|
Kevin Boyle,
author of
Arc
of Justice
___________________________________________
In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines
and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around
the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with
the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor
-- the grandson of a slave -- had made the long climb from the ghetto to
a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after
his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house in an attempt to intimidate
Sweet and force him from his new home. Rocks were thrown and shots
were fired, concluding with the death of one of the white citizens outside.
And so it began -- a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney,
Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial
symbol of equality. In the National Book Award winning book Arc
of Justice, historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and
courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of
narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly
re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration
to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story is an epic tale of one man trapped
by the battles of his era's changing times.#
In our April 1, 2005 interview, Boyle tells this powerful story that rallied
blacks to raise their voices and to begin the march toward equality, dignity,
and self-respect.
Interview Topics
How generally little
is known about this story
Detroit prior to the Northern
Migration
The accomplishments
of blacks during the Jazz Age
The fears whites faced
The presence and power
of Detroit's KKK
The extremism of Henry Ford
Jobs available to
black citizens of Detroit
Ossian Sweet's background
Sweet and the Talented Tenth
The dangers
of moving to the Garland Avenue neighborhood
The police plan
for dealing with a disturbance
The night of the shooting
The white
population's perception of the incident
The NAACP's involvement
in the defense
The hiring of Clarence Darrow
The immediate benefits
of hiring Darrow
The failure of the first trial
The second trial
The fate of the Sweets
after their release
The
contributions of this case toward the cause of racial justice
*
About Kevin Boyle
Praise for the book
Comment on this interview
______________________________
"When I opened the door and saw the mob, I realized I was facing the same
mob that had hounded my people through its entire history. In my mind I was
pretty confident of what I was up against, with my back against the wall.
I was filled with a peculiar fear, the fear of one who knows the history
of my race."
- Ossian Sweet
*
- Listen to Jelly Roll Morton play
Black Bottom Stomp 
___________________________________________
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot…Like men we'll face the
murderous, cowardly pack
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
- Claude McKay, 1919
*
JJM In a blurb for your book, Pulitzer Prize winning
author David Maraniss wrote of Arc of Justice, "With deep research
and graceful prose, he (Boyle) has taken a single moment, the hot September
day in 1925 when Ossian and Gladys Sweet moved into a bungalow on Garland
Avenue in Detroit, and from that woven an amazing and unforgettable story
of prejudice and justice at the dawn of America's racial awakening." This
story truly is a benchmark in American history, yet I was surprised by how
little I knew about it. Is this a common thing for you to hear?
KB Yes, it has become one. It is a story
that I knew because I grew up in Detroit, so it isn't as if I stumbled on
this in the midst of deep research and thought, "My gosh, an unknown story!"
However, the huge break in writing this book was realizing that that ninety-nine
percent of Americans didn't know anything about it. I was curious about why
this story isn't part of our collective memory, and what made it disappear
from history in a way so many other civil rights stories didn't.
| JJM I suppose in Detroit it has retained
its proper historical significance, and at the time of the trial, it probably
received national renown. It is probably pretty safe to say that kids in
today's classrooms -- until the publication of your book -- haven't spent
a lick of time studying it.
KB Probably not.
JJM
What was Detroit like prior to the Northern Migration?
KB Prior to 1910, Detroit was a sleepy, mid-level
manufacturing town. It was not a huge city, especially compared to New York
or Chicago -- in 1900 it was the fifteenth largest city in America. With
the automobile boom that began in the 1910 - 1915 period, Detroit became
the ultimate American boomtown. It was the industrial version of a gold rush
town, and the population skyrocketed, going from fifteenth to fourth largest
city in the country in twenty years time. It was just jammed full of people
on the make, which created an intense tension among its citizens.
JJM A magazine reporter wrote of it, "Detroit
is Eldorado. It is staccato American. It is shockingly dynamic."
KB Yes, and if you go to Detroit today, it
is hard to picture that, because Detroit has been in decline for a long time
now. But as you drive through the streets of Detroit, use your imagination
and you can see its boomtown appeal, and a place that was just jam full of
people and ambition and money. It was out of control, in a sense. |
Detroit, c. 1920
*
"News of high-paying jobs up in the Motor City shot through every
portion of the South, carried from town to town, farm to farm, by labor
recruiters, colored newspapers, word of mouth, and even the blues. 'I'm
goin' to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford's place,' they sang in roadhouses
deep in the delta and across the Black Belt. 'Stop these eatless days
from staring me in the face. When I start makin' money, she don't need
to come around, 'Cause I don't need her now. Lord, I'm Detroit
bound.'"
- Kevin Boyle
_____
I'm
Going Up North, by the Children of East York School
|
Political
and artistic leaders of the era
_____
NAACP leader W.E.B. Dubois
*
Poet Langston Hughes
*
Musician Louis Armstrong
*
"In the 1920s, 'slumming' became a mania, as urban elites sought
out the exotic, the 'real,' wherever they could find it. They packed into
the speakeasies that filled the cities after the imposition of Prohibition,
where they could rub shoulders with Italian, Irish, or Jewish gangsters.
They filled theaters to see ethnic entertainers such as Ragtime Jimmy Durante,
late of Coney Island, or the anarchic Marx Brothers. And in the most startling
turn of them all, they discovered the Negroes living in their midst."
- Kevin Boyle
_____
Potato Head Blues , by Louis Armstrong |
JJM How did the accomplishments of blacks
during the Jazz Age change the way northern whites viewed them?
