Detroit, 1925: A Black family moved into an all-white neighborhood. The next night, a mob came.
What happened to Dr. Ossian Sweet and his family is an American tragedy
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I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the old house in Detroit. The narrow steps were bare and white, the paint chipping. At the top of the stairs, I doubled back through a tight corridor to the front of the house into a small room with a bed, a bureau and not much more. Three windows were covered by thin curtains and looked out onto Garland Avenue below.
It was in this room and two adjoining rooms one steamy late summer evening in September 1925 that a group of Black men were huddled. They were all heavily armed. Outside, a howling angry mob of white men, women and children gathered and was growing increasingly agitated as the night wore on. They were enraged that a Black family — Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife, Gladys — had just moved into the house in their all-white neighborhood.
Dr. Ossian Sweet, Photo credit: Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Libraryhttps://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A143138
Gladys Sweet, photo credit: Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library https://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A144990
The house at 2905 Garland Avenue in Detroit's East Village neighborhood is a nice, little house. The rooms are small but there's an open, comfortable feel to the place. The big windows facing Garland Avenue and the side street, Charlevoix Avenue, allow the interior to be bathed in cheerful sunlight.
But this house is haunted. It’s haunted by ghosts.
Photo credit: Wayne State University, Walter Reuther Library
In the spring of 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet purchased the house from its white owner. The Sweets held off on moving in until early September. The Sweets weren't especially daunted by the prospect of being the first Black family in the neighborhood. Gladys was a native of Detroit. She had grown up in a white neighborhood without any problems. What they didn't realize was that Detroit, like other Northern cities, had changed.
"He and his wife moved into that house for all the ordinary reasons people move into a house," said Kevin Boyle, a Northwestern University professor and author of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Arc of Justice, a gripping tale of the events of 1925. "It was the nicest house on the block and he could afford it. They had a toddler. It was kitty-corner to a grade school. It was an easy drive to where his practice was."
But that summer, five different Black families who tried to integrate Detroit neighborhoods were forced from their new homes. One of them, an esteemed physician, barely escaped. In recent years, Detroit had become a stronghold of the KKK. The police department was riddled with Klan members. And Detroit's neighborhoods had become rigidly segregated with Black people mostly confined to a part of town where housing was cramped, crowded, overpriced and substandard. Dr. Sweet wanted out of there and the Garland Avenue home was exactly what he had in mind.
The trouble began brewing as soon as the Sweets went to see it.
"Neighbors had seen them when they were looking at the house," Boyle told me. "It triggered this panic because White people feared all the things that White people feared when the color line is broken in their neighborhood. It's all tangled up in property values and racism."
Desperate, neighbors formed an organization, the Waterworks Park Improvement Association, to try to figure out a way to stop them. Racist rhetoric was spewed at a rally attended that June by hundreds. But they failed to stop the sale from going through.
The Sweets moved into their dream home on September 8. That night, a crowd of several hundred whites gathered in front. The police were there, too. Someone threw a few rocks at the house around midnight, but nothing worse. It was enough to alarm the Sweets. They asked some of their friends and two of Dr. Sweet's brothers to come to the house the next night, with weapons.
That night, a menacing crowd once again gathered out front. The men inside deployed to the top floor rooms. Another friend arrived to join them and Dr. Sweet opened the front door to let him in.
"And there it was," Boyle wrote in Arc of Justice, "the scene he'd dreaded all his life, the moment when he was facing a sea of white faces made grotesque by unreasoned, unrestrained hate -- for his race, for his people, for him. Garland was a swirl of light and noise and motion.... The people on the other side of the street were screaming, 'Here's n****s!" " 'There they go!' 'Get them! Get them!'"
Suddenly, the house came under a barrage of hurled rocks, stones and bricks. Windows were broken.
Gunfire erupted from the second floor, a volley of as many as 30 shots. One bystander was wounded. Another man was fatally wounded. The police rushed into the Sweets' home and arrested everyone, eleven people altogether, and took them down to police headquarters.
Daniel Baxter in the room from which the fatal shot was fired
Ossian Sweet was born in the small town of Bartow, Florida. His father, whose parents had been slaves in East Texas, farmed his own land on the Black side of town. In 1901, when Ossian was 5 or 6, he witnessed something that would scar him for life. As he hid, he watched a white mob grab a Blackman, pour gasoline on and set him fire. He never forgot it.
