Dovey Johnson Roundtree 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. That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 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. 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. 

April 17th, 1914 in Charlotte  /  Died:   May 21st, 2018