KB There are many changes, and they cut two
ways. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, and the tremendous
accomplishments of African Americans in the arts and in politics forced whites
to confront their long-standing sense of white supremacy. How could white
supremacy be true when African Americans were competing better than whites
on so many levels? At the same time, it was the movement of African Americans
out of the South and into places like Detroit or Chicago that dramatically
accelerated the segregation of northern cities. So, there was a breaking
down of a cultural wall between black America and white America simultaneous
to a geographic wall going up between them.
JJM Which basically triggered a northern version
of Jim Crow…
KB That is exactly what happened. The North
embraced its own version of Jim Crow throughout its big cities. It was different
from the South -- there were no separate drinking fountains, no black and
white waiting rooms at the bus stations -- but it was just as powerful a
form of Jim Crow based on the bedrock of it, which was neighborhood segregation.
JJM
Neighborhood segregation and the triggering of a northern version of
Jim Crow couldn't have happened without whites feeling a lot of fear. What
sort of fears did the white community express or face?
KB It was a whole complex of things. On the
one hand, there were the long-standing white stereotypical fears and assumptions
about black Americans -- that black men were dangerous, prone to crime, and
prone to sexual violence. At the same time, whites felt that the mere presence
of blacks undermined the status of the white world, which was really the
key to the Jim Crow North. These white American mind-sets then got linked
up with the economics of urban America -- particularly the economics of the
housing market that make segregation so powerful. |
Artist William H. Johnson
*
Author Zora Neale Hurston
*
Musician Duke Ellington
*
"White slummers thought black life exciting because it was 'primitive'
and vital. Visiting the ghetto's haunts became the era's way to snub mainstream
society, to be in the avant-garde. 'Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all
stimulate me enormously,' novelist Carl Van Vechten wrote H.L. Mencken in
the summer of 1924. 'Doubtless, I shall discard them too in time.'"
- Kevin Boyle
_____
Black Beauty
, by Duke Ellington |
| JJM
It created a bright opportunity for the Ku Klux Klan to make its presence
felt. You wrote that in the Detroit of 1924, the Klan had thirty-five thousand
members.
KB Yes, that is members. When you
start thinking of the number of fellow travelers, who are the people who
didn't pay the money but accepted the ideas, it is a staggering number --
as if thirty-five thousand wasn't bad enough. Right after World War I, the
KKK was able to sweep out of the South by expanding its hatred. Of course
it was anti-black, as it had always been, but the Klan was also anti-Catholic,
and because Detroit was an immigrant city, with the great growth coming from
the peoples of southern Europe, it was also an overwhelmingly Catholic city.
The Klan was also anti-Semitic, and there was a substantial Jewish population
in Detroit. It was anti-immigrant, and as I said, Detroit was an immigrant
city, as were so many other big cities in the twenties. Because the embattled
white Anglo-Saxon protestant group felt as if it were being engulfed by these
newcomers, the Klan was able to build its membership based on their multiple
hatreds. |
A 1920's Ku Klux Klan rally
*
"They protected morality: they defended the virtue of white womanhood,
assailed bootleggers and their besotted clients, celebrated sobriety and
the triumph of a Protestant God. They made sure that all those who threatened
the nation -- blacks, of course, but also Catholics, Jews, and the foreign
born -- were kept in their place."
- Kevin Boyle |
Henry Ford with a 1921 Model T
*
Ford assembly line, c 1928
*
"To be sure, the Great War opened auto-factory jobs to Negroes,
but colored workers faced a bewildering array of discriminatory practices.
A few automakers, Henry Ford foremost among them, sometimes hired Negroes
for the full range of production positions, though almost never for the skilled
work that native-born whites had always controlled."
- Kevin Boyle
_____
Carolina Shout , by James P. Johnson |
JJM
Did Henry Ford's extremism help feed this attitude?
KB Oh, absolutely. It is a little hard to
picture these days, but Henry Ford was Detroit. When people came to
Detroit, they didn't do so in order to work for General Motors, they came
because that was where "Mr. Ford" was. He symbolized Detroit, and he did
it in the industrial sense. By the twenties, the Ford Motor Company wasn't
even the largest automobile company in the country -- it was second behind
General Motors -- but Henry Ford still symbolized that industry. He also
symbolized its hatreds. Ford was a man of multiple hatreds, foremost for
him being anti-Semitism. The weekly newspaper he published, the Dearborn
Independent, had massive distribution around the country, and it was
filled with hatred. It was not a Klan newspaper, but it was full of rhetoric
against blacks and the "Jewish menace."
JJM
What sorts of jobs were available to the black citizens of Detroit
in the mid-twenties?
KB That was an interesting dynamic, because
it was a spotty sort of thing. There was no absolute rule in the job market
in Detroit. It wasn't as if blacks could work over here, but not over there.
But, by and large, there was a basic rule that operated in short order with
the dramatic growth of the black population, and that is that black men could
get the worst paying, most dangerous jobs in the automobile industry. They
could work in certain places in the auto industry, and they were largely
jobs whites preferred not having. But the kind of work available to blacks
varied from plant to plant. Some employers had more of this kind of work,
others less, and many none at all. It was just a weird kind of hodge-podge
of discrimination, which made life for African Americans really hard, because
they never knew exactly where the line was drawn -- it might be drawn differently
in every plant. Consequently, life was really dangerous all the time, because
they were not sure what it was they could or couldn't do, or where they could
or couldn't go. |
| JJM
You wrote of Ossian Sweet, "Dr. Sweet was no boy. He was a professional
man, better educated, wealthier, more accomplished than most of the whites
he encountered. He wanted others to know it the moment they saw him." Can
you talk a little about how Sweet's background led him to having the courage
to buy a house in Detroit's all-white Garland Avenue neighborhood?
KB It is really a classic American story.
