On the first page of Katie McCabe's new book on Charlotte native and pioneering civil rights lawyer Dovey Roundtree, Roundtree recalls her grandmother's nightly ritual, performed long ago in the kitchen of their shotgun house in Charlotte's Second Ward neighborhood.
Every evening, the woman tended her painful, gnarled feet, rubbing them with salve, then soaking them in steaming water.
Her feet were broken at 13, she told her granddaughter, when the overseer of the Rutherford County farm where her father worked tried to take advantage of her. She fought back. He retaliated by stomping on her feet, leaving them crushed and bleeding.
And yet, Roundtree muses, her grandmother had won. The man had not had his way with her.
"I saw my grandma Rachel fight everything with that same fierceness - poverty, sickness, injustice and even despair. Like a mighty stream, her courage flowed through my childhood, shaping me as a rushing water shapes the pebbles in its path."
The scene is a riveting beginning to the story of a remarkable woman.
In "Justice Older Than the Law: The Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree," we meet the pioneering lawyer and minister who was among the first black female World War II military officers. We learn how she prevailed in a desegregation case that ended "separate but equal" interstate bus travel and won acquittal for a slow-witted black man accused of murdering a mistress of John F. Kennedy.
But the new book (University Press of Mississippi, $30) also manages to immerse readers in Roundtree's life, creating a real sense of what it was like to live as a black person in segregated Charlotte and the Jim Crow South. Often, the narrative reads like a work of fiction.
McCabe, a Washington writer, accomplishes this partly by writing in Roundtree's first-person voice. She made that decision after hearing Roundtree deliver an eloquent sermon at her Washington church.
"I became more and more convinced, if my goal was to get her soul and her spirit across to people, that could only be done with her voice," McCabe says. Roundtree is listed as co-author.
After practicing law in Washington into her 80s, Roundtree returned in 1996 to Charlotte, where she grew up. McCabe worked with her for years, making visits to Charlotte and conducting hundreds of hours of phone interviews.
Today, Roundtree lives in a Charlotte nursing home. She's blind and her health is failing.
But in November, the woman once forbidden from using courthouse bathrooms cast her vote for Barack Obama.
To mark the book's publication, first lady Michelle Obama has written a letter of tribute. "It is on the shoulders of people like Dovey Johnson Roundtree that we stand today," the first lady writes, "and it is with her commitment to our core ideals that we will continue moving toward a better tomorrow."
In September, McCabe plans to visit Roundtree at her Charlotte nursing home. Close friends now, the two women will catch each other up on their lives.
When McCabe last visited Roundtree on her 95th birthday in April, she gave her the page proofs and read the book's powerful final chapter to her.
On this visit, she'll read Michelle Obama's letter. And then she'll give Roundtree a finished copy of her life story.
SOURCE: Charlotte Observer
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