Some of the men in the home, including Sweet’s brother, Henry, grabbed guns, and as rocks continued to rain down, they fired a full volley, twenty rounds. Two white men went down. One, Leon Breiner, a factory foreman who lived just across the street, was fatally wounded. The police, finally shaken out of their lethargy, sprang into action. They stormed the house, arrested Sweet, his wife, and the ten men who had come to his aid, and hauled them out of there.97
The Sweets were clearly in trouble, but it was the neighborhood association that had made abundantly clear its main goal to get rid of them by any means necessary, including violence. Almost the moment they purchased the home, notices for a never-heard-of-before homeowners’ association sprang up in the neighborhood, inviting all concerned residents to a meeting to determine how to act “in self-defense” and stop the invasion. The main speaker at the gathering was the president of the Tireman Homeowners’ Association, which had made front-page news in Detroit as it forcibly expelled or repelled the Turners and two other black families that had tried to move into his all-white neighborhood. We have the model for how to do this, he told the throng of seven hundred. “Use legal means if possible, force if necessary. But put the niggers out. Put them out.”98 Then a mob, which the media and the police initially estimated to be anywhere between three hundred and five thousand people, encircled Sweet’s home. Rocks crashed through the bedroom windows and sat on the floor surrounded by shards of glass. Other stones littered the lawn, porch, and roof. Racial epithets singed the air as the mob surged toward the house.
The clearly violent intent of the mob should have saved the Sweets from the legal trouble that loomed on the horizon. But his aspirations, his ambition, nullified if not justified that intent and triggered a concerted response from the police, the prosecutor’s office, the liberal, “anti-Klan” mayor, and the media itself, as they set to turn self-defense into premeditated murder and throw eleven black people, including a physician, a law student, and a federal narcotics officer, in prison forever.
The police officer in charge at the Sweets’ home that evening, Inspector Norton Schuknecht, who had had a ringside seat to the shooting, stated that there had been no crowd around Sweet’s house on Garland Avenue. There had been people milling about, he claimed, chatting with each other, but nothing that suggested a “mob,” and certainly nothing that indicated the Sweets were in danger. When he charged into the home after the bullets went flying, as he recalled, he yelled at Sweet, “For Christ’s sake, what the hell are you fellows shooting about?” When the doctor pointed to the rocks shattering his windows and pounding against the roof, Schuknecht scoffed, “What have they done? … I haven’t seen a man throwing stones, and I haven’t heard any commotion or anything else.”99 In the police officer’s estimation, Sweet’s posse, for its own nefarious reasons, simply pointed its arsenal, took aim, and fired at neighborly whites out for an evening stroll.
Taking into account the rocks that officers had found in the upstairs bedroom amid so much broken glass, Schuknecht insisted that the stones came after the shooting. His sequence of events—shots, then rocks—made clear that this had not been self-defense. Rather, Leon Breiner had been executed. This was the story the officer repeated to the press, to the prosecutor, and then to the jury, never conveying the impressions of his brother-in-law, who, there with him that evening, “caught snatches of bitterness seething through the growing crowd,” including someone saying, “ ‘Damn funny thing … that the police wouldn’t go in there and drag those niggers out.’ ”100
A reporter from the Detroit Free Press who trudged through the rocks and debris at the Sweets’ home listened to Schuknecht repeat the tale of neighbors walking the streets on a warm summer evening and then add a tantalizing new piece of information. When the officer and his men searched the home on Garland, they found nothing less than a full-blown arsenal: rifles, handguns, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition when the place was barely furnished. The implication was clear: This was not a home where people intended on living. It was, instead, a sniper’s nest from which bullets were sprayed into a peaceful, calm neighborhood, killing a husband and father, while sending another man to the hospital. Schuknecht’s story was explosive, and the Detroit Free Press ran with it, and was quickly followed by its rival paper, the Detroit Times.101
A reporter for a third newspaper in town, the Detroit News, had also been there that night. “A nigger family has moved into the neighborhood and they’re going to put them out,” Philip Adler heard a woman say. As he worked his way through the throng, Adler saw the rocks rain down on the Sweets’ home, and then he heard the shots. Contrary to Schuknecht’s account, Adler saw the Sweets had been under unrelenting attack while the police stood by and did nothing meaningful to stop it.102