He was a black man who came from a very humble background -- his grandparents
were slaves and his parents were the farmers of a small plot of land in central
Florida. But what they had and what they gave to their children -- Ossian
being the oldest in a large family -- was a driving ambition, and a commitment
to education, hard work, and success. Ossian was very much an obedient son,
and he learned that lesson well.
His parents were devout members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
and when he was thirteen, his parents sent him off to the traditional black
college in Ohio connected to it, Wilberforce University. He got a high school
diploma and a college degree, and that alone set him higher on the educational
level than virtually any American -- black or white -- because very few people
went to college in the 1910's. But that wasn't enough for Sweet, as he also
attended medical school at Howard University in Washington D.C. So he was
an example of the classic American success story, a young man of humble origins
rising to the very top of the professional ladder.
As it is for many in this kind of situation, his whole transformation was
accompanied with a sense that he deserved the best, and that he deserved
what he could get. Dr. Sweet was a man who didn't mind showing off his successes
and his accomplishments. And the decision to buy that house was in
large part because he didn't want to live in the poor neighborhood, where
most African Americans were expected to live. He wanted a nice house in a
better, safer neighborhood for he and his young family, and that is what
brought him to Garland Avenue. It was not a spectacular area -- certainly
not the best in Detroit -- but he was moving to a good, solid neighborhood
right across from a grade school, so when his baby daughter got older, they
could walk across the street with her. The house was the nicest house on
the block, and even when you drive there today, it will hit you immediately
it is still the nicest house on the block. That is one of the things that
attracted him to it. |
photo Chicago Defender
Ossian Sweet
*
"He knew…that his parents were counting on him, to prove them
right and to make them proud. He was their hope; their aspirations were his
obligations."
- Kevin Boyle
*
Wilberforce University
_____
I,
Too , read by Langston Hughes |
photo Walter P. Reuther Library
Gladys Sweet
*
"…the Negro race, (W.E.B. DuBois) famously argued in 1903,
would move forward only on the strength of its 'exceptional' men and women,
the handful of scholars and scientists, professionals and poets who he claimed
constituted the 'Talented Tenth.' The black colleges had to be the
tenth's training grounds…"
- Kevin Boyle
_____
I've Got A Feeling I'm Falling , by Fats Waller
|
JJM And he was married to a woman, Gladys
Sweet, who was quite adamant about wanting to live there. You write, "You
work in the ghetto, she told him, but we don't need to live there. We have
a perfect right to live anywhere we please." She was clearly someone who
wanted the best for her family and felt they had the right to live wherever
they wanted to live.
KB A fascinating and important part of this
story is that Gladys, who was also African American, grew up in an almost
completely white neighborhood . It wasn't all that unusual at the time of
her childhood for an African American middle class family to live in an otherwise
all white neighborhood. With this experience, Mrs. Sweet felt there was
absolutely no reason why she shouldn't move into this Garland Avenue house,
which was only one mile south from her parents' home. Moving into it was
the most obvious thing in the world to her. Ossian was different. Where he
grew up -- in the Jim Crow South -- there was a black side of town and a
white side of town, and he lived on the black side of town. So he had a different
understanding of that dynamic than she did.
JJM Well, he may have been more cognizant
of a "racial etiquette" as a result of his childhood experience.
KB Yes, I think that is a great way of putting
it.
JJM
It was quite important to Dr. Sweet to be recognized as part of what
W.E.B. DuBois called "The Talented Tenth." You can hardly blame him for wanting
to be part of that, and it seemed as though he consistently acted with that
goal in mind.
KB As I mentioned earlier, Sweet was a man
from an ordinary background, but his entire educational process were at these
historic black colleges rooted in the premise that the race would be led
by its educated men, which is what DuBois really meant by the "Talented Tenth."
Dr. Sweet wanted to earn a place in that "Talented Tenth." It was a great
ambition, the sort that would be applauded if one were white; whereas in
a black person, this ambition brought terrible tragedy. |
| JJM Dr. Sweet said, "If I had known
how bitter that neighborhood was going to be, I wouldn't have taken that
house as a gift." Did Dr. Sweet have complete knowledge of the neighborhood
he was about to move into? Did he understand the dangers of living there?
KB The simple answer is "No," but of course
we never stop with a simple answer. Timing was very critical with this story.
He bought the house in early June of 1925, and he was a little worried because
of who he was and because of what background he brought with him. He knew
there was a danger in crossing the color line, and the day he signed the
papers to buy the house, he asked the owners he bought it from, "Is this
a Klan neighborhood?" So it was obviously on his mind. The woman said that
it wasn't a Klan neighborhood, and I think she was right about that. So while
he was nervous about moving in, he wasn't so nervous to prevent himself from
going through with the transaction.
Almost immediately after he made the down payment on the house, and during
the time he was waiting for the previous owners to move out, a whole series
of violent events surrounding African American families moving into all-white
neighborhoods were occurring on the other side of Detroit. These families
were attacked by huge, raging mobs of whites immediately after moving in,
and the incidents became front-page stories in the Detroit papers. Dr. Sweet
knew two of the victims personally -- one of whom was a doctor. When that
happened, Dr. Sweet's terror really kicks in, because he assumed that if
that could happen over on the other side of town, it could happen to him
as well. A process of growing fear sets in that began with nervousness, and
moves to terror as he was waiting for moving-in day to arrive. |
photo Chicago Defender
2905 Garland Avenue
*
"Negroes were moving onto the street, breaking into white man's
territory. News of their arrival meant so many things. A man felt his pride
knotted and twisted. Parents feared for the safety of their daughters, who
had to walk the same streets as colored men. And everyone knew that when
the color line was breeched, housing values would collapse, spinning downward
until Garland Avenue was swallowed into the ghetto and everything was lost."
