If I thought any of you had any opinion about the guilt of my clients, I wouldn't worry, because that might be changed. What I'm worried about is prejudice. They are harder to change. They come with your mother's milk and stick like the color of the skin. I know that if these defendants had been a white group defending themselves from a colored mob, they never would have been arrested or tried. My clients are charged with murder, but they are really charged with being black.
--Clarence Darrow, 11/24/25.

The automobile and manufacturing boom that began in Detroit about 1915 made the city a magnet for blacks fleeing the economic stagnation of the South. In the decade from 1915 to 1925, Detroit's black population grew more than tenfold, from 7,000 to 82,000. A severe housing shortage developed, as the city's compact black district could not accommodate all the new arrivals.

Blacks brave enough to purchase or rent homes in previously all-white neighborhoods faced intimidation and violence. The spring and summer of 1925 saw several ugly housing-related incidents. In April, 5000 people crowded in front of a home on Northfield Avenue, throwing rocks and threatening to burn the house down. The house is being rented by blacks, someone in the crowd explained to police arriving at the scene. Two months later, Dr. Alexander Turner, a black physician, purchased an expensive brick home on Spokane Avenue. Minutes after the Turner's moving van arrived at his new home, an angry crowd gathered. Windows shattered as brick, potatoes and other missiles were hurled at the home. Within hours, two white men--from an organization called the Tireman Avenue Improvement Association--entered Turner's home and asked, Will you sell the property back to us? Fearing for his life, Turner agreed to sell. The next month, John Fletcher and his family were the targets of mob violence. The Fletchers had just sat down to a meal in their new home on Stoepel Avenue when they were spotted through a window by a passing white woman. The woman began to yell, Niggers live there! Niggers live there! Soon a crowd of 4000 had gathered. Some in the crowd yelled, Lynch them! Chunks of coke smashed through windows. Two shots rang out from the Fletcher's home. One struck a teenager in the thigh. Police arrested the Fletchers--they would move out the next day.

It was in this violent summer of 1925 that a black doctor named Ossian Sweet purchased a home at 2905 Garland, in an all-white middle-class neighborhood. Although Sweet originally planned to move his family into the new home in July, he postponed the move for two months in the hopes that racial tensions might ease. They didn't.

On July 12, 1925, the Detroit Free Press carried a paid announcement:

To maintain the high standard of the residential district between Jefferson and Mack Avenues, a meeting has been called by the Waterworks Improvement Association for Thursday night in the Howe School Auditorium. Men and women of the district, which includes Cadillac, Hurburt, Garland, St. Clair, and Harding Avenues, are asked to attend in self-defense.

Two days later, seven hundred white residents of the district crammed into the Howe School Auditorium to discuss the rumored move of a black family into 2905 Garland. The principal speaker for the meeting was a representative from the Tireman Association, the group that had successfully driven Dr. Turner from his new home the month before. The loudest cheer of the evening came in response to the speaker's contention, Where the nigger shows his head, the white must shoot.

Despite being aware of the danger, Dr. Sweet decided to move his family into his Garland Avenue home on September 8. Ossian Sweet explained his decision to his brother: I have to die

like a man or live a coward. Before moving in, Sweet prepared himself for the mob he expected to face. He bought nine guns and enough ammunition for all of them. He notified Detroit police of his planned move and asked for protection. He left his infant daughter at his wife's mother's home. Finally, he arranged to have his younger brothers, Henry and Otis, as well as some of their friends, join him and his wife Gladys for their first perilous night on Garland Avenue.

The night of September 8 passed without serious incident. A crowd of 100 to 150 people remained in front of the Sweet house for much of the night, but except for one barrage of rocks thrown against the house around 3:00 A.M., no violence occurred. As one of the occupants of the Sweet house departed the next morning, one member of the mob still in front of the home told him, The crowd had a meeting last night at the confectionery store....They say you better get out of here tonight.

Hearing the report of possible violence, Ossian Sweet recruited three young friends join them for the night of September 9.

