Soledad O'Brien
speaker
904 appearances
45 recordings
7 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Feb
Soledad O'Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But before we get to that, we need to dig into the life of the woman who would defend Mary's accused murderer, a woman who had no idea about Mary's connections to the president and wouldn't for years. In fact, at that time, very few people outside of Mary's inner circle knew about the affair. When Ray was tried, it was the case of a black man who had killed a white woman.
By the time of Mary's murder, Dovey was 50 years old. She had her own law practice with a colleague. She had accomplished so much in a half century, even though she wasn't allowed to drink from the same water fountain as white folks. She'd won some high-profile legal cases, including a bus segregation case that laid the foundation for Rosa Parks.
How had a Black woman in the segregated South gotten this far in 1964? Her story is even more unlikely than it seems. Dovey was born in 1914. After her father passed away, Dovey's mother and two sisters moved in with her grandparents in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was raised by her grandmother. That's Dovey's daughter, Charlene Pritchett-Stevenson.
She and Dovey met at church, but they grew so close that Dovey would eventually call Charlene her chosen daughter.
Her father died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. She was just five years old. They lived in Brooklyn, a neighborhood in Charlotte that was the thriving center of Black life there. It was almost a city within a city, complete with its own downtown. Dovey's family was poor, but some of her neighbors had money. It wasn't uncommon to find shotgun houses next to mansions.
But in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan haunted Charlotte. As a kid, Dovey remembered them riding through the neighborhood, keeping the hate, not the peace. Her grandma, Rachel, would tell the children to get down on the floor. Dovey would shutter the windows before she hopped under. Her grandmother had reason to be terrified that the Klan had murdered her first husband, Dovey's grandfather.
Rachel said goodbye to him one day as he was heading north. He never returned. So when the Klan came around, Black people like Dovey took cover.
But Dovey had one distinct advantage in life, her grandmother, Rachel. Well, the first thing I'm going to say about her is, She was brilliant. That's Dovey Roundtree herself. She died in 2018 at the ripe age of 104. But about a decade before her passing, she sat down for an interview with an organization called the National Visionary Leadership Project.
She lit up when she talked about her grandma.
She was beautiful. Dovey talked about her grandmother as if she walked on water, like she was superhuman. When you're a kid, that's how many of us see our parents and grandparents. I know I do.
As a girl, Dovey didn't know how the outside world saw Rachel, how society treated poor, uneducated Black women like her. But Rachel was determined to make a good life for her family.
If you were poor and black at the time, you had to be resourceful.
It was a skill Rachel was determined to pass on to Dovey. She was arming her grandchildren for battle. Because Rachel knew how hard it was out there. She had lived it. You see, Rachel was born to slaves. She grew up when slavery was abolished, but the structures were still in place. The farm where she lived, she had to call the owner slave master. And when she was 13, that man tried to rape her.
But he wouldn't relent. The man stomped on her feet and crushed them.
When she returned home, Rachel's mother wrapped her bloody feet in bandages. But her feet would never recover.
Rachel eventually learned to walk again, but her feet would never be the same. Here's Charlene again.
Her swollen feet reminded her every day how that man thought he had a right to her. But she never wanted to forget how discrimination had shaped her. misshaped her, really. And she felt obligated to pass that resolve onto her children and grandchildren.
She told them the story about her feet, not once, but regularly. It was one of their family lures. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty traumatic story to tell such young girls. But for Rachel, it was probably her way of preparing them for the world.
Sometimes pain is a catalyst.
Before Dovey met Ray Crump, she wasn't sure she'd take on the case. She was skeptical. Which is understandable. Dovey was a lawyer. Being critical was her way. But everything changed when she met Ray in the D.C. jail. He couldn't give you a straight sentence. Talking about Ray is complicated. He's not alive to share his own story.
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