- Kevin Boyle
_____
Titanic Man Blues
, by Ma Rainey
|
"Dear God! Must we not live? And when a whole city of white folk
led and helped by banks, Chambers of Commerce, mortgage companies and 'realtors'
are combing the earth for every bit of residential property for whites, where
in the name of God are we to live and live decently if not by these same
whites?"
- W. E. B. Dubois
_____
Atlanta
Years, read by W.E.B. Dubois
|
JJM These incidents that happened across
town inspired him to act and prepare differently. He was determined not to
share the same fate as that of the man he knew, Dr. Alexander Turner.
KB That's right. He said that he was not
looking for trouble, but that he would protect himself and his family. He
faced this terrible decision of either going ahead with the purchase of this
home, or backing down. He was tempted to back down, as Dr. Turner had in
fact done. Not only did Dr. Turner back down, but he abandoned his home when
it came under attack. He literally signed the deed to his brand new house
over to the members of the mob, and was vilified in the black community for
being a coward. Again, Dr. Sweet's desire to be part of the "Talented Tenth"
leads him to say that he will not back down, that he will not be humiliated,
but that he is not going there looking for trouble either. It is a very delicate
line to walk.
JJM Given all the events in Detroit leading up to
this, how did the police plan to deal with a potential disturbance at Dr.
Sweet's home?
KB After the incidents over on the other
side of town, members of the white community around Garland Avenue tried
to organize itself in order to keep the Sweet family out. A short distance
from the Sweet house, a big rally was held in the middle of the summer, in
which seven hundred people came to talk about what they would do to prevent
these black people from moving into their neighborhood. The police had undercover
cops in the crowd and caught wind of the neighborhood's intention. The question
was, will the police defend the Sweets' right to be in that house?
The first night that the Sweet family was in the house, a dozen cops were
on the street around it, which was significant for 1925. But the Sweets knew
that the police -- a completely white police force filled with Klansmen --
were also over on the other side of town but they didn't do anything to halt
the mob violence there. So the question for them was that while the cops
were outside the house, could they be trusted? Will they do the right thing
when the whites decide to attack? |
The eleven defendants
(all photos Chicago Defender)
_____
Ossian Sweet
*
Otis Sweet
*
John Latting
*
Norris Murray
*
Joe Mack
*
Charles Washington |
JJM
Of the scene outside Sweet's house on the night of the crime, you wrote,
"And there it was, the scene he'd dreaded all his life, the moment when he
stood facing a sea of white faces made grotesque by unreasoned, unrestrained
hate -- for his race, for his people, for him." Describe the scene outside
the Sweet's home prior to the shooting?
KB The Sweet's home is on a corner lot, which
was important because it meant that when the mob came, they would be attacking
from two sides, and they had to plan for that. The incident began at about
7:30 on the evening of September 9, 1925. The Sweets, his brothers and friends
-- nine people total -- were inside this house, waiting for an attack they
felt could come at any time. They were trying desperately to keep themselves
calm, so Dr. Sweet set up a card game in the living room while Mrs. Sweet
made dinner for everyone. While they were playing cards, one of them looked
out the window and saw that there were literally hundreds of people out on
the street. They were not on the sidewalk immediately in front of Sweet's
house, because that was where the police were, and they were keeping people
off of it. But, there were people everywhere else. Upon seeing this, the
people in the house believed that the moment for the attack had arrived,
so the men raced upstairs and grabbed guns Dr. Sweet had stashed away in
a closet. They lay near or kneeled by the windows and waited.
Dr. Sweet was so terrified that when he reached for a gun he realized he
couldn't keep his hands from shaking. So he went into the front bedroom,
which is a tiny little sloping room, where he lay on the bed and just waited.
He waited for thirty minutes or so, and the mob continued to stand there,
milling about on the lawns of the homes across the street. It is a very narrow
street -- if two cars are parked on it, it is difficult to get a third one
to squeeze between them. Although all these people were out there, nothing
had happened. Nobody was yelling or screaming or throwing anything. Then,
at 8:30, Dr. Sweet's brother Otis, the dentist in town who was supposed to
be in the house to help protect it, arrived with a friend in a taxicab. The
cab came rattling down the street, parked in front of Sweet's house, they
hopped out and raced to the front door. The moment the people in the mob
saw two more black people enter the house, it triggered stone throwing from
the crowd. Dr. Sweet rushed downstairs to open the door and let his brother
into the house, and at that moment, while the rocks were hitting the house,
he saw the mob. It was when he thinks to himself that this is the moment
he has been terrified to think of his entire life.
The two men came into the house, and within a minute or two, the upstairs
window was broken with rocks thrown by the mob, which is when the men upstairs
opened fire. Two bullets hit members of the mob, one hitting the leg of a
young man from across the street, and the other the back of a man -- Leon
Breiner -- who lived down the block and had come down to be part of the mob,
killing him. That is the central tragedy of the story.
JJM The police had quite a different version of
the events. Police officer Norton Schuknecht told the Detroit News,
"The shooting was not provoked. A small crowd was in front of the house,
on both sides of the street, but no threats were made and no missiles were
thrown. Suddenly an attic window was thrown up and a rifle was fired. A score
or more shots followed in quick succession." All three Detroit newspapers
reported this version. Was this quickly perceived as the truth throughout
the white population of Detroit?
KB The Sweets were brought down to police
headquarters for interrogation, and by the morning, when the papers hit the
newsstands, they were convicted in the press under the headline, "Negroes
Kill White Man on the East Side." That version of the events swept
across all three major newspapers of Detroit, and the real irony of that
is that by sheer coincidence, one of those newspapers had a reporter on the
scene. He saw what had really happened, but his editor decided not to run
the story.
