“They feel the beams resting upon their necks”: George W. Crockett and the Development of Equal Justice Under Law, 1948–1969

Abstract

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 39:2 (Fall 2013): 51-75.©2013 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. “They feel the beams resting upon their necks”: George W. Crockett and the Development of Equal Justice Under Law, 1948-1969 by Ruth Martin Can anyone imagine the police invading an all-white church and rounding up everyone in sight and bussing them to a wholesale lockup in a police garage? Can anyone imagine a group of white people being held incommunicado for six or seven hours, and white women and children being locked up all night when there wasn’t the slightest evidence they’d been involved in any crime? (George W. Crockett, 1969)1 Despite his importance as a pioneering leader of progressive bar associations, George W. Crockett’s legal career remains neglected by historians. His controversial decisions as a Detroit judge during the height of racial tensions in the late 1960s merited the attention of urban historians B. J. Widick in Detroit: City of Class and Race Violence, and the more recent study by Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.2 The deep roots of his commitment to challenging police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct were a reaction to his early legal career in the 1950s and early 1960s, as he worked to expose and refute inherent prejudice within the American justice system. Two major periods in his life informed his judicial 1 Charles L. Sanders, “Detroit’s Rebel Judge Crockett: Champion of Justice for Blacks Spark Mini-revolution in Court,” Ebony, August 1969, 114-24, 116. 2 B. J. Widick, Detroit: City of Class and Race Violence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 52 The Michigan Historical Review opinions. First, he defended suspected Communists and radicals in Detroit and New York during the Second Red Scare. His refusal to yield to the persuasive and pervasive pressures of guilt-by-association led to his imprisonment, contributing to an intimate knowledge of the barriers to equal justice for unpopular or marginalized defendants. Second, his leadership of a southern justice initiative in the early 1960s led him to develop a sophisticated critique of the failings of the US criminal justice system, particularly when racism is entrenched in the workings of the courtroom. As the civil rights movement moved into a new phase, and as he once again returned to Detroit, he worked to combat police brutality and racism. His presence at the nexus of the defense of the rights of labor and of Communists and ethnic minorities was revealed through his central role in shaping an alternative judicial response to the clash of Law and Order politics and ethnic minority discontent. As an African American and political radical, he remained a double outsider whose judicial decisions in Detroit were regarded with suspicion. Those who believe that as an African American he would allow sympathy for the Republic of New Africa’s (RNA) aims to shape his judicial response reveal their willingness to assign bias to an ethnic minority, in contrast to their unquestioning acceptance of what they consider to be the normative decisions of white judges. Although controversial, his decisions during the 1967 riot and the 1969 New Bethel incident reflected his deep-rooted political philosophy of developing the agency and rights of African Americans while working within a whitedominated judicial system. During the summer of 1969, fifty-nine year old Detroit Judge George W. Crockett became the center of state media attention as critics charged that his decision-making process on the bench was unduly biased by his race and his radical politics. The Detroit Police Officers Association was at the forefront of the campaign to pressure him off the bench, and they picketed Crockett’s Detroit courthouse, charging that his actions provided dangerous support for extra-legal black paramilitary groups.3 Michigan Governor William Milliken responded by calling for a legislative probe of Crockett’s fitness to remain on the bench, as “Sock it to Crockett” and “Impeach Crockett” signs proliferated across Detroit. Crockett’s supporters lauded him...