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. In 1948, Crockett became a member of the legal team that went to New York for the
Foley Square trial to defend 11 Communist Party leaders accused of teaching the overthrow of the Federal government, a violation of the
Smith Act. Among the 11 were Communist Party leaders:
Gil Green,
Eugene Dennis,
Henry Winston,
John Gates,
Gus Hall,
Robert G. Thompson and fellow Morehouse alumnus and first black New York City Councilman
Benjamin J. Davis. In 1949, while defending the Smith Act prosecution, Crockett and four other defense attorneys were sentenced by Judge
Harold Medina to Federal prison for
contempt of court. Crockett served four months in an Ashland, Kentucky Federal prison in 1952. A portion of Crockett's jury summation at the trial was published in ''Freedom is Everybody's Job! The Crime of the Government Against the Negro People''. Crockett's criticism of
McCarthyism and the
House Un-American Activities Committee grew after that case, and in 1952 he represented future Detroit mayor
Coleman Young and
Charles A. Hill before the Committee. As large numbers of young civil rights volunteers traveled to the U.S. South in the spring of 1964, Crockett recruited lawyers from the
National Lawyers Guild (NLG) to follow them. He founded the National Lawyers Guild's office in
Jackson, Mississippi, and managed the
Mississippi Project, a coalition of the NLG and other leading civil rights legal organizations, during the 1964
Freedom Summer. The infamous murders of the civil rights workers
James Chaney,
Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner occurred in June of that year. The three had been arrested by local police while investigating the arson of a Black church near
Philadelphia, Mississippi. Collaborating with local white supremacist vigilantes, the
Neshoba County sheriff released the three men from jail late at night, and other civil rights workers reported their disappearance. From the NLG office in Jackson, Crockett dispatched Guild lawyers to search for the missing men. The effort was in vain, and, years later, Crockett described his growing despair in the 1995 PBS documentary
Mississippi America, narrated by
Ossie Davis and
Ruby Dee. In the film, Crockett recounts his drive from
Jackson to
Meridian in a personal search for the missing men. He survived an effort of the sheriff to arrange his ambush by loudly offering driving directions, while white supremacists loitered nearby. Crockett returned safely to Jackson. He offered a full report to the Justice Department and the FBI, who refused to take the information. The murdered bodies of the three young men, one black, two white, were found days later. ==As a judge==