The date was Sept. 9, 1925. The NAACP wasn’t even two decades old. Across America, there had been anti-black programs in places like East St. Louis, Ill., Chicago, Tulsa, Okla., Rosewood, Fla. and Arkansas. Less than three months before, the boy named Malcolm Little who would grow up to be Malcolm X had been born in Omaha, Neb.
In Detroit, Dr. Ossian Sweet found his home on Garland Avenue under attack by a white mob determined to drive him, his wife and their infant daughter from the neighborhood. Not wanting to suffer the fate of another black physician who had been driven from a white Detroit neighborhood, Sweet had asked his two brothers, a cousin and six other black men to have his back.
They did. When the mob unleashed a barrage of rocks and bricks at the Sweet home, some of the black men answered the volley with gunshots. One white man was killed and another wounded. Sweet and the other nine were charged with murder, along with his wife Gladys. Defending them was none other than Clarence Darrow, the legendary lawyer who had, only months before, defended Tennessee’s John Scopes in the famous “Monkey Trial” that focused on the teaching of evolution in public schools.
The latter event was immortalized in a play and 1960 movie called “Inherit the Wind” that starred Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. There have been no movies about the ordeal of Ossian Sweet and his 10 co-defendants. I’m not sure if there were even any books about it, but we all know there’s one now: “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age” recently won the National Book Award for non-fiction.
The author of “Arc of Justice,” Kevin Boyle, is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. Boyle is also a Detroit native and, more than most, should be familiar with the racial situation in his home city and state.
That situation was, and to a certain extent still is, every bit as bad as what existed and to some extent still exists in Southern states. In fact, Detroit — along with other Northern cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York and Boston — could all be a correct answer on the “Jeopardy” game show. The question would be: What city has never been described by the four words “oasis of racial harmony”?
Of all those cities mentioned above, Detroit could well be at the bottom of the list — which would take some doing, considering Boston’s racist history [its location in a “blue” state notwithstanding]. Boyle tells why in “Arc of Justice.” In 1924, Boyle writes, Detroit had some 35,000 Ku Klux Klan members. Most real estate agents refused to show blacks houses in white neighborhoods. Blacks who migrated from Southern states were crammed into the ghetto in East Detroit that became known as Black Bottom, where they faced constant police brutality and harassment.
I first read about the incident involving Ossian Sweet in the book “Black Saga: The African-American Experience,” in which author Charles M. Christian, a geography professor at the University of Maryland College Park, gives a year-by-year chronicle of what happened in black America starting from the 16th century to the present. Christian includes a brief synopsis of the Sweet case as part of the goings on in 1925. I yearned to know more, and now, thanks to Boyle, I have.
“Arc of Justice” isn’t perfect, of course. At one point Boyle refers to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association as the “United” Negro Improvement Association. [He gives the correct name later in the book.] In another faux pas, Boyle claims the anti-black pogroms masquerading as riots that swept through several Northern cities in the early 1900s were “imported” from the South.
Actually, before the Civil War, almost all anti-black riots in the United States occurred in Northern, not Southern, cities. Black historian J.A. Rogers took pains to point that out in his “Africa’s Gift to America.” Christian’s “Black Saga” proves Rogers right. Christian gives the year and place of most of the anti-black riots prior to the Civil War, and almost all were in the North, not the South.
Still, “Arc of Justice” is a welcome addition to black historiography and a compelling tale of 10 black men and one black woman who drew the line against white mob violence and decided they weren’t going to take it anymore.
