Tonya Bolden - Dovey Undaunted: A Black Woman Breaks Barriers in the Law, the Military, and the Ministry

DOVEY
UNDAUNTED

A Black Woman Breaks Barriers in the Law, the Military, and the Ministry

TONYA BOLDEN

Copyright 2021 by Tonya Bolden Associates

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 978-1-324-00317-5

ISBN 978-1-324-00318-2 (ebook)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

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W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

For Zakai Eliza Lee Brunson

CONTENTS

DOVEY UNDAUNTED

LAWYER, WHAT IS IT they say I done?

That was Ray on a late October day in 1964.

Black.

Twenty-five.

Eighth-grade education.

Construction worker.

Husband.

Father of five.

Imprisoned in Washington, DCs, main detention facility, the DC Jail.

A year earlier, Ray had been sentenced to sixty days for shoplifting. Twice hed been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.

Lawyer was fifty-year-old Dovey J. Roundtree.

They say you killed a lady.

What spiraled through Rays mind is a mystery, and not many people cared.

Not about his mind.

Not about him.

Ray was a nobody in societys eyes.

No stocks and bonds, no real estate, no bank accounts, no car. Nothing of value.

Raymond Crump Jr. on the day of the murder at DC ' s Metropolitan Police Headquarters, 300 Indiana Avenue, NW.

When arrested on Monday, October 12, 1964, he had on him only a buck and a half.

The woman Ray was accused of killing on that chilly, clear DC day was definitely a somebodya socialite, in fact.

White. Blonde. Beautiful.

Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyer, prominent Georgetown artist and a niece of a noted conservationist, was shot to death yesterday as she was walking on the C&O Canal towpath near Georgetown, reported DCs Evening Star on October 13.

That noted conservationist was the wealthy Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the US Forest Service and twice governor of Pennsylvania. His younger brother, Amos, Marys father, had been an esteemed attorney (and also wealthy). Marys mother, Ruth, an alumna of the elite, then all-woman Vassar College, was a former journalist.

The victim, forty-three, divorced, and the mother of two boys away at prep schools in New England, was a Vassar alumna too. So was her sister, Tony, at the time married to Ben Bradlee, Newsweek magazines Washington Bureau chief.

Whats more, the victims celebrity friends included former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whose husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been close friends with Ben Bradlee. President Kennedy had been assassinated eleven months earlier in Dallas, Texas, shot as his open-top Lincoln limousine cruised past a grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza.

Henry Wiggins was an earwitness to the shooting of Mary Pinchot Meyer. This twenty-four-year-old Black employee of an Esso gas station and another guy were working on a car, a stalled Nash Rambler, across the road from the abandoned Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. At about 12:20 p.m. they heard screams.

At first we didnt pay much attention, Wiggins told a reporter. You know that area down thereit could have been some kids playing. Or it might have been a bunch of winos fighting. Then all of a sudden I heard a shot and I started across the road.

As he went, he heard another shot.

When Wiggins reached the low-rise stone wall separating the road from the footpath that hugs the C&O Canal, he saw a Black man standing over a white womans body, a man who soon ran off.

Wiggins raced to his tow truck.

Within minutes, a crowd of copsPark Police, Metropolitan Policesome on foot, others in scout cars, sirens wailing, were on the scene.

Wiggins was back too.

A manhunt ensued, and shortly after 1 p.m. a detective spotted Ray near the crime scene.

Soaking wet.

Tipsy.

Blood on his right hand.

He was questioned.

Cuffed.

Identified by Wiggins.

Hauled to the police departments headquarters.

Booked.

Placed in a lineup.

Identified by Wiggins again.

A week later Raymond Crump Jr. was indicted for first-degree murder.

AT FIRST, WORD WAS that Mary Pinchot Meyers murder stemmed from a botched robbery.

Robbery Motive Seen in Shooting of DC Artist, the Washington Post told its readers on October 13. But a day later the Evening Star reported, Rape Weighed as Motive in Death of Mrs. Meyer. That same day a Washington Post front-page story explained the switch: the victims pocketbook and wallet had been found in her studio, where an electric fan was still blowing on a newly finished painting.

Robbery?

Rape?

Rays mother, Martha Crump, believed in her bones that her son, the oldest of three, had not killed that white lady, let alone tried to rob or rape her. At her pastors urging, Mrs. Crump pleaded with Dovey J. Roundtree to take her sons case. Roundtrees reputation was legend in the Black community. Martha Crumps pastor called her a righteous lawyer.

At first, Dovey doubted Rays innocence. From what she had heard and read, the governments case against him was strong, very strong.

But at the end of their first meeting in the DC Jail on that late October day, Roundtree was convinced that Ray was many thingsdefinitely none too brightbut no murderer. So she, long a champion and defender of nobodiesthe poor, the shunted-aside, the brutalized, the degraded, the brokenwas ready to fight like a tiger for Ray.

And she had this hanging over her head: if her defense failed, if a jury found Ray guilty of first-degree murder, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Or he could draw his last breath in a small chamber on the fourth floor of the DC Jail.

Strapped into its electric chair.

Riding the lightning.

DOVEY MAE JOHNSON ROUNDTREE came from fighting stock, was mentored and molded, inspired, pushed forward, blessed by warriors throughout her life. First and foremost was her maternal grandmother, Rachel Graham.