‘No Equal Justice’ shares George Crockett Jr.’s civil rights legacy

Detroit has been the site of many civil rights and labor rights battles, and many notable Black attorneys have called the city home. The first Black president of the ABA, Dennis Archer, came from the Detroit legal community, as does the current ABA president, Reginald Turner. But the full story of one of the city’s pioneering legal figures has not been told–until now. 

In No Equal Justice: The Legacy of Civil Rights Icon George W. Crockett Jr., co-authors Edward J. Littlejohn and Peter J. Hammer have filled in this blank with an absorbing history of Crockett’s Floridian childhood, his law school years at the University of Michigan, his defense of Communist activists at the height of the Red Scare, his harrowing search for the murdered Freedom Riders in 1964, his time as a judge on Detroit’s Recorder Court, and his election to the U.S. House of Representatives. 

For this episode of the Modern Law Library, Hammer joined the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles to discuss the research that went into the book, some of Crockett’s most high-profile cases, how Crockett ended up serving four months in prison for contempt of court, and to explain why Crockett was one of the Detroit police department’s most-hated public figures.

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Mentioned in This Episode