JJM So, the Sweet's defense was that they
acted in self-defense, and the police retaliated by saying that there was
no mob to defend against. They were very careful -- as were the white witnesses
-- when describing how many people were outside the Sweet home.
KB It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
A terrific source of information for my book was the prosecutor's office,
which has transcripts of the interrogations of the African Americans on the
night of the shooting, and the interviews of the white witnesses on the next
day. In Michigan there is an official definition of a mob, which constitutes
about fifteen people if they are armed, and about thirty if they are not
armed but are intent on doing harm. So, there is a kind of legal threshold
around this issue. The day after the shooting, the prosecutor asked the
commanding police officer how many white people were around the Sweet's house,
and he responded by saying there were twelve. When you read the transcript,
it is easy to hear the surprise in the prosecutor's voice, because he basically
says, "What?" It is painfully obvious that the police officers read the law.
The prosecutor then asks what happened next. The officer said that he and
his fellow officers rushed inside the house and arrested them, and by the
time they came out, the mob had grown. The prosecutor asked him how big the
crowd was at this time, and the cop said it was twenty-five. So, he hit the
exact number of the size of the mob to keep it below the legal definition
twice within one page of the transcript. It was absolutely remarkable. |
Henry Sweet
*
Hewitt Watson
*
William Davis
*
Leonard Morse
*
Gladys Sweet
_____
Leon Breiner, the man shot and killed outside Sweet's home |
| JJM It certainly cast a wide suspicion
about a conspiracy, but we are not exactly talking about a fair justice system.
KB No, not even close. The press and the
police clearly decided that these people were going to go to prison for first
degree murder.
JJM
The good news with this case -- if there was such a thing as good news --
is that it opened up an opportunity for James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP
to rally black Americans around.
KB That's right. The NAACP had been watching
this rise of racial segregation in the North with real fear for a few years,
and they decided about a year before this that they were going to mount a
major campaign against residential segregation. There was a Supreme Court
case pending on the constitutionality of one of the ways that residential
segregation was enforced, and they were hoping to turn this into a great
crusade. The thing is, with a couple of really big exceptions, you really
can't rally people very easily around Supreme Court cases, because they tend
to be a bit abstract and too technical.
The campaign wasn't going anywhere, so throughout the summer, James Weldon
Johnson scouted around for a story he could use to illustrate the problem
of residential segregation, and to build his campaign around. All of a sudden,
two days after the Sweets were arrested, this tiny little notice of the arrest
was published in the very back pages of a New York paper that came across
Johnson's desk. As soon as he saw it, he knew it was the story he was waiting
for. He decided then and there that he wanted the NAACP to come to the Sweet's
defense because he knew he had in this story -- that of a black doctor and
his wife trapped and defending themselves against a white mob -- a way to
illustrate the dangerous growth around residential segregation in the North. |
Library of Congress
"If in Detroit the Negro is not upheld in the right to defend his
home…then no decent Negro home anywhere in the United States will be
safe."
- James Weldon Johnson
_____
We
To America, read by James Weldon Johnson
|
Library of Congress
"I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond.
The traits of my race are nowhere visible on me."
- Walter White
*
"I have always been interested in the colored people. I had lived
in America because I wanted to…The ancestors of the negroes came here
because they were captured in Africa and brought to America in slave ships,
and had been obliged to toil for three hundred years without reward. When
they were finally freed from slavery they were lynched in court and out of
court, and driven into mean, squalid outskirts and shanties because they
were black, or had a drop of negro blood in their bodies somewhere. I realized
that defending negroes, even in the north, was no boy's job, although boys
were usually given the responsibility."
- Clarence Darrow
_____
Darrow
talks about crime
|
JJM
Besides being Johnson's assistant, Walter White played a big role in
this case, particularly through his skills as a publicist. He felt it was
important to hire a high profile white attorney to defend Sweet, saying,
"As even the best white sentiment of Detroit was against Sweet, the retention
of an eminent white lawyer would serve to win over this alienated opinion,
alienated because many white people believe the killing was unwarranted."
How did Clarence Darrow get hired for the case?
KB Blind luck. Prior to Darrow's involvement,
Johnson dispatched White to Detroit to work all the details of the trial
out. While White was intent on having a white lawyer defend the Sweets, they
already had three black lawyers hired to defend them. But White wanted a
white lawyer partly because the jury was going to white and would require
a white lawyer as front man, and partly because it was possible for this
campaign to cross the color line and appeal to whites about the problems
of residential segregation. As we were talking about earlier, this was the
time of the Klan, and one of the appeals the NAACP wanted to make was that
if the Klan were successful in their effort to segregate black people now,
they would segregate Jews and Catholics next. White wanted to make whites
understand that many of them were as vulnerable as blacks, and to make this
trial a campaign that crossed the color line.
They set out to find a white attorney, but couldn't find one because, despite
White's month-long attempt at putting a defense together, the case was a
sure loser. The defendants were already convicted in the public opinion in
Detroit, and white lawyers didn't want to tarnish their image by being on
a losing case. As it got closer to trial time, they were getting desperate
because they didn't have the lawyers they wanted. Then by sheer luck, Walter
White received a letter from the counsel of the Chicago Defender,
the great black newspaper, which said that he could arrange a meeting for
them with Clarence Darrow. They hopped on it, and within a day or so of getting
that letter, Johnson had an appointment to meet Darrow. It so happened that
Darrow was in New York at that time, visiting Arthur Garfield Hays, his friend
and co-counsel from the Scopes trial, which had just been held that summer.
Johnson and White went to see Darrow, who decided about thirty seconds into
the meeting to take the case.
JJM It seemed as if Darrow understood the
importance of this case right away, He wrote, "I realized that defending
Negroes, even in the north, was no boy's job, although boys were usually
given the responsibility."
