Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  The morning was bright and beautiful, oddly cheerful against the previous night’s trauma. With two men left to watch the house, Joe Mack drove Ossian and Gladys to shop for furniture and then dropped Ossian off at his office. Sweet worked through a round of patients, then took a call from Hewitt Watson, who had written the insurance policy on the new house. There was some problem with the description of the property and Watson needed to amend the documents. Sweet quickly poured out his tale from the previous night. Watson, unlike some of Sweet’s tough-talking hospital friends, immediately volunteered to come over and sit up through the night.

  Watson also promised to bring two other agents from the black-owned Liberty Insurance company. Compared to Sweet’s colleagues at Dunbar, these three men were relative strangers. It is unclear what motivated their willingness to help. Watson may have empathized with Sweet because he was also the lone Negro on his block. The other two men, Leonard Morse and Charles Washington, Sweet only knew in passing. Whether they would show up as Watson promised remained to be seen.

  That evening as they assembled for dinner, Gladys picked up the phone to a hysterical Edna Butler, her guest from the previous day. Butler had overheard a conversation on the streetcar where a Garland resident explained to the conductor, “Some niggers have moved in and we’re going to get rid of them. They stayed there last night but they will be put out tonight.” Brother Henry chimed in with an unfortunate confirmation of the rumor. While he was keeping watch, a beat cop came to the door and warned vaguely, “you better be on your guard.” There had been a meeting last night to plan the details of the coming assault.

  Ossian tried to put up a brave front, but he was shaken. Hoping for a display of strength in numbers, he sent his driver to Black Bottom to retrieve their handyman, Norris Murray, on the promise to pay him five dollars to stay at the house again. By the time Mack returned with Murray, the insurance men also had arrived. With his brother Otis and friend William Davis en route, Ossian stepped back from the edge of panic. He tried briefly to act like an ordinary homeowner, inviting the men to sit down at the card table for a couple of hands of bid whist while Gladys put the final touches on dinner.

  The veneer of normalcy was obliterated when something heavy crashed into the house. Henry Sweet peeked around the drawn shade and exclaimed, “My God, look at the people!” There were hundreds of them, far more than last night. And tonight, said the rumors, there was a plan of attack, a plan for running them out.

  The men dashed upstairs and grabbed rifles, the shotgun, and revolvers. Ossian groped in the closet for one of the revolvers and cartridges. He was unprepared for the effect of adrenaline on his fine motor skills. His hands were shaking so badly that he had difficulty loading the gun.

  And then there was calm. The mob did not surge. Whatever had crashed into the house did not explode or catch fire. Sweet thought for a moment that perhaps his colleague Edward Carter was right. These mobs were mainly about intimidation, not action. The idea was a mild comfort and helped Sweet regain his composure. He lay down on the bed, closed his eyes, and relaxed his grip on the revolver.

  The brief calm was shattered when a brick crashed through the window. From downstairs someone shouted, “There’s someone coming!” Sweet rushed down the stairs, pistol in hand, pushing past Henry, who was headed in the opposite direction, clutching a Winchester rifle. A taxi slowed in front of the house. Before it really stopped, the door flew open. Otis Sweet and William Davies exited at a dead run. Someone in the crowd yelled, “Here’s niggers! There they go! Get them!” Otis and William dashed under a hail of stones to the dubious shelter of the bungalow. They were welcomed in, issued guns, and huddled for cover. They would wish later that they had crouched in the backseat and told the cabbie to drive on.

  With rocks and debris crashing down like a hailstorm, Ossian was swept back into fear, pleading to no one really, “What shall I do? What shall I do?” Then, upstairs, another window shattered, followed by two volleys of gunfire. And out in the crowd, two men fell wounded, one of them fatally.

  The police on the scene had multiple problems. One of them, who lived in the neighborhood, would initially testify that it was a calm summer night when the Negroes opened fire on their white neighbors, who were just strolling and enjoying the evening. None of that comported with the difficulty of getting the Sweets through the mob, into police cars, and down to the station. It was only a quick-thinking lieutenant, newly on the scene, who leveled his revolver at the mob, freezing them just long enough to push the Negroes into squad cars.

  Ossian Sweet had more than ample warning that buying the house on Garland Avenue was a bad idea. Between January and March 1920, the homes of eight Negro strivers recently purchased in or on the boundary of white neighborhoods were firebombed. But in fuller context, Sweet’s decision to buy the house on Garland and protect it with a sack full of guns was not irrational. Yes, he knew about Al Turner being mobbed out of his new home. But he also knew about Aladeine and Fleta Mathies. And that made Sweet’s Garland Avenue strategy seem plausible.

  The Mathieses were part of the latest wave of southern migrants into Detroit. Just arrived from the Georgia countryside, they went in with another couple, the Burtons, to rent an apartment on the border of Black Bottom and an ethnic white neighborhood. As soon as they moved in, the Klan called, first with a threatening letter demanding that they give up the flat. Then menacing men came over to explain why they did not belong. After that, the mob descended.

  Two nights in a row, the men of the house stared down the mob, standing under the porch light, armed with rifles. But this strategy raised obvious problems. The men also had to sleep and work. So it was inevitable that at some point the women would be home alone.

  Left on their own early in the week, the wives were shocked into action by shattering glass. On raw instinct, Fleta Mathies grabbed her bedside pistol and fired through the broken window. Police were fast on the scene and arrested Fleta on firearms charges.

  The Michigan justice system actually worked for Fleta Mathies. Represented by the former head of the Detroit NAACP, she convinced the court that she feared for her life and had fired the gun in self-defense. On the courthouse steps, Fleta was full of defiance, and a touch of hubris, declaring, “The race needs people who are not afraid to die to defend their pride.” Whatever the wisdom of that approach, it suggests that Fleta Mathies was playing for higher stakes than her unhappy neighbors. After Fleta’s return from jail the threats and midnight attacks ended.

  Another incident that Ossian Sweet surely knew about pushed closer to the edge and should have complicated his strategic assessment. Shortly after Al Turner was run out of his home, Vollington Bristol had his own encounter with a mob. Sweet was friends with Bristol. They had arrived in Detroit around the same time. