Editorial Content for Mighty Justice: My Life in Civil Rights

Award-winning author Katie McCabe worked for 10 years in collaboration with African American activist Dovey Johnson Roundtree to create this remarkable chronicle of one of the 20th century’s outstanding military, legal and civil rights luminaries.

MIGHTY JUSTICE begins and ends with vignettes casting light on Roundtree’s early years, growing up in respectable poverty in a black ghetto of Charlotte, North Carolina. Her grandmother Rachel, who held the family together through crisis after crisis, had horribly misshapen feet, bathing them each day after painfully performing all necessary chores. One day, she told her granddaughter, Dovey Mae, what caused her crippled state: an overseer on the farm where her father worked tried to rape her as a young girl, and when she ran, he stomped on her feet, mangling them into broken bones. But still somehow, she escaped.

"Katie McCabe worked for 10 years in collaboration with African American activist Dovey Johnson Roundtree to create this remarkable chronicle of one of the 20th century’s outstanding military, legal and civil rights luminaries."

That spirit --- which also made Rachel get off a streetcar and walk home when the conductor called her granddaughter a “pickaninny” --- kept food on the table, however sparsely, when Roundtree’s father died of influenza and her mother fell into a deep depression. It was a spirit that Roundtree would absorb when, with urging from Rachel, she went to the big, dangerous city of Atlanta to college. There she met a courageous white teacher, Mae Neptune, a northern Quaker who became her champion, even supporting her financially to complete college in the dark years of the Great Depression.

Another long-term backer of this promising, highly intelligent young woman was Mary McLeod Bethune, a renowned educator and consultant to Eleanor Roosevelt on Negro women’s issues. Bethune would find a place for Roundtree in the first group of black women in the military in World War II, where she would attain the rank of captain. After the war, Roundtree attended Howard University, became an attorney in Washington, D.C. and participated in two seminal cases: one aimed at desegregating public transport, and the other in defense of a black man falsely accused of murder because of his innocent presence at the crime scene. She took on his defense for the fee of one dollar and won with dazzling skill, cementing her reputation in upper legal echelons.

Roundtree passed away in 2018 at the age of 104, being one of the last personal observers of and high-profile participants in the early civil rights era. She was a dynamic speaker who excelled in the ministry in her later years. McCabe was fortunate to work in close communication with this amazing woman and record her memories in what she describes as a transformative relationship. For McCabe’s part, she brought Roundtree’s extraordinary autobiography into the spotlight. In return, Dovey Johnson Roundtree “gave me her trust.”