KB Yes, that truly is a Darrow line. There were
a whole combination of factors that made Darrow open to Johnson and White's
appeal, but among them, two were particularly important. The first was that
his parents had been part of the abolitionist generation of the 1850's, and
this case gave Darrow a chance to spout his politics; and the second was
that Darrow had built an entire career around attacking the great sacred
creeds of America, and this most sacred creed, white supremacy, was a target
Darrow couldn't resist attacking.
|
| JJM
What were the immediate benefits of hiring Darrow?
KB In one sense the upside is that the campaign
the NAACP wanted to build around the case caught fire immediately, especially
in black America. All of a sudden, the sheer publicity of having Darrow --
who was at the height of his fame -- brought money pouring in, which the
NAACP used to help defend the Sweets. Darrow did this entire case for only
five thousand dollars, so he is basically working pro bono. Within a very
short period of time they raised about seventy-five thousand dollars -- a
huge amount of money at the time -- and it became the basis for their legal
defense fund, which was really the heart and soul of the organization. Another
upside to his hiring is that the liberal white opinion starts to swing towards
the Sweets. Stories about the case begin appearing in The Nation,
for example, and it becomes something liberal whites wanted to support.
The critical question was, could Darrow actually get them off? That was an
open question when Darrow signed on, because while he was a brilliant defense
lawyer, the truth is that he didn't get people off in most of his high profile
cases. This had something to do with the fact that he had very tough clients
to defend, of course. He defended Eugene Debs, for instance, which was his
first high profile case. They lost, and Debs went to prison. He did get Big
Bill Haywood off, and that built up his reputation. He didn't get Leopold
and Loeb off, although he did keep them out of the electric chair, which
was in itself probably a great accomplishment. So, he always took on very
tough cases to win, and as a consequence his record for getting people acquitted
was not all that great. |
Darrow, defending Leopold and Loeb, 1924
*
"The Klan was in the ascendancy; the Negroes' white allies on the
bench had deserted them; the mayor they had helped to elect had endorsed
injustice and declared the pursuit of civil rights a threat to peace and
liberal democracy. No longer was this simply a question of whether the Sweets
were justified in firing into the mob on Garland Avenue. Now the Talented
Tenth was locked in combat against segregation itself, battling to preserve
some shred of the promise that brought almost a million people out of the
South in the previous ten years, to show that the North was different, to
prove that there were places in America where Jim Crow would not be allowed
to rule. This had become a fight over fundamentals."
- Kevin Boyle
_____
Black And Blue , by Louis Armstrong
|
Prosecutor Robert Toms
*
"The evidence shows no act of violence or provocation on the part
of the victims or any other persons. The prisoners were found in a room filled
with deadly weapons. As we are unable to say who fired the fatal shots we
must charge them all with the same crime."
- Assistant prosecuting attorney, Lester Moll
*
photo Walter P. Reuther Library
Henry Sweet, friend Julian Perry, Thomas Chawke, Clarence Darrow
*
"He spoke, too, of the people who populated 'this highly cultured
community near Goethe Street.' Back came Marjorie Stowell, 'fifteen
years a school teacher and in common with all the other people in the community
she calls it "Go-thee" Street.' Back came 'wonderful mathetical geniuses'
like John Getke who couldn't manage to count how many people gathered on
the street in front of the house the night Leon Breiner died. Back
came Edward Miller, 'who thinks he's the only kind of American. The
Negroes and they Eye-talians don't count...Christopher Columbus was an
Eye-talian, but he isn't good enough to associate with Miller. None
of the people of brains and courage and intelligence, unless they happen
to live around those four corners, are good enough, and there are no brains
and intelligence to spare around those corners.'"
- Kevin Boyle, describing a portion of Darrow's closing argument
|
JJM
The first trial seemed virtually impossible for either side to prevail
in, because eleven people were charged with one crime, and only two bullets
did any damage.
KB Right, and no one could really say who
shot the guns. It was a mess.
JJM It seemed destined to fail on both ends…
KB Yes, it was a mess of a case for the
prosecution. They put eleven people on trial at one time, they couldn't pinpoint
who fired what gun, they never found the bullet that actually killed the
man, and the entire prosecution's premise was that there was no mob outside
Sweet's home. They brought witness after witness from that neighborhood up
to the stand, who said there was no mob, which of course is stupid because
you couldn't have all these people claim to be witnesses and also say they
never saw a mob. This was not a case of legal logic, it was a political trial,
and the prosecutor did an admirable job in not playing the race card the
way he could have. Darrow and the defense's challenge was that there were
twelve white men in the jury box who needed to be convinced that it was alright
for a black man to kill a white man, and that was a tough proposition. It
is not surprising that the first trial ends in a hung jury.
JJM For
the second trial, you wrote that Darrow "seemed convinced that he could exploit
the situation in Detroit more effectively than he had in the first trial."
Why?
KB Probably because this time he got the
right co-counsel. For the first trial Darrow teamed with his friend Arthur
Garfield Hays, who at the time was the lead lawyer for the ACLU. While it
wasn't an ACLU case, they basically ran it as a political case, filled with
great oratory and political statements. Hays couldn't participate in the
second trial, and Darrow partnered with Thomas Chawke, a criminal lawyer
whose entire career was spent keeping Detroit's mobsters out of prison. Chawke
brought an edge to the defense that wasn't there for the first trial, and
the two of them together were downright mean. It is vicious the way that
they attacked and humiliated the witnesses for the prosecution, who were
the ordinary white people of Garland Avenue. They basically turned them into
fools.
JJM One instance you write of concerned Darrow's
humiliation of a schoolteacher who couldn't pronounce one of the neighborhood's
streets...