The next evening was hot. Gladys Sweet worked in the kitchen preparing a meal of roast pork, sweet potatoes and mustard greens. Ossian Sweet and his acquaintances played cards. Someone in the house exclaimed, My God, look at the people! The Sweets looked out through their windows and a screen door to see a swelling crowd--filling the nearby steelyard, the space around a grocery store, the alley, the porches of nearby homes. According to the Sweets, stones began flying. They were gripped with fear. Around 8 o'clock a taxi cab pulled up in front of the Sweet home. Ossian's brother Otis and a friend emerged from the cab to hear cries of Niggers! Niggers! Get the damn niggers! As he opened the door to let them in, Ossian Sweet said later, the whole situation filled me with an appalling fear--a fear that no one could comprehend but a Negro, and that Negro one who knew the history behind his people.

The Sweets pulled down the blinds and waited. Rocks hit the house. One smashed through an upstairs window. At 8:25, a fusillade of shots rang out from the upper floor and back porch of the Sweet home. One of the bullets struck thirty-three-year-old Leon Breiner in the back as he stood on the porch of 2914 Garland, talking to friends. Breiner's last words were, Boys, they've shot me. Police covered Breiner with a blanket and took him away. Nearby, another man, Eric Houghberg, lay with a bullet wound to the leg.

Six policeman (who had been present at the house at the time of the shooting) entered the Sweet home, flung up all the shades, turned on all the lights, and arrested the eleven occupants. At police headquarters, the Sweets and their house guests were told for the first time that a man had been killed and a boy wounded. Each of the arrested persons was interviewed separately. They gave wildly different accounts of events. Some claimed to have been sleeping at the time of the shooting; one claimed to have been taking a bath. Ossian Sweet admitted having distributed a gun to each male occupant, while some of those interviewed denied any knowledge of guns. At about 3:30 A.M., an assistant prosecutor informed them that he planned to recommend first degree murder warrants against all eleven.

On September 16, at a preliminary hearing, Judge John Faust denied bail for all defendants. Following the hearing, thirty-five-year-old Judge Frank Murphy, the presiding judge of Recorder's Court, assigned himself to the trial of the Sweet case. Murphy explained that he took the case because every judge on this bench is afraid....they think its dynamite. He also admitted to a more self-serving reason for wanting the trial: [The other judges] don't realize this is the opportunity of a lifetime to demonstrate sincere

liberalism and judicial integrity at a time when liberalism is coming into its own. Murphy set October 30 as the date for the start of the trial.

Meanwhile, efforts were underway to put together a first-rate defense team. After learning of the mass arrest in Detroit, the NAACP had sent Walter White, its assistant secretary, to Michigan on a fact-finding mission. After completing his assignment, White returned to New York where he met with Arthur Garfield Hays, a noted civil rights attorney, and Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense attorney of the time, and urged them to take the Sweet case. It didn't take much urging.

Darrow and Hays arrived in Detroit on October 12. They went to the Detroit jail, were ushered up two flights of stairs, and in a small, poorly lit room with a table and broken chairs, met their clients for the first time. Hays described the clients reaction to their visit as being cheered, but not hopeful.

Darrow and Hays--according to Hays' account--concluded that the only defense lay in making a clean breast of the whole matter, but found their clients evasive and unwilling to talk. According to Hays, they had a very human desire to support their original and inept stories. The only one of the bunch who seemed to want to talk about the incident was rather proud of the fracas--the whites had learned a lesson. Gradually, however, Hays and Darrow were able to piece together a plausible story of the events of September 9.

After a week of jury selection, assistant prosecutor Lester S. Moll delivered his opening statement to the all-white jury. He described a peaceful neighborhood whose tranquility was shattered by an unprovoked barrage of gunfire. Moll conceded that blacks had a civil right to live wherever they chose, but suggested to the jury that the most important civil right of all is the right to live--a right Leon Breiner forfeited on September 9 as he amiably smoked his pipe on a neighbor's

[1] [2] [3] 下一页