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Although ready to retire, famed attorney Clarence Darrow rose to the challenge when asked to defend a black physician against a murder charge.

by John F. Wukovits

Ossian Sweet wasn’t looking for trouble when he went shopping in Detroit for a house for his young family in the spring of 1925. "He just wanted to bring up his girl in good surroundings," his brother Otis later recalled. Sweet found what he wanted in a two-story bungalow at 2905 Garland Avenue, in a lower middle-class neighborhood of small businessmen and factory workers. But when Sweet, a black doctor with a thriving practice in the city, tried to move into his new home, his efforts triggered violent protest from white neighbors and led to two remarkable trials.

Racial tension was high in Detroit that year. Henry Ford’s introduction of the five-dollar-a-day wage in 1914 had spurred an exodus of poor, black Southerners to Detroit to build automobiles. When Ford raised his rate by a dollar in 1919 the migration increased; by the mid-1920s Detroit was home to the nation’s fastest-growing black community. Whites reacted with increasing alarm. The city police department was responsible for the deaths of roughly 50 blacks between 1923 and 1925. Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan, buttressed by a similar movement north of poor southern whites, became involved in city politics and fielded a candidate in the 1925 mayoral race.

It was in this setting that Ossian Sweet started a family and career. The grandson of an Alabama slave, Sweet worked his way through Howard University Medical School in Washington, D.C., before opening a practice in Detroit in 1921. After marrying Gladys Mitchell the following year, Sweet treated his wife to a lengthy European honeymoon and studied in Vienna and in Paris under the renowned Madame Curie. Following the birth of a daughter, the Sweets returned to Detroit in 1924 and moved temporarily into the home of Mrs. Sweet’s mother.

Sweet could afford a decent home for his family, away from the cramped, unhealthy conditions of Detroit’s "Paradise Valley." Where he had witnessed race-related violence in his Florida home town and in Washington, Sweet did not initially anticipate trouble. His mother-in-law had lived peacefully in a partially integrated area for many years, and the owners of the house on Garland Avenue–the Smiths–were a white woman and a black man. Mr. Smith, however, was apparently so light-skinned that his neighbors never realized he was black.

Sweet soon saw signs of trouble. First the Smiths received threatening warnings not to sell their house to a black family. In July, a local group called the Waterworks Improvement Association was formed to "render constructive social and civic service" to the neighborhood. The innocent-sounding name hid the group’s real purpose, which was to keep the area free of blacks.

Other incidents that summer illustrated the increase in racial tension in the city. Another black physician named A.L. Turner was greeted by loud demonstrations when he moved into an all-white neighborhood. The police responded by directing that area’s "improvement association" to deliver Turner’s furniture back to his old house. Meanwhile, a crowd of angry whites pelted the home of a black waiter named John Fletcher with lumps of coal. Gunfire erupted from within the house, wounding a white teenager. Fletcher was arrested, but the charges were later dropped.

Resolving to "die a man or live a coward," Sweet informed the Detroit police department that he would move into his new home on September 8. He was not reassured by the department’s reluctant promise to protect his rights, and asked his brothers, Henry and Otis, and several of their friends to stay with him for a few days. He left his young daughter in the care of Gladys’ mother for the time being. Among the items Sweet brought with him for the move were nine guns and a stockpile of ammunition.

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