Forgotten justice

Kevin Boyle's "Arc of Justice" resurrects one of history's great lost civil rights cases to create a courtroom drama for the ages.

By Priya Jain

Oct 5, 2004 | The cover of Kevin Boyle's "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age" features a worn black-and-white photograph of what looks like a packed courtroom, with four men in the foreground looking off to the right, as if awaiting a verdict. All of them, three white and one black, wearing suits, have their faces scrubbed out, as if someone had taken an eraser to them while the photograph was still wet. That has been the state of the 80-year-old Ossian Sweet case: pretty much wiped out of American history. But by the time Boyle -- an associate professor of history best known for his books on the labor movement -- finishes reconstructing it, we have a clear, precise snapshot of an incident that belongs in our collective memory.

The story begins in 1925 Detroit, a teeming city so tight with racial tension it's ready to explode. In the heyday of the auto industry, cash-flush Detroit was "America's great boomtown." It was also the country's fourth largest city, a beacon for black Americans escaping Jim Crow in the South and immigrants fleeing depressed, postwar Europe. Five thousand seven hundred blacks lived in Detroit in 1910; by 1925, that number had swelled to 81,000. The Great Migration, as the mass movement of blacks from the South to northern cities in the early 20th century is known, made the nativists restless; by 1924, Detroit's branch of the Klu Klux Klan claimed 35,000 members.

In the middle of all this was Ossian Sweet, a doctor whose most immediate goal was to get his family out of Detroit's black ghetto. He moved them into a bungalow in a white, working-class neighborhood, and, accurately reading the boldness of this move, he brought along nine friends and a bagful of guns. The neighbors -- hundreds of them -- rioted, throwing rocks at the Sweets' house and advancing on the front door. The police officers meant to guard the Sweets against danger made no move to stop the mob. And then suddenly, someone inside the house shot out into the street, wounding one white man and killing another, and the 11 black adults, including Sweet's wife, were taken to jail and charged with first-degree murder.

Boyle's portrait of the mob's rage, and Sweet's reaction, is gripping. When Sweet opens the door, he sees "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." Sweet was prepared for this moment -- in the not-too-distant past, his colleagues had moved into white neighborhoods and had had to face similar, murderous mobs. It's hard not to ask then, what drove Sweet to do it? Why purposely walk into the eye of the storm?

Boyle devotes the first half of the book to answering this question. By moving back through the life of Ossian Sweet, he gives us a thorough treatment of the postbellum South, racial politics in the North, the formation of the first black universities, and lynchings and race riots throughout the country. Boyle's Sweet is neither a hero nor a fool; he's a product of a time in which for many blacks, moving into a white neighborhood, even if it meant facing down a mob of angry whites, was their only chance to live in comparative peace.

Boyle has a keen eye for detail and a laudable aversion to idealizing his subjects. Although his affection for Sweet is clear, he's also honest -- sometimes brutally so -- about Sweet's weaknesses. He portrays Sweet as a man of fierce pride and ambition obsessed with status and material things, the kind of person so awkwardly self-conscious that he comes across as arrogant and cold. Even as the mob rails outside his new house and rocks shatter the windows, Sweet, unsure of what to do, takes to his bed; he "first slid off his shoes so as not to scuff the comforter, and lay down in the darkness, the pistol at his side." In just this action, we see a man as hemmed in by notions of bourgeois propriety as he is terrified by what he has to do to earn respectability.

Next Page: If there were only one reason for this story, it would be to remind contemporary readers of Clarence Darrow

• View blog reactions