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An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly,shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes.And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet'sstory, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times. Arc of Justice is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Author Notes

Kevin Boyle is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

History professor Boyle (The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968) has brilliantly rescued from obscurity a fascinating chapter in American history that had profound implications for the rise of the Civil Rights movement. With a novelist's craft, Boyle opens with a compelling prologue portraying the migration of African-Americans in the 1920s to the industrial cities of the North, where they sought a better life and economic opportunity. This stirring section, with echoes of Dickens's Hard Times, sets the stage for the ordeal of Dr. Ossian Sweet, who moves with his young family to a previously all-white Detroit neighborhood. When the local block association incites a mob to drive Sweet back to the ghetto, he gathers friends and acquaintances to defend his new home with a deadly arsenal. The resulting shooting death of a white man leads to a sensational murder trial, featuring the legendary Clarence Darrow, fresh from the Scopes Monkey trial, defending Sweet, his family and their associates. This popular history, which explores the politics of racism and the internecine battles within the nascent Civil Rights movement, grips right up to the stunning jaw-dropper of an ending. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Sept. 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Review

A murder case in Detroit lies at the heart of labor scholar Boyle's wide-ranging examination of race relations early in the 20th century. One September evening in 1925, physician Ossian Sweet and his young family spent their first night in their new home on Garland Avenue, a previously all-white block four miles east of downtown. The very next evening, a crowd formed across the street from the Sweets' bungalow, which now sheltered some volunteer defenders. Rocks were thrown, shots were fired from the house, and a white man lay dead. Boyle (History/Ohio State) meticulously tells the story of the Sweets, one family among the many who participated in the grand effort to do away with Jim Crow laws. The '20s were the decade of the New Negro, the Harlem Renaissance, and the rise of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The KKK's Invisible Empire spread in response to black militancy, but the NAACP also grew, thanks to remarkable activists like James Weldon Johnson and William White. The Great Migration brought strivers by the thousands from oppression in Dixie to unexpected prejudice in the urban North, including the Motor City. Born and raised in Detroit, Boyle depicts the politics and people of the industrial metropolis, vividly evoking life in the city's Black Bottom ghetto. He presents a balanced, considered portrait of Sweet, born in rural Florida, a graduate of Wilberforce University and Howard Medical School, and of other players in the drama. Along the way, he establishes an early tension that, after instruction in some African-American history, culminates in a classic courtroom drama starring the Great Defender himself, Clarence Darrow. Told with exemplary care and intelligence, this narrative chronicles inflammatory times in black and white America and pays tribute to those heroes who struggled to get Old Jim Crow where he lived. The way history should be written. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

In the steamy summer of 1925, Detroit, like many northern cities, was in the throes of rising tension from racism as native-born whites, immigrants, and blacks, drawn by the flourishing automobile industry, jockeyed for jobs and housing in the teeming metropolis. In the jazz-age era of changing social mores and rising expectations, Dr. Ossian Sweet, grandson of a slave, attempted to move into a working-class white neighborhood. His neighbors, fanned into a panic by avaricious real-estate brokers and the growing presence of the Ku Klux Klan, threaten Sweet and his family with violent eviction. In self-defense, Sweet and his friends arm themselves and end up killing a member of the mob. The murder indictment of Sweet, his wife, and their defenders attracts Clarence Darrow as defense attorney and the newly organized NAACP, which was in the midst of a national campaign against racial restrictions in housing. Boyle, a history professor, brings immediacy and drama to the social and economic factors that ignited racial violence, provoked the compelling court case, and set in motion the civil rights struggle. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2004 Booklist

Library Journal Review

Detroit native Boyle (history, Ohio State Univ.) re-creates the racial thinking and tensions that produced the politics, prosecution, and personal tragedy of People v. Ossian Sweet. The 1925 Michigan murder case tried a black physician for shooting and killing a white man in a mob trying to run him out of the home he and his wife had just bought in a previously all-white neighborhood just outside Detroit. Against images of a 10,000-strong KKK rally on Detroit's west side, Boyle makes the Sweet episode a tableau for U.S. justice and race relations. He sketches the time, the place, and the major players, from Sweet to local politicians in a hot mayoral race to NAACP leaders, who hired legendary trial lawyer Clarence Darrow and cast Sweet as a symbol in a crusade against residential racial segregation. This fact-filled, people-focused, readable work complements the growing literature on race in Detroit (e.g., Phyllis Vine's One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow and the Defense of the American Dream) and in 20th-century U.S. urban development.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Prologue: America: 1925	p. 1
1 Where Death Waits	p. 13
2 Ain't no Slavery no More	p. 44
3 Migration	p. 70
4 Uplift me, Pride	p. 102
5 White Houses	p. 133
6 The Letter of Your Law	p. 170
7 Freedmen, Sons of God, Americans	p. 197
8 The Prodigal Son	p. 229
9 Prejudice	p. 260
10 Judgment Day	p. 300
Epilogue: Requiescam	p. 337
Notes	p. 347
Acknowledgments	p. 397
Index	p. 403

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