Arc of Justice:
A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

DETROIT, A SEGREGATED CITY

The city of Detroit in 2013 is a city in bankruptcy, with a state-appointed Emergency Manager, a city of abandoned houses and factories and a population that has declined by two-thirds since its population peak in the 1950s. It's also a city with a long history of racial segregation which spawned deadly riots in the 1940s and the 1960s. Arc of Justice explores a sliver of its history, focusing on an incident in 1925 when black doctor Ossian Sweet purchased a house in a white neighborhood… a neighborhood where he and his wife and baby daughter were not welcome.

EARLY YEARS OF OSSIAN SWEET

Boyle takes you through Dr. Sweet's personal history, growing up in Florida, and a look back at his father and grandfather, who had been born a slave. The young Ossian, named for a white governor of Florida who supported integration, seeks a better life through education, attending the colleges available to blacks. He discovered Detroit through summer jobs there and settled in the city to begin his medical practice in the black ghetto known as Black Bottom.

The book takes you through his marriage to Gladys, a year in Europe studying with the best, a miscarriage for Gladys and finally a baby girl born in Detroit. The author interprets Sweet's personality through these events, painting him as someone determined to have what his accomplishments would merit him if he had been a white man. The house on Garland Street, rather than settling into cramped quarters in Black Bottom, was one of those things.

THE HOUSE ON GARLAND STREET

The house was a bungalow style home with a broad front porch and nice architectural touches inside and out, possibly the nicest house on the block. This was not a classy neighborhood and the house was no palace, but it was a stable neighborhood full of solid citizens who worked in the trades, as office clerks or technicians, earning enough money to own a home, but often needing to take in a renter for the spare bedroom in order to make the mortgage. It seemed to Dr. Sweet that it was not too big a leap for him to be able to live in such a neighborhood.

But Dr. Sweet is no fool. He's experienced lynchings of blacks in Florida and a horrific riot in Washington DC where he attended medical school. He knows his new neighbors may not be welcoming, so he brings guns and friends and his brother with him for the move into the house. What follows is a growing crowd of people from the neighborhood gathering outside his house, with police there to protect the Sweets, but doing nothing to disperse the crowd. As rocks are thrown and shots fired, a man lays dead in the street. Police arrest 11 people inside and all of them are charged with murder.

The author takes us to New York and the headquarters for the NAACP where Robert Weldon Johnson and Walter White happen to be looking for a show case to challenge residential segregation. In Ossian Sweet's attempt to live in a white neighborhood in Detroit, they find their case. They hire famous attorney Clarence Darrow, fresh off the Scopes "monkey trial," and they go on the road promoting the cause of housing rights for blacks, raising money and managing the hoopla that builds around the case.

I am a long-time Detroit area resident with an interest in the city, its past and future, so I was aware of the Sweet case and have seen the Sweet house, which still stands, with a historical marker on the lawn. But I learned a great many details about the incident and the trial (actually, there were two trials, but read the book to get the whole complicated story of the prosecution which resulted in no one being found guilty of anything). The author writes this story in the manner of a novel, going inside people's heads, imagining their feelings and motives. It is very good reading and I am in awe of the amount of research that must have gone into it. But I am also aware that it is an interpretation, and the story is not really focused on Detroit, but on the role of the NAACP in finding ways to fight the common attitude held by Detroit's mayor during this incident. Mayor Johnny Smith was generally a liberal with no ill will against Negroes, who mostly voted for him, but he felt they should be willing to give up some of their rights (like the right to buy a house in any neighborhood) in order to preserve the peace. With this, the NAACP did not agree. And nor should we!

THE NAACP HIRES THE BEST WHITE ATTORNEY: CLARENCE DARROW

However, the NAACP did think they needed a white lawyer to head up the defense. Clarence Darrow was a wonderful choice, since his forte was oratory and his own strong belief in the rights of all people. Fresh off his stunning performance in the Scopes "monley trial," Darrow was a national celebrity. But even the Great Defender himself could not see a way out of the dilemma of housing segregation. He acknowledged that when colored families moved into white neighborhoods, the property values declined. He did a masterful job of showing how the Sweet family was in danger from a mob and had to defend themselves, but he did not go further and attack the whole system of real estate and mortgage practices that preserved racial segregation.

This issue has a personal meaning for me because my own family moved from our house in a Flint neighborhood when I was a child because a black family bought a house on the street. Every white family put their house up for sale and the neighborhood quickly shifted from white to black. Flint, like Detroit, was highly segregated.

DETROIT REMAINED A SEGREGATED CITY

When my husband and I (both students at Wayne State University in Detroit) married in 1967, we moved to one of two all-white apartment buildings in a black neighborhood where we found ourselves, less than two months after moving in, in the epicenter of the riot that rocked the city that year and led to a steady stream of white families leaving the city, followed in later years by middle-class black families. Most neighborhoods in Detroit became black neighborhoods and finally, many became abandoned neighborhoods.

If I have a criticism of Arc of Justice, it is that the author did not nail the Detroit context quite as well as he got the national context of this case. I suppose that was the bigger story - how the trial of Dr. Sweet fit into the larger struggle for Civil Rights - but the Sweet case was just one story in the tide of history in Detroit illustrating continued housing segregation leading to the city's sad state in the present time.

Detroit remained a segregated city after the defendants in the Sweet case were exonerated. It did not turn out to be the victory the NAACP had hoped for, and the Supreme Court ruled against their case which sought to end "covenants" in real estate deeds specifying that a property could not be sold to a Negro. Black families moving into white neighborhoods continued to be harassed even after the passage of Civil Rights laws in the 1960s stopped the covenants. I am convinced that housing segregation played a role in Detroit's decline. See my web page, Detroit's Segregation Past.

Buy Arc of Justice from amazon.com. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

You might like to read my review of Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor. Young knew Dr. Sweet, for whom he did errands when he ws growing up in Black Bottom. He writes that the former owner of the house on Garland Street was a light-skinned black man, married to a white woman, and passing for white himself. Lots of good insights about Detroit's segregated neighborhoods in this book.