However, Adler’s editor refused to run his story and instead reiterated Schuknecht’s version. By evening, Detroit’s three newspapers had five hundred thousand copies blanketing the city, each of them condemning the Sweets as killers.103
It was like throwing gasoline on a fire. Since the war, Detroit had become Klan country, thirty-five thousand members strong. Thus far, a coalition of white ethnics and blacks—arrayed around the slogan “Keep Detroit an American City!”—had managed to beat back the Klan’s challenge for the mayor’s office.104 Now, Mayor Johnny Smith, who had helped weld that coalition and whom blacks had come to view as an ally, sucker punched his African American constituency in an open letter to the police commissioner. He saw the KKK’s hand behind “the outrage” on Garland Avenue, which, given the violence that rained down on the Sweets, initially made sense. But as Smith unveiled his logic, it was not the mob that had incurred his wrath, but the Sweets, who had the temerity to move into a white neighborhood. The Klan, he railed, had worked overtime to “induce Negroes to go into districts populated entirely by persons who would … resent such an invasion.” The point of such an incursion, he asserted, was to spark a race war that would blow Detroit apart and deliver the city to the KKK. Unfortunately, the mayor continued, the Ossian Sweets of this world had been willing pawns in this power play. If the Negro would just stay in his place, he wrote, and quit demanding to exercise every last little right “which the law gives him,” then there would be peace in Detroit. “I shall go further,” Smith then added. “I believe that any colored person who endangers life and property, simply to gratify his personal pride, is an enemy of his race as well as an incitant of riot and murder.”105 Even for Detroit’s liberal mayor, peace was based on black people quietly and gracefully accepting the fact that they had no right to their rights.
As he read the police reports, the interrogation transcripts, and the newspaper accounts of what happened that evening on Garland Avenue, Wayne County prosecutor Robert Toms, who would go on to be tapped as a judge to oversee the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg, spotted an obvious weakness in his case: All those arrested, despite the fact that their stories rippled with inconsistencies, agreed that the house was under attack, that rocks were “pouring in like rain,” and that a bloodthirsty mob had descended on the Sweets. By any measure, that established self-defense. But Toms remained determined “to bring those eleven Negroes to trial.”106
Toms sent his assistant prosecutor, Ted Kennedy, out to conduct additional interviews with the police and neighbors to shore up the case against Sweet and his friends. Two key points needed to be nailed down: the size of the crowd and the time when the rocks were first thrown. Michigan law defined a mob as more than twelve armed people, or thirty unarmed “assembled to intimidate or inflict harm,” which meant causing “twenty-five dollars in damage to a piece of property.” It wasn’t just the Sweets who had insisted that there was a mob; the very newspapers that had branded them as killers described hundreds of people swarming Garland Avenue.
Schucknecht’s version, though, had to be supported, and Kennedy’s job was to nail down the police inspector’s story and then get independent corroborating testimony. After just a few questions, it wa
s clear to him that the case rested on quicksand. The assistant prosecutor strongly suspected that Schuknecht’s answers were rehearsed, informed not by the truth but by a quick glance at Michigan law books. But Kennedy had a job to do, and as he turned to the next-door neighbors, the tone of his questions, along with his body language, helped steer them to the right answers.107
These corroborating statements buttressing an “avalanche of police evidence” convinced Toms to proceed. He would, as well, ensure that “the Sweets would face an all-white jury … and if he couldn’t convince twelve Caucasians to convict eleven Negroes who invaded a white neighborhood armed to the teeth,” well, then he “didn’t deserve his salary.”108 He had already seen to it that the Sweets were denied bail and would have to languish in jail until the jury decided their fate months later.109
As the trial began, Toms described the “empty rooms contrasted with the full supply of weapons,” driving home the point that “the defendants agreed to a preconceived conspiracy to murder,” which, plotting by the people holed up in the house on Garland, he explained to the jury, was evident from the results of the interrogations.110 At the police station, Kennedy had kept after Dr. Sweet about the guns: When had they arrived, why were weapons in the house, and who had brought them? Sweet dodged and dodged, but the assistant prosecutor was relentless.
