Ossian Sweet: The House on Garland Avenue
Near Detroit, Michigan
In the summer of nineteen twenty-five, Dr. Ossian Sweet was twenty-nine years old, a physician trained at Howard University and postgraduate programs in Vienna and Paris, married to Gladys Mitchell Sweet. He purchased a house at two nine oh five Garland Avenue on Detroit's east side, in a neighborhood that was entirely white. He knew what that meant. He had grown up in Florida and had seen a man burned alive by a white mob when he was a child. He bought the house anyway.
On the night of September eighth, a crowd of several hundred white neighbors gathered in the street outside the Sweet home. They had been there the night before as well. The Detroit police were present but did not disperse the crowd. On the second night, stones were thrown at the house. Shots were then fired from inside the house. A white man in the street, Leon Breiner, was killed. A second man was wounded.
Detroit police arrested Ossian Sweet, his wife Gladys, his brother Henry, and nine other people who had been inside the house, charging all eleven with first-degree murder. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People retained Clarence Darrow, who was at that point the most famous defense attorney in America, to take the case. The first trial ended in a hung jury. In the second trial, in early nineteen twenty-six, Darrow addressed the jury on the meaning of a Black man's right to defend his own home.
Henry Sweet, who had fired one of the shots, was acquitted. The prosecution then dropped charges against the other defendants, including Ossian. The state could not prove which shot had killed Breiner, and Darrow had argued effectively that the men inside the house had been defending themselves against a mob that had every intention of driving them out by force.
The house at two nine oh five Garland Avenue still stands. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-five. Gladys Sweet, who contracted tuberculosis during her time in jail awaiting trial, died in nineteen twenty-six. She was around twenty-seven years old.
