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Ossian Sweet |
| Ossian Sweet | |
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| Born | 10 October 1895 Orlando, Florida, USA |
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| Died | 20 March 1960 (aged 64) Detroit, Michigan, USA |
| Fields | Internal medicine |
| Institutions | Dunbar Hospital |
| Alma mater | Howard University Wilberforce University |
Ossian Sweet (IPA: [ŏshʼən swēt]) (30 October 1895 - 20 March 1960) was an American physician. He is most noted for his self-defense of his newly-purchased home against a white mob attempting to force him out in Detroit, Michigan in 1925, and the acquittal on murder charges of his family by an all-white jury after a famous trial.
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Sweet was born in Orlando, Florida on October 30th 1895. He was the second son to Dora Devaughn and Henry Sweet. Sadly eight days after Ossian's birth the eldest son Oscar passed away. In 1898 Henry Sweet was able to buy land in Bartow, Florida and as a child Ossian always helped a lot around the farm by caring for the animals, and eventually plowing. At age five, he witnessed the lynching of Fred Rochelle, as he hid in the bushes and watched Rochelle be burned. The lynching was the most terrifying moment in Ossian's life, and scarred his memory forever. Ossian's Parents knew that he needed to get out of the South and move north in order to be safe and to obtain an education. He left Florida in September 1909. Ossian's parents decided that he would attend Wilberforce University because they believed that the school shared important family values. But, with tuition being$118 a year, Ossian took work shoveling snow and stoking furnaces before he started at Wilberforce University He earned his undergraduate degree at Wilberforce University where Sweet earned a "traditional education, rooted in liberal arts" and had a science degree(Arc of Justice). He was charter member Delta chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi and studied medicine at Howard Universityone of the two black medical schools at the time.
Even with his extensive medical knowledge, Dr. Sweet encountered difficulty finding work at a hospital due to his ethnicity. But his summers waiting at Detroit restaurants instilled him with the knowledge of Black Bottom's need for medical care. Black Bottom was an overpopulated black ghetto in which migrant workers from the south made their home during the great migration. This overpopulation and steady influx of migrants, who lacked of medical care amid cramped quarters, caused diseases and created an imminent threat to life. According to Kevin Boyle in "Arc of Justice" "Rudimentary care would have saved some of them. But Black Bottom didn't get even that." Sweet saw this as an opportunity to practice his medicine. He gave $100 to a pharmacy, "Palace Drugs", in exchange for office space. His first client Elizabeth Riley who feared she had contracted tetanus because her jaw grew stiff. Sweet was able to diagnose that it was not an infection, but rather a dislocated jaw. He reset the bone which helped spread a good word about his practice throughout the neighborhood.
After marrying Gladys who was from a prominent middle class black family, he left his practice to study further in Vienna and then in Paris, where he attended lectures by Madame Curie. While he did not receive a degree for this study and extended stay in Europe, it brought him the prestige he sought to further exhibit himself as part of the "talented tenth" of black society. In Paris he was also able to experience what life would be like without prejudices. For the first time, the Sweets were treated as equals to whites. His only experience with prejudice while in Europe was at an American Hospital in which he donated a relatively large amount of money, given his finances. When seeking to reserve space for his wife to deliver their baby they promptly refused on the grounds that the white Americans in the hospital did not want to be mixed with black patients. This infuriated him, and reminded Sweet of the world to which he would return.
Returning to Detroit from France in 1924, he started to work at Dunbar Hospital, Detroit's first black hospital. Having saved enough money, he moved his family in 1925 from his wife's parent's home in an all-white neighborhood to 2905 Garland Street, another all-white neighborhood at Garland and Charlevoix. The house on Garland, known as the Ossian H. Sweet House, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In the following days, Sweet's house was repeatedly surrounded by white mobs, encouraged by the "Waterworks Improvement Association," which gathered outside Sweet's home to force him to move from the neighborhood. On September 8th 1925, the first white mob of neighbors surrounded the Sweet's house. There were any where between one hundred and two hundred men, women, and children watching the Sweet's house. According the Kevin Boyle's "Arc of Justice" a friend of Ossians asked the police department to send officers to the house on Garland Avenue to provide protection to the Sweets Except, during this time period a white officer was not going to get in the middle of an angry white mob and an African American family. The Sweet family waited in fear that night. Then the next night, at around 10 p.m. on Thursday, September 9, 1925, Leon Breiner, one member of the mob, was shot dead, and another was injured. The shots were fired from Sweet's house. These events occurred after everyone in the Sweet's house witnessed the mob throwing rocks at the house and breaking a window on the top floor. Boyle described it at "Stones were raining down from across the street, smashing into the lawn, crashing onto the painted wooden floor." Shortly after the shots went off everyone in the Sweet's house was arrested and put into the back of a paddy wagon.
All eleven occupants of the house (Sweet, his wife Gladys, two brothers and a number of friends who were helping Sweet to defend his home) were arrested and tried for murder by a jury presided over by young judge Frank Murphy. The prosecution was represented by Robert Toms.1
With assistance from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the defense (headed by Clarence Darrow, assisted by Arthur Garfield Hays and Walter M. Nelson) successfully construed the fear that had assailed Sweet and his friends, and also asked whether the jury of 12 whites would be able to forsake their racial differences and give a "Negro" a fair trial. The first jury was unable to form a verdict after 46 hours of deliberations, and a mistrial was declared.
The defense then elected to hold eleven separate trials. Henry Sweet, Ossian's younger brother who had admitted to actually firing the gun, was tried first and defended again by Darrow with Detroit lawyer Thomas Chawke replacing Hays. He was acquitted after a deliberation of less than four hours. Judge Murphy's instructions to the jury are available.2 The prosecution then dropped the charges against the remaining ten defendants.
The two closing arguments of Clarence Darrow from the first and second trials are available, and show how he learned from the first trial and reshaped his remarks.3
The trial was presided over by the Honorable Frank Murphy, who went on to become Governor of Michigan and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.4
Sweet's later life was troubled. His daughter Iva died at the age of two in 1926, and his wife died soon after, both from tuberculosis contracted while Gladys was in prison. Breiner's widow sued for US$150,000, but the case was dismissed. Sweet ran for office four times, but lost each time. He remarried twice, but both marriages ended in divorce. He committed suicide in 1960.
The trial is memorialized in two official Michigan Historical Markers:
Additionally, there is a "Michigan Legal Milestones"6 plaque erected by the State Bar of Michigan in the first floor of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in Detroit.
Kevin Boyle's chronicle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age was adapted into a play. Mr. Boyle was honored by the Detroit City Council for The Sweet Trials.7 *The Sweet Trials: Malice Aforethought is a play written by Arthur Beer, based on the trials of Ossian and Henry Sweet, and derived from Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice.8
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