As part of the Great Migration, Ossian Sweet managed to transform from being just two generations away from slavery in the American South to becoming a respected physician in Detroit in the 1920s. He originally established his practice and found a home in Black Bottom, a lower-economic section of Detroit that was home mainly to blacks and immigrants. Success allows Sweet and his wife to move into a new house in 1925 located in a middle-class neighborhood. The Sweets will become the only black residents in that section of town. This does not go over well with his neighbors and the mere expectation of their presence creates an atmosphere of racially charged emotions among the bigoted whites.
The Great Migration of descendants of slaves from rural areas of the South into the big urban centers of the North has been creating a long-simmering racial tension felt throughout Detroit. These tensions are personified in the race for mayor pitting a working-class Polish-American candidate against an opponent openly backed by the Ku Klux Klan. The division of support among these two candidates will later prove essential to helping Dr. Sweet.
On September 8, 1925, the Sweets moved into their new home. Intensely aware of the potential for violence this will instigate, Dr. Sweet requests police protection. Intensely aware of the history of police protection of black families. Dr. Sweet also gathers many friends, weapons, and ammunition as a backup plan. The very next night, September 9, a menacing mob descends upon the Sweet home, armed with rocks. They prove themselves unafraid of using the rocks since, as Dr. Sweet expected, police officers stationed outside his house make no serious effort to disperse them. As projectiles rain bitterly against the house, shots are fired from inside the house. Two men fall dead. They are both white.
The DA immediately files murder charges against literally everyone who was inside the house at the time, including Gladys, Dr. Sweet’s wife. Upon news of the indictment, the NAACP swoops in to draw attention to the inequality of this story in the biggest and most dramatic way possible: they hire the most famous lawyer in America, Clarence Darrow. Darrow, a white man who joins a team of black lawyers, has already represented the defendants in two different “Trials of the Century.” Although already halfway to becoming a legend, it is worth noting that Darrow failed to successfully defend his clients in both of those cases. The point of hiring Darrow is not necessarily legal brilliance in the courtroom, however, but selling newspapers to cast the Sweet case as the rule rather than the exception when it came to justice for minorities in America.
The prosecution unwittingly helps their case when the DA tries to argue that the very fact of moving into the neighborhood was an act designed by Sweet to provoke racial tension by outraging his white neighbors. Furthermore, the prosecution also insists that there had never even been a mob outside the house in the first place. A unanimous verdict of not guilty is decided by the jury for all defendants except Dr. Sweet, his brother Henry, and a man named Leonard Morse. This inability to reach a decision therefore results in a hung jury, forcing the prosecution to re-file charges. They also make the decision to try the defendants separately rather than as a group, beginning with Henry, Dr. Sweet’s brother. Eight months later, Henry is found not guilty, and the DA makes the decision not to pursue trials for the other ten defendants.
The Sweet case is presented against a backdrop that explores the history of the Sweet family’s rise from slavery and their battle against systemic racism over multiple generations and across the North/south divide. In addition, the author also explores the complicated politics of Detroit which divides sympathy for the Sweet case along not just racial lines, but ethnic lines. The success of the attorneys in picking white jurors that ultimately fail to convict any black defendant is presented as being inextricably linked to those jurors being mostly from lower-class immigrant populations who were themselves experienced with systemic prejudice and discrimination.
Dr. Sweet finally moves into his house a few years after the trial but, ironically, winds up selling it and moving back to Black Bottom. Tragically, both Dr. Sweet’s wife and daughter—as well as his brother Henry—would all contract tuberculosis and be dead before the end of the decade. In 1960, Ossian Sweet took his own life by shooting himself to death at the age of sixty-four.