KB Yes, and I have got into a bit of trouble
over this one myself, to tell you the truth. There is a side street that
runs all the way through Detroit called "Goethe." In Detroit, all
of us pronounced it "Go-thee" Street. None of us knew who Goethe was,
and no one would have pronounced it that way, and certainly most everyone
on Garland Avenue would have said "Go-thee," which is how the schoolteacher
-- Marjorie Stowell -- pronounced it on the stand. But Darrow took that
mispronunciation and made it a symbol of the stupidity of the people who
lived on Garland Avenue. He asked the jury to look at the people of Garland
Avenue who claimed to be better than Dr. Sweet -- an educated and sophisticated
man -- yet who couldn't even pronounce their own neighborhood streets correctly.
It became a way for Darrow to exploit how ignorant these people really were.
It is kind of painful to watch, and I flinched at this because I used to
pronounce it "Go-thee" as well. |
| JJM In the second trial, Darrow and Chawke
are defending just one man…
KB Yes. The prosecution and the defense agreed
to try the defendants one at a time, so the prosecutor picks Dr. Sweet's
little brother Henry, who had been in the house and who was the only one
of the defendants to have admitted firing into the crowd. Under the interrogation
of the prosecutor's office on the night of the shooting, he said something
to the affect of, "Of course I fired into the crowd, they were going to kill
us." Since Henry basically admitted that he fired at somebody, the prosecutor
and the defense agree that if Henry couldn't be convicted, no one could.
JJM The case, of course, went Darrow's way.
Of Darrow's closing argument, which went on for several hours, David Lilenthal,
a reporter for The Nation wrote, "He seemed to be pleading more that
the white man might be just than that the black man be free, more for the
spirit of the master than the body of the slave."
KB I loved that, and Lilenthal was exactly
right. What Darrow argued for was really not so much for black rights as
for white decency, which was a very critical distinction. He was really making
a plea to the whites of Detroit and across the nation rather than for the
African Americans. |
"I do not believe in the law of hate. I may not be true to my ideals
always, but I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing
with hatred. I would like to see a time when man loves his fellow man, and
forgets his color or his creed. We will never be civilized until that time
comes. I know the Negro race has a long road to go. I believe the life of
a Negro has been a life full of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. The
law has made him equal - but man has not….I know there is a long road
ahead of him, before he can take the place which I believe he should take.
I know that before him there is suffering, tribulation, and death among the
blacks, and perhaps among the whites. I am sorry. I would do what I can to
avert it. I would advise patience; I would advise toleration; I would advise
understanding; I would advise all those things which are necessary for men
who live together….This is all. I ask you, gentlemen, on behalf of this
defendant, on behalf of these helpless ones who turn to you, and more than
that - on behalf of this great state, and this great city which must face
this problem, and face it fairly - I ask you in the name of progress and
the human race, to return a verdict of not guilty in this case!"
- Clarence Darrow's final statement in Henry Sweet's
trial
_____
The Pearls
,
by Jelly Roll Morton
|
Ossian Sweet
*
"The public role that Ossian had adored during the trials crashed
around him as well. In his insensitive way, he made an ill-advised
bid for the presidency of the Detroit branch of the NAACP in 1930, running
against the very men who'd rushed to his defense five years earlier; the
city's Talented Tenth never forgave him for the effontry. Twice, he
ran for elective office, once for a seat in the state Senate, another time
for U.S. Congress, his campaigns built on a fierce pride in his accomplishments
and a touching faith in what he called 'the American way of life.' Twice,
he was defeated."
- Kevin Boyle |
JJM As a result of Henry's acquittal, none of the
other defendants face trial. Where did the Sweets end up living afterwards?
KB This is one of the profound tragedies
in this story. Right after Henry's trial, in 1926, Mrs. Sweet and their
eighteen-month-old baby girl headed to Arizona because they had both contracted
tuberculosis, and she wanted to be where the air was drier. Within a few
months the baby died, but Mrs. Sweet remained in Arizona until 1928. That
year, after waiting two years, Dr. Sweet finally moved back into the house
on Garland Avenue, but his wife never joined him because she died that year,
also of tuberculosis. So, only two years after the trial, Dr. Sweet had lost
his entire family.
He lived in the house on Garland until the fifties, and by the time he left
it, he was still one of only a handful of African Americans who lived in
that neighborhood. Even after all this time, it remained a largely segregated
neighborhood. He left the house because he had tax problems, and his finances
sort of crumbled around him, and he had to move back into the little apartment
above his medical practice office, which by this point was located in the
inner city. By the late fifties, Sweet found himself approaching old age
and living back in the black ghetto, the very place that he basically lost
everything to escape in the twenties. And it is in that apartment, in March
of 1960, that Sweet put a bullet in his brain, committing suicide.
JJM He really was a tragic figure in so many
ways. He became known in the community and tried his hand at politics without
success. His younger brother Henry actually fared better at it than he did.
KB Yes, Henry became the head of the Michigan
NAACP, but he also died at a very young age of tuberculosis, so the family
had this terrible degree of tragedy. |
JJM You wrote that it was not "…until
the cataclysmic summer of 1968…to push through federal legislation
prohibiting discrimination in the selling and financing of homes. By then
it was too late. Segregation had become so deeply entrenched in urban America
it couldn't be uprooted, no matter what the law said. To this day, the nation's
cities remain deeply divided, black and white neighborhoods separated by
enduring discriminatory practices, racial fears and hatreds, and the casual
acceptance by too many people that there is no problem to address. And of
all the cities in the United States, none is more segregated than Detroit."
Given this, what was the most significant contribution this case made to
the cause of racial justice?
