Ossian Sweet

Biography Ossian Haven Sweet was born in 1895 in Orlando, Florida as the second son of Henry Sweet and Dora DeVaughn. In 1898, his father, Henry, bought a farm in Bartow, the county seat of Polk County, Florida, and moved there with his entire family.

Wilberforce University was established in 1855 by a collaboration of white and black Methodists. By the early 1860s, the Cincinnati Methodist Church had withdrawn support due to demands of the Civil War. The school struggled financially after most of its paying students, mixed-race children of white Southern planters, were withdrawn. The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) paid the debt and took over ownership and operation of the college.

Sweet attended Wilberforce for eight years. During the first four years, he studied in its prep school, learning Latin, history, mathematics, English, music, drawing, philosophy, social and introductory science, and foreign language (probably French) to prepare for college. Sweet took work in shoveling snow, stoking furnaces, washing dishes, waiting tables, and working as a hotel bellhop to pay the $118 for his tuition and books. At Wilberforce, he became a charter member of the Delta chapter of the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree at age 25. After Wilberforce, Sweet attended Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., where he earned his medical accreditation.

Red Summer In July 1919, Sweet was attending Howard University when he witnessed the Washington, D.C. race riot. The capital was among 20 cities that had outbreaks of racial violence in the so-called Red Summer of 1919. These resulted from postwar social tensions and competition for jobs and housing as World War I veterans returned home. There was little help for veterans trying to re-enter the workforce, and both whites and blacks resented their difficulties. Rumors of a white woman being attacked by blacks set off a mob that went to a black neighborhood and attacked people on the street. For the next three days, the riot flared up in different areas of the city, with white men, including many in military uniform, pulling black people from streetcars or attacking them on the street. Black civilians armed themselves and fought back. The riot resulted in the deaths of ten white people, including two police officers, and five black people. It was one of the first racial riots in which more white people died than black. Some 150 persons were wounded, 50 of them severely. President Woodrow Wilson called up the National Guard to suppress the violence, but a fierce rainstorm helped end the mob's enthusiasm as well.

For safety, Sweet and classmates stayed in their Chi Delta Mu fraternity house, four blocks from one area of fighting on H Street NE. He and his fraternity brothers were afraid to go out. Earlier while walking down the street, he had seen a white gang stop a passing streetcar, pull a black passenger to the sidewalk, and "beat him mercilessly". This sight stayed with him all his life. These covenants were intended primarily to exclude lower-class families and racial and ethnic minorities from certain neighborhoods, in order to preserve white racial homogeneity in a neighborhood. Covenants sometimes explicitly stated that the property could be sold only to a white buyer, but in other cases, they had restrictions associated with poorer buyers: multiple families could not live on the property, the home could not be divided into rental units, etc. By creating covenants that applied to low-income families, ethnic immigrants and racial minorities were also targeted, since they were frequently restricted to lower paying, blue-collar jobs.

In the case of Ossian Sweet, restrictive covenants aimed at low-income families would not prevent him from buying a house because he earned a doctor's salary. However, residents used restrictive covenants primarily to prevent racial integration of their white neighborhoods. If restrictive covenants did not prevent minorities from buying properties, white residents found other ways to block such people from moving in. Boyle argues that racial discrimination in Detroit's housing market was present but somewhat avoidable until approximately 1923 or 1924, when local real estate agents organized to coordinate their discriminatory practices.

As September passed, life in the Wayne County Jail became slightly more comfortable for Sweet and the others. They received a steady stream of visitors, including Sweet's father, the elder Henry Sweet. On October 6, Gladys Sweet was released on bail provided by friends of her parents, to the relief of her husband.

In early October, the NAACP invited Clarence Darrow to join the Sweets' defense team, alongside Mahoney. and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Arthur Beer, wrote the play Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials, to explore the court cases. Initially produced in 1987 at University of Detroit Mercy, the play was revived in 2007 for its 20-year anniversary. Michigan Legal Milestones placed a commemorative plaque honoring the legacy of the Sweet Trials in the Wayne County Courthouse, now known as the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in Detroit. Kevin Boyle's history Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), was a bestseller. It won the National Book Award for non-fiction and was a finalist that year for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.