Racial tensions cloud doctor's tragic life

September 9, 2007

Eighty-two years ago today, in 1925, a mob gathered outside the home of an African-American doctor who had bought a house in an all-white neighborhood in Detroit.

Ossian Sweet studied medicine at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and had practiced in Vienna, Austria, and Paris. He bought a home at Garland and Charlevoix on Detroit's lower east side. On Sept. 9, 1925, people gathered outside the house and became aggressive, threatening the family and pelting the house with stones. Shots were fired from inside the house, and an onlooker was killed. Sweet and 10 others in the house were charged with first-degree murder.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People brought in Clarence Darrow as defense attorney. When the jury could not reach a verdict after 46 hours of deliberation, Judge Frank Murphy dropped the charges against the family.

After the trial, Sweet moved back to his home on Garland. Tragedy struck again, however, when in 1926, his 2-year-old daughter died of tuberculosis. Soon after, his wife, Gladys, died from the disease, as well. He sold his house in 1944 and committed suicide in 1960.

The incident and Sweet's life are chronicled in Kevin Boyle's 2004 National Book Award-winning "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age."