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| Affiliation | Democratic |
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| Name | George W. Crockett, Jr. |
| Address |
Detroit, Michigan , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
August 10, 1909
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| Died | September 07, 1997
(88 years)
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| Contributor | eddy 9_99 |
| Last Modifed | RBH
May 24, 2016 11:12pm |
| Tags |
Black - Imprisoned - Baptist -
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| Info | George William Crockett Jr. was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 10, 1909, the son of George William Crockett Sr., a carpenter, and Minnie A. Jenkins Crockett. He had one sister, Alzeda Crockett Hacker. His first marriage was to the Ethelene Jones Crockett, a physician in 1934. They had three children: Elizabeth Ann Crockett Hicks, George William III, and Ethelene Crockett Jones. Crockett's second marriage was to a pediatrician, Harriette Clark Chambliss, in the summer of 1980. Harriette had two sons, Cleveland Roberts Chambliss Jr., Marque Chambliss. George W. Crockett Jr. died of cancer on Sunday, September 7, 1997, at the Washington Home and Hospice in Washington, D.C.
Crockett's first job was delivering groceries when he was 12-years old. He attended public schools in Jacksonville and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1931. He received his Juris Prudence (J.D.) degree from the University of Michigan in 1934, where he was the only African American student in his class. Crockett returned to Jacksonville to begin his law practice, then moved to Fairmont, West Virginia, where he practiced from 1934 to 1939.
Crockett went to Washington, D.C., in 1940 as a protege of West Virginia's senator Matthew M. Neely, the man who had converted him from a Lincoln Republican to a New Deal Democrat. Although he had been assured a position with the Justice Department, they shunted Crockett to the Labor Department. It was holding a series of posts that convinced him that African Americans and American workers were often fellow victims of an oppressive society.
In 1943 Crockett was the first African American examiner appointed to a government labor board. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Crockett a hearing examiner of the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee. In this position, he regularly ordered companies to adopt race-neutral hiring and promotion policies that would not become standard until the 1970s. A chance meeting with a top official of the International United Auto Workers union led to a job organizing and running a union fair-employment division. It was through his work with the union in Detroit that Crockett was asked to join the team defending 11 Communist leaders.
In 1948 the government accused those Communist leaders of teaching the overthrow of the federal government. This was a violation of the Smith Act, a law regarded by those who believed in civil liberties as contrary to the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Years later the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the Smith Act. Crockett defended Carl Winter of Michigan in this celebrated trial. He was such a strong advocate for his client that after the trial and conviction of the defendant Judge Harold Medina cited the attorney for contempt. Medina sentenced Crockett to a four-month stay at an Ashland, Kentucky, federal prison in 1952. While serving his sentence, he became a "jailhouse lawyer," helping inmates with appeals and suits against the prison system and advising them of their legal rights. This experience had its impact. He told the New York Times for April 1, 1969: I think I have always been a champion of the underdog in our society and, if anything, that segregated prison life probably pushed me a little further along the road. I know from physical contact what it means when a judge says one year, two years, three years. I don't want to wish it on any of my associates, but I think it would do them some good if they would spend some time in jail.
In 1952 Crockett defended future State Senator and Detroit mayor Coleman Young, whom the House Un-American Activities Committee had charged with subversion. Criticism and suspicion of Crockett's alleged support of leftist causes followed him throughout his career. In 1987 the National Review accused Crockett and other Democratic representatives of being Communist sympathizers. The article cited Crockett's association with the Civil Rights Congress and the National Lawyers Guild; his representation of witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities; a reception he sponsored in support of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (then in prison awaiting execution for spying for the Soviet Union); a petition drive he led charging the U.S. government with genocide against African Americans; and, suggested that during the 1960s Crockett was a registered agent of Cuba. His son, George Crockett III, a judge, stated that he and his two sisters grew up with pickets, threats, tapped telephones and FBI surveillance.
As vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild, Crockett led a contingent of 65 volunteer civil rights lawyers to the South. The Mississippi Project provided free legal defense for civil rights workers jailed in the state. That summer of 1964 left George Crockett shaken after the three young people, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwermer, whom he asked to investigate a church burning in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were lynched and buried in an earthen dam.
Crockett was elected Recorders Court judge in 1966. A University of Michigan Law School report praised him as perhaps the only judge who kept his head during the 1967 Detroit rioting and administered justice impartially. Crockett refused to impose what he considered excessive and unlawful bail on scores of suspects accused of participating. He was convinced that African American judges had to lead the fight for equal justice.
In March 1969 Crockett gained nationwide attention and condemnation for his action in upholding the Constitutional rights of 142 blacks, including women and children, arrested by the Detroit police. The police raided a cell of the militant organization, Republic of New Africa, at a meeting at C. L. Franklin's New Bethel Baptist Church. Shooting began and a white police officer was killed. Some 50 white officers shot their way into the church and corralled all present, holding them in the police garage. Crockett rushed to police headquarters, set up an impromptu courtroom, and began releasing prisoners on their own recognizance. Crockett freed most of the suspects because the evidence being used to hold them was inadmissible. Police had ignored their right to counsel while requiring them to submit to gunpowder tests. Two investigating commissions found Crockett's rulings within the law. Many felt that he had again kept an explosive situation from erupting into a repeat of the 1967 riot.
Following his retirement from the Recorder's Court in 1978, Crockett served briefly as a visiting judge in the Michigan Court of Appeals and later as the Acting Corporation Counsel for the City of Detroit. Crockett was a well-known leader in Detroit's African American community when he declared his candidacy for the congressional seat left vacant by the 1980 resignation of Charles Diggs. He was elected to fill that vacancy on November 4, 1980, and simultaneously was elected for the full term of the 97th Congress. He was sworn in on November 12, 1980.
One of the oldest members of Congress at 71 when he replaced Charles C. Diggs Jr., (D-Mich.), he went on to compile a voting record described as one of the most liberal in Congress. A member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Crockett served on the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees. An honorary member of the Congressional Hispanic Congress, Crockett served on the Select Committee on Aging and the executive board of the Democratic Study Group. Crockett, who represented most of inner-city Detroit, became the first member of Congress to call for decriminalizing drugs. While in Congress, he was one of the first members to be arrested at the South African Embassy in protests there against white minority rule. As a member of the Africa Subcommittee on Foreign Affairs, he wrote the Mandela Freedom Resolution, which called on the government of South Africa to release Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie Mandela, from imprisonment and banning.
Both houses of the Congress passed the resolution in 1986. He displayed sympathy for the Palestine Liberation Organization when most political figures shunned the group as a terrorist organization.
Crockett sued the Reagan administration to keep U.S. troops out of El Salvador. He was also opposed to the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama. In 1987 and 1988 Crockett served as a member of the United States delegation to the 42nd General Assembly of the United Nations. He was previously a member of the U.S. congressional delegation to the International Parliamentary meeting in Havana in 1981 and the Seventh United Nations Congress on Prevention of Crime meeting in Milan, Italy, in 1984.
Crockett founded the law firm of Goodman, Crockett, Eden and Robb, in 1946. This Phi Beta Kappa and Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity member was also a trustee of Morehouse College. Founder and first chair of the Judicial Council of the National Bar Association, Crockett belonged to the National Lawyers Guild and the Congress for Peace Through Law. Crockett's hobby was carpentry. He enjoyed photography, swimming, cycling, and was a member of Hartford Baptist Church. Time magazine described George Crockett as having "a thorough legal mind, limitless self-assurance, and militant sympathies."
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