George Crockett Jr.
George Crockett Jr.
Main page
1733697

George Crockett Jr.

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
George Crockett Jr.

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.

George Crockett was born in Jacksonville, Florida, to George William Crockett and Minnie Amelia Jenkins, who had two other children: Alzeda Crockett and John Frazier Crockett. George Sr. pastored the Harmony Baptist Church in Jacksonville for more than 30 years and mastered the carpentry trade. George Sr. became a railroad carpenter for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. His son, George Jr., would later build room additions and continue practicing carpentry for pleasure in adulthood. Minnie, a gentle woman, Sunday School teacher and poet, said in a November 23, 1969, Times-Union Journal (Jacksonville) article, "My philosophy is that children should be ahead of their parents, should climb a step higher and make a contribution to the family and to society." George Jr. took his mother's philosophy to heart.

Crockett graduated from Stanton High School in Jacksonville. In 1931, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, a prestigious, historically black college that awarded its first degrees in 1897. He was later given an Honorary LL.D. from Morehouse in 1972, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and served as a Trustee of the College for many years. During his Morehouse tenure, Crockett pledged Kappa Alpha Psi.

Crockett received a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Michigan Law School 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 nation's first racially integrated bar association, the 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, 1939–43, 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 along with partners Ernest Goodman, Morton Eden, and Dean A. Robb, 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. The firm, eventually called Goodman, Eden, Millender and Bedrosian, closed in 1998.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.