“When you moved in, you had the arsenal up there with you … knowing you were going to have trouble, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” the doctor finally said.
If Sweet knew there was going to be trouble, Kennedy probed, “why did [he] move in there, then?”
Sweet’s response, “Because I bought the house … and it was my house, and I felt I had a right to live in it,” carried no weight.111 Blacks had no property rights in white neighborhoods.112 Henry Sweet eventually admitted that he had fired a rifle, but only after the rocks “began coming in on me.” Kennedy was unimpressed. “Did any of them hit you? … If you stayed out of the front room … you wouldn’t have been hit, would you?”113
Toms summed up his case at the end of the trial: The invasion of a white neighborhood, the arsenal in a sparsely furnished house, the admission that shots had rung out from the upstairs window—it all meant only one thing: Leon Breiner was “shot through the back from ambush.” And, as the prosecutor told the jury, “you can’t make anything out of those facts … but cold-blooded murder.”114
Watching the Sweet case unfold, Walter White, assistant secretary of the NAACP, immediately recognized that “if the ancient Anglo-Saxon principle that ‘a man’s home is his castle’ were not made applicable to Negroes … we knew that other and even more determined attacks would be made upon the homes of Negroes throughout the country.”115 The Association declared that if black people in Detroit couldn’t protect their home from a white mob, then no black person anywhere in America was safe.116 The NAACP had, therefore, rushed to pull together a legal team to help the Sweets, including famed attorney Clarence Darrow, for whom this case was about “a sacred ancient right, that of protection of home and life.”117 And, as David Lilienthal wrote in the Nation, the question was “Did Negroes have the same right of self-defense as white people?”118
Patiently and meticulously, Darrow and his co-counsel, Arthur Garfield Hays, picked apart the lies, the coached testimony, and the half-truths of the neighbors, homeowners’ association leaders, and police. The size of the crowd inched well above Schuknecht’s twelve. The rocks were acknowledged as a hailstorm, and eventually a homeowners’ association discussion concerning property values was revealed to have been about the level of violence necessary to oust the Sweets.119
During closing arguments, Darrow explained for the jurors’ benefit that the prosecution’s case was based on racism and lies. “Every one of them [the prosecution’s witnesses] … perjured themselves over and over and over and over again to send [eleven] black people to prison for life.” What was more, he added, they had “perjured themselves on behalf of what they think is their noble, Nordic race.” “Acquit my clients,” he insisted, “and repair the damage caused by America’s shameful original sin.”120
Several days of deliberations later, Darrow did not get what he wanted, but neither did Toms. Five jurors voted for acquittal. Seven, however, repeatedly voted to convict Ossian and Henry Sweet for murder.121 It was, then, a hung jury. Yet, despite the fact that Darrow had exposed the perjured testimony and legal weaknesses in the case, Toms refused to drop the charges. And so there was a second trial at which Henry Sweet, an admitted shooter, was the first to be tried.
