This black doctor faced down an angry white mob storming his house — and was acquitted of murder
Ossian Sweet defended his family, and was arrested for it
In July of 1925, a young doctor named Ossian Sweet bought a house in a middle-class Detroit neighborhood. Sweet had been living with his wife’s family and their toddler daughter in cramped quarters and craved a piece of the American homeownership dream. Instead they found themselves barricaded in their own house, armed with rifles, facing down a brutal mob.
The family should have been an ideal addition to the neighborhood, except for one fact: they were black and the neighborhood was white.
During World War I, industry was booming and thousands of black workers relocated to Detroit. As the black population swelled to nearly six times its pre-war size, housing that allowed black families was extremely scarce. The families that could afford to began cautiously moving into white neighborhoods. But the Ku Klux Klan was strong in Detroit, as it was in many parts of the country. Conjuring none of the stigma it does today, the Klan slipped seamlessly into the fabric of society, organizing under “improvement associations” and “neighborhood associations” propelled by a straightforward mission: keep black families out of white neighborhoods. If bureaucratic means didn’t work, they organized mobs to chase black families from their homes. A black banker in Chicago reportedly had his home bombed nine times. In Cleveland, Washington D.C., Staten Island, and Los Angeles, mobs had terrorized black families who dared to settle in white neighborhoods. If they wouldn’t leave, the house might be burned to the ground — or worse. Arrests for these crimes were virtually unheard of.
When the neighbors learned that the Sweets planned to move in, they formed their own “improvement association.” Nearly everyone in the neighborhood attended a meeting to discuss how to root the Sweets out. Speakers rose and delivered ominous, hate-filled invectives about exactly what would happen should the black family try to move in.
Dr. Sweet was aware that his family wouldn’t be welcome. He had heard of other black families being chased from their homes, but hoped that the anger would roll over. He knew what white mobs were capable of. As a child, he had witnessed a lynching. And he had been at Howard University during the 1919 Washington D.C. race riots. He told his brother of his decision to move in, “I have to die like a man, or live like a coward.” On September 8, he notified the police the he and his family would be moving in. They stationed themselves down the street, as the Sweets, a few friends, and two interior decorators unloaded their belongings from a moving truck — including a burlap sack of guns.
Their white neighbors gathered throughout the day and remained into the night. The interior decorators, too afraid to leave, stayed the night. No one slept. No one dared to turn the lights on. Each man took a gun, stood by the window, and waited.
In the morning, the two decorators left. But the next night, the crowd was larger — and angrier. By some accounts, there were between as many as 500 people gathered in front of the home. The air was thick with humidity. Ten of Dr. Sweet’s friends were in the house that night. They waited with their guns by the windows. Then the mob surged toward the house. To Sweet, “it looked like a human sea.”
Ossian Sweet would later say, “When I opened the door and saw that mob, I realized in a way that it was that same mob that had hounded my people through its entire history. I realized my back was against the wall and I was filled with a peculiar type of fear — the fear of one who knows the history of my race.”
The mob hurled rocks and bottles through the windows. Sweet’s brother, Henry, who was a junior at Wilberforce College in Ohio, fired his gun. The police broke the fracas up. A white man, Leon Brennier, had been killed. The eleven black men were taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder.
The Sweet case appeared hopeless. Almost everyone in the neighborhood had joined an organization to block the Sweets from moving in, and now they were allied to make sure the doctor and his friends were convicted. Public opinion in Detroit was against them. Newspaper articles suggested that the Sweets had deliberately tried to provoke a riot. A historian would later say of the case, “To know the history of the Sweet case is to know the history of segregation in America.”
But then two things happened in the accused’s favor. The judge assigned to the case appeared not to be an outright racist, and the NAACP hired Clarence Darrow, the famous defense lawyer. Darrow had just won the highly publicized “Monkey Trial,” a case against Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes, who made the mistake of teaching evolution. The stakes for the Sweet case were high. As Phyllis Vine wrote in her history of the Sweet case, One Man’s Castle, “Properly defended, the case could potentially be as important to America’s twelve million blacks as it was to the eleven people awaiting trial in Detroit’s jail.”
The trouble began at jury selection. As Darrow explained, though nearly a tenth of Detroit’s population was black, there wasn’t a single black juror. And everyone who had been called expressed an unfavorable opinion of Sweet.
The prosecution called more than 50 witnesses, all of whom testified that there was no mob that night, that in fact, the streets were quite empty — a logical fallacy considering that at least those who testified were there, not to mention the fact that two blocks had been roped off near the house for an apparently nonexistent hoard. Darrow handily exposed their lies in cross examination.
The courtroom was packed. Darrow, surveying the black members of the crowd, would later write, “With strained and anxious faces they made a powerful mute appeal to the white men who seemed to be holding in their keeping the fate of an outraged and downtrodden race.” In his closing arguments, Darrow told the jury, “You are facing a problem of two races, a problem that will take centuries to solve. If I felt none of you were prejudiced, I’d have no fear. I want you to be as unprejudiced as you can be…Draw upon your imagination and think how you would feel if you fired at some black man in a black community, and then had to be tried by them.” Afterward, according to Darrow, the judge’s directions to the jury “scarcely left a chance for them to do anything but acquit.” Still, they deliberated for more than twelve hours and then announced the jury hung, which forced a mistrial.
In the second trial, the defendants were tried one at a time, beginning with Sweet’s brother, Henry, who had fired the shot killing Leon Brennier. In an unprecedented twist, he was found not guilty, and the prosecution then dropped the cases against the other men. Darrow would marvel, “Few colored men in America charged with killing white persons have ever lived to tell the tale; they have been lucky if they survived long enough to be tried in court under the forms of law and legally slaughtered.”
Darrow was hopeful that the Sweet case had set an important precedent for civil rights. “The verdict,” he wrote, “meant simply that the doctrine that a man’s house is his castle applied to the black man as well as to the white man.” But the coming years would bring brutal housing policies with housing discrimination still rampant to this day.
And while Sweet may have won the legal battle, in the subsequent years he would lose nearly everything else. His family never returned to their home, and within two years, both Sweet’s wife and daughter would be dead from tuberculosis. He married twice more and divorced both times. In 1960, after two failed bids for public office, Ossian Sweet killed himself.
This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.
History shapes the world around us — from national elections to cultural debates to marches in cities across the country. At Timeline, we spread knowledge of the past to help shape a better future. If you want to do the same, please share this and other Timeline stories and join us on Facebook and Twitter.
