And lawyer and civil rights pioneer Dovey Johnson Roundtree has died at the age of 104. Throughout her legal career, Roundtree shattered gender and racial barriers and successfully challenged Jim Crow laws and segregation. She was also among the first black women to train as an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and among the first women to be ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. This is Dovey Johnson Roundtree speaking about her experience working for then-NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall in the preparations for Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall would go on to become the first African-American Supreme Court justice.

Dovey Johnson Roundtree: “We were always looking for the pattern. Where are we going? Can we go there? Why can’t we go now? And sometimes the answer was, 'Well, we've got to wait for this theory to be exhausted and get to the Supreme Court. We’ve got to wait for that.’ So, there were a lot of things that went into the pattern of getting it to the Supreme Court. So you get some reading of how courts in between would be reacting to the theory, say, of nondiscrimination in education. See, that didn’t just happen. You had to come up a long way through a number of states to get it ripe, that when it hit the Supreme Court, they then had only one question that they needed to be answered. Because courts, you know, like to deviate. Go down here and stay 10 years, you know. Then a lot of heads get beat over that. A lot of losses be sustained. But that’s the way the legal system is.”

That was Dovey Johnson Roundtree. She died on Monday at the age of 104.