KB That is the hardest question of all to
answer. When you write about civil rights history, or about any social movement,
what you would love to do is end by saying that the story being told made
life better, that it addressed an important social problem, and that it solved
the fundamental issue. I wanted so badly to say that. I wanted nothing more
than to be able to say that Sweet, for all his sacrifices and for all the
terror he endured in that house and in the courtroom, had at least helped
change the situation, but I can't. This case is filled with the most profound
of tragedies, because everything was lost in the end for Dr. Sweet, and the
issues he tried to confront -- even if he didn't address them for all the
right reasons -- were lost. Segregation of the cities wasn't stopped, and
in fact it grew more intense after 1925, and by 1935, the cities were strictly
segregated. While we have made progress and the segregation of American cities
is not as severe as it was in the twenties and thirties, they are still
profoundly segregated. So that, in the end, is what makes this a story of
bravery and courage, but also the deepest of tragedies.
JJM You can't help but wonder what goes on
in the real estate world, and how much residential segregation continues
to take place.
KB Absolutely, and how much that link between
racism and the marketplace exists. I can guarantee that in cities across
America -- and in its suburbs as well -- there are still white people who
will say to themselves that an African American family moving into their
neighborhood will depress property values. That is the link -- the exact
sentiment that resulted in the segregation of the cities at the start, and
it still remains.
One of the things that is so insidious and powerful about the connection
between racism and the marketplace is that it forces people who aren't themselves
racist, to act like they are, and that is what makes a racial system. It
is one thing if one or two people on a block are prejudiced, because you
can dismiss them as jerks. But the power of the system is demonstrated when
people who aren't in fact racist, have to, because of economics, act like
they are.
___________________________________________
photo Detroit News
The twelve jurors in the Henry Sweet trial
*
"We feel that this is a case in which more is involved than the liberties
of the eleven persons concerned; it is a case that boldly challenges the
liberties, the hopes, and the aspirations of fifteen million colored Americans.
If the prosecution should win, in that very act, they erect over the head
of every Negro not only in this city but in every community in this country
a very formidable threat of residential proscription whose consequences none
of us can now predict. He would be forced to face the future with only the
feeblest hope as to the positive maintenance of his inalienable right under
the Constitution to live without molestation and persecution wherever he
may. We feel that the prosecution realizes this and will spare no cunning
in the prosecution of their dastardly program."
- Otis Sweet, father of Ossian Sweet
_____
Black And Tan Fantasy , by Duke Ellington's Washingtonians
Arc
of Justice
by
Kevin Boyle
About Kevin Boyle
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
KB I have two different answers. One is a
very conventional answer, which is probably the classic American boy answer
-- the baseball player. I grew up in Detroit, and was a huge baseball fan.
I loved the game, and would lay awake at night, listening to the Tigers games
on the radio. While I played baseball, I was one of those kids who couldn't
hit. So my baseball hero was the shortstop for the Tigers at the time, a
guy by the name of Eddie Brinkman, who couldn't hit at all either.
JJM I remember him. He hit about .190 one
year, didn't he?
KB Exactly, but he was a terrific fielder.
So Brinkman the baseball player is my conventional answer. My other answer,
which is also probably quite conventional, is my parents. I really worshipped
them, and they were definitely boyhood heroes of mine. By my answers you
can probably tell that I wasn't exactly a wild, radical kid…
Heroes Index
*
Kevin Boyle, a professor of history at Ohio State University, is the author
of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968.
A former associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, he is also
the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
He lives in Bexley, Ohio.
Praise For the Book
“Dr. Ossian Sweet bought a house in a white neighborhood in 1925. Detroit
exploded as a result, and a largely forgotten, yet pivotal, civil rights
moment in modern American history unfolded. Kevin Boyle's vivid, deeply
researched Arc of Justice is a powerful document that reads like a
Greek tragedy in black and white. The lessons in liberty and law to be learned
from it are color blind.”
—David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.
E. B. Du Bois
"Arc of Justice perfectly illustrates why W.E.B. Du Bois insisted
that a keen sense of drama and tragedy is the ally, not the enemy, of clear-eyed
historical analysis of race in U.S. history. By turns a crime story and a
gripping courtroom drama, a family tale and a stirring account of resistance,
an evocation of American dreams and a narration of American violence, Boyle's
study takes us to the heart of interior lives and racist social processes
at a key juncture in U.S. history.
—David Roediger, Babcock Professor of African American Studies and
History, University of Illinois, author of Colored White: Transcending
the Racial Past
“What a powerful and beautiful book! Kevin Boyle has done a great service
to history with Arc of Justice. With deep research and graceful prose,
he has taken a single moment, the hot September day in 1925 when Ossian and
Gladys Sweet moved into a bungalow on Garland Avenue in Detroit, and from
that woven an amazing and unforgettable story of prejudice and justice at
the dawn of America's racial awakening.”
—David Maraniss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of They
Marched Into Sunlight and When Pride Still Mattered
“There are many hidden and semi-hidden and half-forgotten markers of
the civil rights movement. Kevin Boyle's careful, detailed study of a 1925
murder trial in Detroit is one such precursing marker. Arc of Justice
is a necessary contribution to what seems like an insoluble moral dilemma:
race in America.”
—Paul Hendrickson, author of Sons of Mississippi: A Story of
Race and Its Legacy
“A welcome book on an important case. In Kevin Boyle’s evocative
account, the civil rights saga of Gladys and Ossian Sweet finally has the
home it has long deserved.”
—Philip Dray, author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The
Lynching of Black America
_______________________________
Kevin Boyle products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This interview took place on February 4, 2005
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our conversation with Bayard Rustin biographer John D'Emilio.
_______________________________
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
# Text from publisher.
|
