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Dovey Johnson Roundtree (born April 17, 1914) is an African-American civil rights activist, ordained minister, and attorney. Her 1955 victory before the Interstate Commerce Commission in the first bus desegregation case to be brought before the ICC resulted in the only explicit repudiation of the separate but equal doctrine in the field of interstate bus transportation by a court or federal administrative body.〔Barnes, ''Journey From Jim Crow'', p. 99〕 That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (64 MCC 769 (1955)), which Dovey Roundtree argued with her law partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson, was invoked by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the 1961 Freedom Riders' campaign in his successful battle to compel the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce its rulings and end Jim Crow in public transportation.〔"Petition for Rule-Making Filed by Attorney General on Behalf of the United States," ICC Docket No. MC-C-3358, May 29, 1961〕 Roundtree was saluted by First Lady Michelle Obama on the occasion of the release of her 2009 autobiography, ''Justice Older than the Law'', which Roundtree co-authored with Washington journalist Katie McCabe and which won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.〔http://www.abwh.org/awards.htm〕 In a letter made public at a July 23, 2009 tribute to Roundtree at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the First Lady cited Roundtree's historic contributions to the law, the military and the ministry, and stated: "It is on the shoulders of people like Dovey Johnson Roundtree that we stand today, and it is with her commitment to our core ideals that we will continue moving toward a better tomorrow." A protégé of black activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, Roundtree was selected by Bethune for the first class of African-American women to be trained as officers in the newly created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps)〔Putney, ''When the Nation Was In Need'', pp. 29-30.〕 during World War II. In 1961 she became one of the first women to receive full ministerial status in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which had just begun ordaining women at a level beyond mere preachers in 1960.〔Greason, Walter David, ''The AME Church Review'', pp. 45-55.〕 With her controversial admission to the all-white Women's Bar of the District of Columbia in 1962, she broke the color bar for minority women in the Washington legal community.〔Green, Joyce Hens, Oral History, Second Interview, September 16, 1999, pp. 65-67.〕 In one of Washington's most sensational and widely covered murder cases, ''United States v. Ray Crump'', tried in the summer of 1965 on the eve of the Watts riots, Roundtree won acquittal for the black laborer accused of the murder of Georgetown socialite (and former wife of a CIA officer) Mary Pinchot Meyer,〔Chapman, William, "Crump Free in Murder on Towpath," ''Washington Post'', July 31, 1965, page A1.〕 a woman with romantic ties to President John F. Kennedy.〔Bradlee, A Good Life, pp. 267-68.〕 The founding partner of the Washington, D.C. law firm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Parker in 1970 following the death of her first law partner Julius Robertson in 1961, Roundtree was special consultant for legal affairs to the AME Church, and General Counsel to the National Council of Negro Women.〔Warner, Honorable John, ''Congressional Record'', April 13, 2000.〕 She was the inspiration for actress Cicely Tyson's depiction of a maverick civil rights lawyer in the television series "Sweet Justice",〔Weinraub, Judith, "A Long Life of Sweet Justice," ''Washington Post'', February 4, 1995.〕 and the recipient, along with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, of the American Bar Association's 2000 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.〔(American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession-- Previous Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award Recipients. )〕 In 2011 a scholarship fund was created in her name by the Charlotte Chapter of the National Alumnae Association of Spelman College. Roundtree also received the 2011 Torchbearer Award from the Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the organization which she integrated in 1962. In March 2013 an affordable senior living facility in the Southeast Washington DC community where she ministered was named "The Roundtree Residences" in her honor. She turned 100 in April 2014. == Early life and the influences == Roundtree was born Dovey Mae Johnson in Charlotte, North Carolina, the second oldest of four daughters of James Eliot Johnson, a printer in the local offices of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and Lela Bryant Johnson, a seamstress and domestic. Following the death of her father in the influenza epidemic of 1919, Roundtree and her mother and sisters went to live with her maternal grandmother, Rachel Bryant Graham, and her husband, the Rev. Clyde L. Graham, an AME Zion Church minister. Though Rachel Graham had only a third-grade education, she wielded great influence in Charlotte's black community, and through her involvement in the colored women's club movement she formed a friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune, who at that time traveled extensively through the South as head of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, the precursor to the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune's vision inspired Roundtree to excel academically, rise above poverty and Jim Crow, target a medical career, and work her way through Spelman College from 1934 to 1938, at the height of the Great Depression.〔McCabe and Roundtree, ''Justice Older than the Law''〕 It was Bethune to whom Roundtree turned in 1941, as the threat of war generated unprecedented numbers of jobs for African Americans in the country's "defense preparedness" program. Resigning the South Carolina teaching position she had taken up on college graduation in 1938, she sought out Bethune in Washington, D.C. for assistance in obtaining employment in the burgeoning defense industry.〔''McCabe and Roundtree, Justice Older than the Law''〕 Bethune immediately tapped her for the select group of 40 African American women who were to become the first to train as officers in the newly created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.〔McCabe, ''Washingtonian'', Putney, ''When the Nation Was in Need'', Roundtree, ''Dear Sisters, Dear Daughters''〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dovey Johnson Roundtree」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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