The Sweet Trials: A Detroit Doctor Defends His Home

In the summer of nineteen twenty-five, African American physician Dr. Ossian Sweet purchased a modest two-story bungalow on Garland Avenue in a white East Side neighborhood. What happened next became one of the defining civil rights trials of the twentieth century.

On the evening of September ninth, nineteen twenty-five, a white mob surrounded the house, hundreds of neighbors who had organized to keep Black families out of their streets. Rocks and bottles struck the windows. From inside, shots were fired into the crowd. One white man was killed and another wounded. Detroit police, who had stood watching the mob, immediately arrested Sweet, his wife Gladys, and nine others inside the house, charging all eleven with first-degree murder.

The NAACP, newly focused on building a legal defense apparatus, recognized the case as a national test of the right to self-defense in one's own home. They retained Clarence Darrow, America's most celebrated trial lawyer, to defend the defendants. The first trial, of eight of the defendants after charges against three others were dropped, ended in a hung jury after the all-white, all-male panel could not reach a verdict. In the second trial, only Henry Sweet, Ossian's younger brother who had fired a weapon, was prosecuted. Darrow's closing argument stretched across seven hours. He told the jury: the life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. Henry Sweet was acquitted. Prosecutors dropped the remaining charges.

The case pushed the NAACP to invest heavily in legal defense work, and in nineteen forty the organization established the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which, decades after the Sweet trial, argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. The house on Garland Avenue still stands. It is a National Historic Landmark.