George W. Crockett

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George W[illiam] Crockett Jr. August 10, 1909 - September 7, 1997

George Crockett was an African American attorney, a state court judge in Detroit, Michigan, a United States Representative, and a national vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild. He co-founded what is believed to be the first racially-integrated law firm in the United States, and was associated with the history of the infamous murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

George Crockett was born in Jacksonville, Duval County, Florida, in 1909. In 1931, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, a prestigious, historically-Black university that awarded its first degrees in 1897.

Crockett received a law degree from the University of Michigan in 1934 and returned to Jacksonville to practice law that year as one of very few African American attorneys in the state of Florida.

Crockett participated in the founding convention of the racially-integrated National Lawyers Guild in 1937, and later served that organization as its national vice-president.

As the first African American lawyer in the U.S. Department of Labor, from 1939-1943, Crockett worked as a senior attorney on employment cases brought under the National Labor Relations Act, a legislative program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Crockett also worked as a hearing officer in the Federal Fair Employment Practices Commission during 1943.

That same year the United Auto Workers retained Crockett to run the union’s Fair Practices Committee, which tried to oppose so-called “hate strikes” by white workers, who protested the migration North by Black workers.

In 1946, Crockett co-founded the corporation believed to be the first racially-integrated law firm in the U.S., Goodman, Crockett, Eden, and Robb, in Detroit, Michigan.

In 1949, while defending a Smith Act prosecution of an alleged Communist Party member, Crocket was sentenced by Judge Harold Medina to 4 months in Federal prison for contempt of court.

Crockett’s criticism of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee grew after that case, and in 1952 he represented future Detroit mayor Coleman Young and the Rev. Charles Hill before the Committee.

As large numbers of young civil rights volunteers traveled to the U.S. South in the spring of 1964, Crockett recruited lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild follow them. He founded the National Lawyers Guild’s office in Jackson, Mississippi, and managed the Mississippi Project (a coalition of the NLG and other leading civil rights legal organizations) during the 1964 Freedom Summer.

The infamous murders of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner occurred in June of that year. The three had been arrested by local police while investigating the arson of a Black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Collaborating with local white supremacist vigilantes, the Neshoba County sheriff released the three men from jail late at night, and other civil rights workers reported their disappearance.

From the NLG office in Jackson, Crockett dispatched Guild lawyers to search for the missing men. The effort was in vain, and, years later, Crockett described his growing despair in the 1995 PBS documentary “Mississippi America,” narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.

In the film, Crockett recounts his drive from Jackson to Meridian in a personal search for the missing men. He survived an effort of the sheriff to arrange his ambush by loudly offering driving directions, while white supremacists loitered nearby. Crockett returned safely to Jackson. He offered a full report to the Justice Department and the FBI, who refused to take the information. The murdered bodies of the 3 young men, one Black, two white, were found days later.

Crockett was elected Judge of Recorders Court, Wayne County, Michigan, in 1966. The court handled criminal cases. From that bench, in March 1969, Judge Crockett incurred the wrath of the white corporate media and endured death threats for his role in a highly-publicized police shooting, raid, and mass arrest.

Following an officer-involved shooting outside New Bethel Baptist Church in which a Detroit police officer died, police officers fired into and stormed the church. A Nationalist organization, the Republic of New Afrika, had rented the church for a meeting. Witnesses in the majority African-American neighborhood later stated that the responding officers had all been white. More than one-hundred forty persons, including juveniles, were arrested inside the church.

In refusing to find probable cause to hold the people from what he termed a “collective punishment” mass arrest, Judge Crockett released nearly all of the arrested persons. In the media controversy that followed, Detroit saw the appearance of bumper stickers that read, “Sock It to Crockett.”

Crockett was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, at the age of 70, in 1980. He represented Michigan’s old Thirteenth Congressional District for a decade. He served on the Western Hemisphere Affairs subcommittee and gained international prominence in denouncing Apartheid in South Africa.

George W. Crockett died on September 7, 1997 at the age of 88. He is honored with a middle school and a ninth-grade charter school in Detroit in his name.