patient. Eventually, a story emerged. Crump had had a fight with his wife, Helena, that morning and he had refused to go to work. Instead, he had met up with a girlfriend named Vivian, whose last name was never made public. Both Crump and his mother, Martha, had finally offered that last bit of information, but Ray hadn’t wanted to reveal his paramour’s identity for fear of repercussions with his wife and the woman’s husband.
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Crump then told Roundtree that he had taken a bus from his house on Stanton Road to a point where he met Vivian in her car. The couple stopped to buy beer, a half pint of whiskey, a bag of potato chips, and some cigarettes. The $1.50 left over was hardly enough to rent a motel room.

“They were trying to figure out where it would be a good place to go,” Roundtree told Leo Damore in 1990. “He’d been fishing on the river on occasion. So it was someplace he knew about.”

“I was goofin’ around,” Crump eventually disclosed.

“And I fully understood what he meant,” Roundtree explained in 1990. “He had sex—the usual thing. He was drinking and he fell asleep. And the girl left. The next thing he knew he was trying to get himself together and he slipped and fell into the water. That scared him. He almost drowned. He didn’t know how to swim. He was really trying to find his way out of the dang place. He wasn’t familiar with that area at all. And he sort of roamed around. And then he heard something like an explosion.”
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“I tried to pin him down,” Roundtree continued. “I asked him, ‘Well, what did it sound like?’ Crump said he heard something ‘like the backfire of a car,’ but he paid no attention to it. He said he was afraid.”

“Well, what were you afraid of?” Roundtree had asked him.

“I don’t know. I was trying to get out of there and I couldn’t get myself together,” she remembered him responding.

“Well, you were half drunk,” Roundtree replied.

“I had to get home,” Crump had told her. “And then, all hell broke loose. Police all around. I didn’t know what was going on.”

“Do you own a gun?” Roundtree wanted to know. Crump said no. He never owned a firearm. His brother Jimmy had a.22 rifle because Jimmy used to go hunting, but not Crump. He didn’t like hunting. He had never owned a gun and wouldn’t have one with five children in his house, Roundtree recalled.

“That made sense to me, so I didn’t pursue it,” said Roundtree. “He wasn’t given to armed robbery. He didn’t have a record like that. He had a job. He was hustling the best way he could. He wasn’t going out to rob anybody.”
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But Crump did have a misdemeanor record: two drunk and disorderly charges and a conviction for petit larceny. Convicted of shoplifting, he’d been sentenced to sixty days in jail, a substantial sentence for a first offense.

“But it was at the whim of the judge,” Roundtree said in 1990. “We didn’t have dialogues about sentencing like we do now. And it may well have been, according to what Ray told me, that he was drinking at the time. And that could have made the judge angry, that would have aggravated it.”
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Toward the end of their first interview at the D.C. jail, the bewildered Ray Crump again asked Roundtree, “What was really going on down there?” And again, Roundtree tried to explain that a woman had been murdered and that he had been arrested for the crime. Crump was already withering under the stress of being in prison. He was withdrawing and was increasingly unable to help with his own defense. That vulnerability convinced Roundtree to take his case. “Instantly, I felt this man was being used as a scapegoat. The crime just didn’t fit him at all,” she recalled. Roundtree believed that Crump didn’t have the temperament to be a killer. “He wouldn’t have the nerve. He was of such meekness, I came to know him to be frightened half out of his wits in fear of his life. And I was afraid for him.”
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So afraid, in fact, that Roundtree did what she had never done for any client: She visited him in jail every day.

But Crump had lied to police about going fishing, and he had lied again about what he had been wearing the day that he was apprehended. Trying to conceal his affair with Vivian, he had put himself in jeopardy with police. For Roundtree, the immediate priority was to find Vivian, his only alibi. She did so with the assistance of her private investigator, Purcell Moore.

But Vivian made it clear from the outset she didn’t appreciate Dovey Roundtree’s out-of-the blue telephone call to her home. Vivian did, however, corroborate Ray Crump’s story—right down to the details about the beer, potato chips, whiskey, and cigarettes. Her version of events lined up with Crump’s. They had walked out the towpath to a spot adjacent to the Potomac River, she told Roundtree. They drank a little, had sex on some rocks, and Crump fell asleep. She left without waking him. The corroborating details
offered Roundtree her first glimmer of hope. But unfortunately, like Crump, Vivian feared the repercussions of exposing her extramarital affair—she believed her husband might kill her if he learned of it. She refused to testify in court. Only after Roundtree explained that Crump would likely face the death penalty did Vivian agree to sign an affidavit verifying she’d been with Crump the entire morning of the day of the murder, and that he had carried no gun. But without an appearance at trial, the affidavit was all but worthless. Crump’s fabrications to police would then form the only cornerstone of the government’s case against him. The noose around his neck was tightening.
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W
hen Ray Crump was moved to a cellblock with other prisoners, guards taunted him at night. “How you doing, Crump? You know, it would be a lot easier on you if you just come out and tell what you did.” Dovey Roundtree believed the guards were trying to extract a confession from Crump. “And I made him promise me. No matter what goes on, you tell the guards: ‘Get my lawyer here.’ Don’t say anything else. I don’t want them beating you up or messing with you. You just say: ‘You get Mrs. Roundtree here.’ And you say it loud, so that somebody in the other cells can hear you. That’s what you’ve got to do. You got to fight fire with fire.”
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