Clarence Darrow and the Right to Defend Your Home

In September of nineteen twenty-five, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family into a house at twenty-nine oh five Garland Avenue in a white neighborhood of Detroit. Sweet was a Black physician who had trained in Vienna and Paris and worked in Detroit's Black Bottom community. He knew what moving into that neighborhood would mean. He brought eleven people with him.

White crowds gathered outside the house on consecutive nights. On the second night, shots were fired from inside the house. A white man in the crowd, Leon Breiner, was killed. Ossian Sweet, his brother Henry, and nine others inside the house were charged with murder.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People made the Sweet case a national priority and hired Clarence Darrow to lead the defense. Darrow was sixty-eight years old and had just come from the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. He argued the case as what it was: a man defending his home and his family against a mob. Two trials followed. In the second, Henry Sweet was acquitted by an all-white jury on grounds of self-defense. The judge's instructions to the jury acknowledged that the crowd gathered outside had been threatening.

The legal victory was real. Henry Sweet was free, and the precedent that self-defense applied regardless of the racial composition of the threatening crowd was established. What the legal victory could not provide was a neighborhood. The Sweet family was driven from the Garland Avenue house within two years by continued threats and harassment. The restrictive covenants that prevented Black property ownership were not ruled unconstitutional until nineteen forty-eight.

The house still stands. It is a Michigan State Historic Site.