Ossian Sweet Photo credit: Wayne State University, Walter Reuther Library
A few days after the incident on Garland Avenue, James Weldon Johnson, head of the NAACP, happened to come across a small item about it in a local newspaper in New York City. The NAACP decided to help provide legal assistance to the defendants, all of whom stood accused of first-degree murder. They already had lawyers -- good ones -- but they were Black. The NAACP knew that was a recipe for disaster with what would certainly be an all-white jury.
"He (Johnson) didn't want a Black man arguing for the right of a Black man to kill a white man in Detroit in 1925 and assume you're going to get them off," Boyle said. "So they set off to find a white lawyer and no one would take the case. Because it was a loser of a case."
But then someone had the idea to ask Clarence Darrow, the most renowned defense lawyer in the country, his fame at its peak following the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee which had been his last case which had riveted the nation. Darrow agreed.
Henry Sweet (Ossian's brother) far left, and his legal defense team. Clarence Darrow, far right Photo credit: Wayne State University, Walter Reuther Library
Boyle said, "He loved turning the law into a massive critique of what he saw as the illusions of American society, to strip away the nation's illusion. Well, there's no greater illusion in America than white supremacy. For Darrow, that's what this case was about."
Under Michigan law, you could use deadly force to defend against a mob if you had a well-reasoned fear for your safety. The statute defined a mob very specifically. Fifteen or more armed people, or 30 unarmed people. The prosecution in the Sweet case set out to prove there were only a handful of people outside the house, milling about harmlessly.
But witness and police accounts wilted under intense cross-examination by Darrow and his team. A newspaper reporter and others testified that there were hundreds of people in the crowd.
Dr. Sweet was called to the stand.
"When I opened the door and saw the mob," he said. "I realized I was facing the same mob that hounded my people through its entire history. In my mind, I was pretty confident of what I was up against, with my back against the wall. I was filled with a peculiar fear; the fear of one that knows the history of my race."
The jury was unable to reach a verdict. There would be a retrial, or rather 11 separate trials next for each of the individual defendants. Ossian's younger brother, Henry, who had told police interrogators he fired into the crowd that night would go first.
Jury at first trial, Photo credit: Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, https//:digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A144990
Old Wayne County Courthouse, where the two trials were held
This time, the jury -- again all-white -- did reach a verdict. Not guilty. Afterward, the district attorney decided not to prosecute the other 10 cases.
Earlier this week, I visited the house and its current owner, Daniel Baxter, who showed me around. Baxter's father bought the house from Dr. Sweet in 1958. When his mother died in 2018, he inherited the property. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Dr. Sweet and the house.
"Was he a great man?" Baxter said, repeating my query. "Whether he was a great man or not, what he did was great. What he did was noble. What he did was sacrificial. They don't say a lot about Gladys. Gladys was tough."*
Baxter got a National Park Service grant to renovate the house. He plans to turn it into a museum.
The story does not end with Henry Sweet's acquittal and dropping of murder charges against the others.
Within a year, both Gladys Sweet and the couple's infant daughter contracted tuberculosis. The family was convinced Gladys got it during her pre-trial jail detention and that she gave it to little Iva. Iva died in 1926 at age 2. Gladys died of TB in 1928. She was 27.
Gladys Sweet
Photo credit: Wayne State University, Walther Reuther Library
Dr. Sweet moved back into the closed-up house in 1928 and lived there into the 1950s before falling so far behind in property taxes, he had to sell it.
Baxter remembers a story his dad once told him.
"It was late in the evening and he was about to close shop (he owned a cleaners) and Dr. Sweet comes in," Baxter recalled. "They go in back and get a bottle, They start having a conversation and in the middle of the conversation, Dr. Sweet's whole countenance changes and he (his father) said, 'What's going on, Doc?' He says his eyes just glazed up and he said, 'I wish I never bought that house. I hate that I ever bought it.'"
In 1960, Dr. Sweet took his own life. He was 64.
Dr. Ossian Sweet Photo credit: Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, https//:digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3144596
Professor Boyle, the author of Arc of Justice, told me, "While Darrow won the battle, it had no effect on stopping the solidification of segregation. This system of segregation bulldozed right past this verdict."
Today, nearly a century since the events of September 8, 1925, housing segregation persists throughout much of America.
"No one's drinking out of separate fountains anymore," Boyle said. "But we still live in this hyper-segregated society in terms of neighborhoods, in terms of cities."
In 2018, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley ranked American cities from most segregated to least. At the top of the list -- the most segregated -- was Detroit.
* During her first interrogation by police, Gladys Sweet was asked, "Why did you go up there?" She replied, "It is my perfect right to move where I please."