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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Miss May Neptune taught English literature at Spelman. She was 60 years old and six feet tall. Miss Neptune had a presence. She wore a tight gray bun and wore thick rimmed glasses. And she could spot a revolutionary woman because she was one herself. Miss Neptune was a white woman from the North who believed everyone had an equal right to education.
She made her students think and gave them the space to write honestly about the world. One of the first assignments was to write an essay on democracy. Dovey took a chance and wrote what she really thought about being Black in America. She wrote about how democracy had gone wrong, that she wasn't living in the land of the free.
Miss Neptune was white, but Dovey had a hunch she could be frank with her. After all, this professor had uprooted her life to teach black women in the South. Miss Neptune read the paper. She returned Dovey's essay. Scrawled in red ink, she asked if she would like to write for the campus newspaper. She thought Dovey would be good at it.
And that was how the campus mirror found their new star reporter.
But things at home took a turn for the worse. Mrs. Hurley seemed to change. Ever since Dovey started school at Spelman, she grew cold and distant. It was as if she thought Dovey had broken a promise. This is how Dovey saw it. Mrs. Hurley wanted to make something of her. She didn't expect Dovey would make something of herself. They didn't want an uppity housemaid. Here's Charlene again.
She calls Dovey Nana.
Dovey was always one small step away from getting into trouble with her employer. One day, Mrs. Hurley accused her of stealing. She said Dovey was a thief. We don't know exactly what set Mrs. Hurley off, but in her memoir, Dovey was adamant she was wrongly accused, and there was simply no evidence she stole anything. That didn't stop Mrs. Hurley from marching Dovey straight to the police.
Mrs. Hurley didn't need much evidence to get Dovey in trouble. Her word against Dovey would be enough. She was a white, stately homeowner, and Dovey was just a black 20-year-old who served at her pleasure. Suddenly, Dovey was experiencing what happens to black and brown folks even today. even if you do everything right, it might not matter. Dovey was arrested and taken to the jailhouse.
That's Dr. Chatelaine again.
At the jailhouse, a guard told Dovey she could call someone. Her mother was back in North Carolina. There was only one person in Atlanta she trusted in such a dire situation. Miss Neptune. By that evening, a white lawyer arrived at the jail for Dovey. Miss Neptune and Miss Rockefeller had sent him. He point-blank asked Dovey if she'd stolen anything. She said no.
The next morning, the police released Dovey. As a black woman, she could have easily stayed locked up for a good while. The police probably didn't believe Dovey, but they believed the white people around her. Dovey's legal troubles may have been behind her, but her financial ones were far from over. Where would she get the money to pay for her housing, for the rest of her tuition, to live?
She wasn't going to be able to come back because she wasn't financially able. She would have to leave Spelman, maybe teach until she could make enough money to pay for all her expenses. She confided in Miss Neptune that she would have to leave school. Miss Neptune said to meet her the next morning at Miss Rockefeller's office. When she arrived, she was told some arrangements had been made.
Dovey's college expenses would be covered until her graduation. Miss Neptune wasn't a woman of means. She was on a modest teacher's salary, but she had gone into her savings to help pay off Dubby's tuition. The loan cost Miss Neptune. She would be penny-pinching for a long while. But she had seen something in Dovey that was undeniable.
She gave her protege the money she needed to become the woman who would one day defend Ray Crump. Dovey asked Miss Neptune how she could repay her. Miss Neptune told her to pass it on. Pass it on became a way of life for Dovey.
She wanted to right the wrongs in the world, to be kind when life wasn't kind to her, and to defend the defenseless like Ray Crump.
After Mary's murder, local residents, well, white Georgetown residents, were scared. One D.C.
This was their thinking. If a murder in broad daylight could happen to someone as prominent as Mary, what hope did the rest of them have? The police also had incentive to wrap up this case and put all of this unease to rest. The U.S. attorney exponentially sped up the typical procedures for a criminal case in D.C.
The grand jury judge indicted Ray solely on the basis of Henry Wiggins' eyewitness testimony. Wiggins said he was about 120 feet away when he saw Ray. Now, typically, a preliminary hearing happens before a grand jury hearing. Alexis Coe says that's not what happened here. It's clear they wanted to ram through this process fast.
This enraged Dovey. It wasn't fair. In the meantime, Ray's mental state was deteriorating by the day. He was in solitary confinement in the D.C. jails. Dovey petitioned the court that Ray wasn't mentally fit to defend himself at trial. But the psychiatrist's report said otherwise. He was mentally competent. It was decided. Their case was going to trial.
There was nothing else to do but to prepare herself the best she could. How was she going to prove Ray's innocence? The answer, she thought, lay in the towpath. Dovey and her law partners, George Knox and Jerry Hunter, went to the scene of the crime. Throughout those cold days in November and December of 1964, the three of them retraced Mary's steps on the towpath. I've been there in the winter.
Showing 541–560 of 904 · page 28 of 46
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