Darrow was more than ready.122 This time he suspected that the lying would be all the more obvious, with “many of the prosecution witnesses [having] forgotten the testimony they gave at the first trial.” Even the press, taking notice of these irregularities, had begun to tone down its polemics.123 Having already managed to establish that so many cars had been in the area that night that the police had had to barricade the street, Darrow explained to the jurors, “There is nothing but prejudice in this case. If it was reversed, and eleven white men had shot and killed a black while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted … They would have been given medals instead.”124
With each crack in witnesses’ testimony, Toms’s case fell apart. By the time of his closing statement, therefore, he was reduced to arguing that “even if there were five hundred people out that night,” Michigan law might call that a mob, but the doctor and his friends had no right to do so.125 Toms went on to argue that “prejudice” and “intolerance” had nothing to do with this case.126 Nevertheless, he said, it “wasn’t unreasonable for the community association to want to maintain the racial purity of their neighborhood.”127
Toms continued to minimize what a rock-throwing mob converging on the house at Garland Avenue actually meant to those trapped in the home. Even though the prosecution’s own witnesses, under intense cross-examination, admitted to stones having positively pounded the bungalow, Toms remarked that it couldn’t have been that intense because only two panes of glass had broken. The only thing that mattered was that Leon Breiner, a white man, was now dead. And Toms, as he continued his closing arguments, wanted the all-white jury to understand why: The killing of that family man happened because “the Sweets and their friends were uppity.” They murdered Breiner “just to impress on the right people that they didn’t propose to be driven out.”128 Sweet thought that he had “the right to live wherever he wanted to live by any means he chose to adopt.”129 “It was not fear that led Henry Sweet to pull the trigger,” Toms stated by way of conclusion. “It was hate. It was arrogance.”130 Breiner was “sacrificed on the altar of Henry Sweet’s rights and privileges.”131
This time, though, the jury didn’t buy Toms’ argument and the foreman pronounced Henry Sweet “not guilty.”
The costs of this legal victory, however, were painfully, staggeringly high. Gladys Sweet, the doctor’s wife, who had been cooking dinner when the rocks and bullets started flying, contracted tuberculosis while being held for nearly a month in the dank, crowded, and unsanitary jail. Their baby daughter also became infected, as did Henry. All of them died. Ossian Sweet, who had fought so hard, tried to soldier on, but eventually he faced foreclosure, had to sell the home on Garland Avenue, and was forced to move to a small apartment in Black Bottom. He put a gun to his head one night and pulled the trigger.132
Three
Burning Brown to the Ground
Jim Crow dominated the lives of black people in America from 1890 well into the twentieth century. From conception to coffin, there was no nook or cranny of a black person’s life that it did not touch. In the early 1930s, under the direction of brilliant legal tactician Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP launched a campaign in the courts to destroy Jim Crow and overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that had made “separate but equal” the legal cornerstone of racial segregation in America. When the U.S. Supreme Court
first announced that 1896 decision, the states had seized on the “separate” aspect of the edict almost immediately, instituting racially distinct facilities from telephone booths to cemeteries. For nearly six decades, the same states had consistently failed to provide anything approximating “equal” for America’s black citizens.1 This was the Achilles’ heel that the NAACP’s legal team attacked.
The Association’s initial thrust was to force the states to equalize educational opportunities, as Plessy required, insisting they finance, create, and maintain black law schools and doctoral programs of the same caliber as the ones labeled “whites only.” White Southern leaders tried to parry the NAACP’s challenge and still meet Plessy’s threshold. Texas attempted to re-create the University of Texas at Austin’s law school for black students in a run-down off-site basement and, as far as the justices could tell, failed miserably.2 Missouri opted to define “equal” as paying for African Americans to get their legal education in Nebraska or Iowa; the U.S. Supreme Court would have none of it and ordered the University of Missouri to open its doors to African Americans.3 Oklahoma hoped to keep Plessy intact by admitting blacks to its flagship university but then creating apartheid-like separate spaces on campus for them. But that hardly constituted “equal,” as the justices noted, and they ruled that those internal racial barriers were unconstitutional.4 Those results were not surprising. The states couldn’t possibly build two comparable systems. But if they really wanted Jim Crow, the NAACP began to make painfully clear, they would have to pay for it.5
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