Katie McCabe - Mighty Justice: The Untold Story of Civil Rights Trailblazer Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Dovey! Dovey Mae Johnson, do you hear me calling you? Her grandmothers voice, soft yet strong, landed in Doveys ears like music. She hurried toward the sound.

Yes, maam?

Rachel Graham stood in front of the mirror, adjusting her hat. Im going downtown, she said. I want you to go with me.

Dovey could hardly believe what shed heard. She had often dreamed of accompanying her grandmother on errands, and now it was finally happening. Dovey was only six, but she felt like a big girl at last.

She was so excited that she nearly forgot to hold her grandmothers hand as they made their way up the block. Soon the streetcar arrived, clanging and squeaking. The minute the trolley doors swung open, Dovey clambered up the steps and plopped into the first empty seat she spotted, right behind the driver. She sat straight up in her seat and grinned at Grandma.

But the driver was not smiling. He whirled around in his seat, and his face turned red. Get that pickaninny out of here! he yelled. You know she cant sit in that seat. He had used a word that white people often used when referring to Black children. Dovey had never heard it before, but she knew it was an insult. She had no idea shed chosen a seat reserved for white passengers. In a flash, Grandma Rachel pulled the cord to stop the trolley, yanking Dovey down the steps as soon as it screeched to a halt. She led Dovey into town without saying a word, ignoring every trolley that passed their way. Dovey had to run to keep up with Grandma, who quickened her pace with each block. Trolley after trolley passed, but Grandma never stopped. To Dovey, the journey was the longest mile shed ever walked. More troubling than the drivers stinging remark was Grandma Rachels silence.

Little had changed in Charlotte, North Carolina, since Dovey was born there in 1914. Like most cities in the United States, it was divided by race. White people lived on one side of Charlotte; anyone who wasnt white lived on the other. Black people were confined to neighborhoods in the Second Ward, including Brooklyn, where the Johnsons lived, and Blue Heaven, an even poorer community beside it.

Dovey Johnson, July 1914, on the occasion of her baptism at Charlottes East Stonewall AME Zion Church by her maternal grandfather, Rev. Clyde L. Graham.

After the end of slavery in 1865, North Carolina and other southern states established Black Codes, laws designed to block African Americans access to all their country had to offer. The codes enforced a system of racial separation in every place where people gathered, including stores, restaurants, buses, and sidewalks. Whites confined Blacks to underfunded schools, denied them the right to vote, prevented them from testifying in court, discouraged them from owning land, and forced them to endure life as second-class citizens.

Violence and cruelty were used to make sure Black people followed the rules. An organization called the Ku Klux Klan, founded after the Civil War to terrorize former slaves, rose up with renewed fierceness during the years of Doveys childhood. In southern cities such as Charlotte, mobs of Klansmen, dressed in white hoods, frequently gathered to terrorize Black people with public executions called lynchings. By the time Dovey was born, southern whites had lynched thousands of African Americans. Any Black people who challenged racial segregation risked not only their lives but also the lives of their families and neighbors. The formal name for the system was segregation, but in those days most folks called it Jim Crow.

At the age of six, Dovey had looked Jim Crow full in the face for the first time, and it had hurt. For the rest of her life, she would remember the sting of the trolley car drivers insult and the hatred in his voice. But there was something far greater than the shame of that moment that she took with her, something fierce and proud in the words that Grandma Rachel spoke to her and the family that evening.

Dovey:

It wasnt until after dinner that she finally spoke about the trolley car. Just as she did every night, she lit the kerosene lamp in the sitting room and cleared a space for my grandfather to open the old family Bible. Then she disappeared into the kitchen to takeher cinnamon and butter pastriesstickies, she called themfrom the oven. It seemed to me that she was gone an unusually long time.

Something bad happened to Dovey Mae today, she said.

I felt my cheeks grow hot, and I looked down.

The mean old conductor man on the trolley car called her a bad name.

No one spoke. In the lamplight, I looked up into Grandmas face, and I knew she was almost as angry as shed been that morning.

I want to tell you all something, she said. She looked around the table at each of us. Her gaze rested last on me.

Now hear me, and hear me good, she said. My chillun is as good as anybody.

Only from a distance of years is it possible for me to fathom the courage required for my grandmother to pick herself up from such humiliation and speak those words. I believe, now, that in the long moment when she vanished into the kitchen, Grandma was crying. Certainly she was reaching down into her hearts core, for she was wrestling with the greatest curse of segregation: the horror of having to watch ones own children and grandchildren face its degradation.

In the course of my life, I have heard Black people say they got used to the pain of segregation, eventually. I weep for the numbness of mind and the brokenness of spirit that motivates statements like that. Let me say here for all time that never for one moment of my life under Jim Crow did I grow accustomed to being excluded, banned, pushed aside, reduced. I was never to take a back seat on a trolley or bus, drink the rusty water that trickled from the Colored fountains, smell the garbage in the back-alley entrance to segregated movie theaters, or scratch myself on the rough toilet paper in the Black restrooms but that I felt personally violated. And I know, having seen the look on Grandmas face that night, that she felt the same way. Powerful as she was, she could not protect me from the thing she most hated.

But she could arm me. And arm me she did, with words that lifted me up and made me forever proud: My chillun is as good as anybody.

In Doveys mind, no one was as wise or as brave as Grandma Rachel. Even before Dovey saw how fiercely her grandmother defied the ugliness of segregation, she had felt the force of Grandma Rachels strength. In the darkest time of Doveys young life, in the days and weeks after the sudden death of her father, James, Grandma had risen up to heal the family and enfold it in love.

Dovey had been not quite five when her father died of influenza, a deadly disease that was sweeping the country. For the rest of her life, she would remember that as a time of darkness. Lela, Doveys mother, seemed to be swallowed whole with sadness. Before her husbands death, she had been playful and active, quick to laugh or jump hopscotch with her daughters. After his passing, she fell silent, stopped grooming herself, and refused to eat. Dovey missed the sound of her mothers voice and the way light seemed to ripple through her long, wavy locks when she ran a comb through them. Lelas heartache terrified Dovey and her sisters, Beatrice, Eunice, and little Rachel. It must have frightened their grandmother as well, but she didnt let her fear stop her. She stepped in and took the children under her wing, moving them and her grieving daughter from their home into the parsonage she shared with her husband, Rev. Clyde L. Graham.