Crockett, George W. (George William), 1909-1997

George William Crockett Jr. (August 10, 1909 – September 7, 1997) was an African-American attorney, jurist, and congressman from the U.S. state of Michigan. He also served as a national vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild and co-founded what is believed to be the first racially integrated law firm in the United States.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 10, 1909, Crockett was the son of George Crockett, Sr., a carpenter, and Minnie Jenkins Crockett. He attended public schools in his native city and graduated with an A.B. from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1931. Crockett went north to study law at the University of Michigan, where he earned a J.D. in 1934. That same year he married Dr. Ethelene Jones, the first black woman to practice obstetrics and gynecology in Michigan and the first woman president of the American Lung Association. The couple had three children: Elizabeth Ann Hicks, George William Crockett III, and Ethelene Crockett Jones. After his wife died in 1978, Crockett remarried two years later, to Harriette Clark Chambliss, a pediatrician with two sons.

During his career before Congress, Crockett established a solid civil rights record. He helped found Michigan’s first integrated law firm andorganized the Mississippi Project to provide free legal services for civil rights workers imprisoned in Mississippi. As a judge of the Recorder’s Court in Detroit from 1966 to 1978 and the presiding official of the court for the latter four years, Crockett often dispensed lenient sentences for defendants arrested in civil rights protests. Of the belief that African–American judges should be the “conscience of the judiciary,” Crockett garnered national attention in 1969 when he released more than 100 members of a black separatist group after a violent encounter with the Detroit police. Crockett defended his actions by asking, “Can any of you imagine the Detroit police invading an all–white church and rounding up everyone in sight to be bused to a wholesale lockup in a police garage?” After retiring from the Recorder’s Court, he served as a visiting judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals and as corporation counsel for the City of Detroit.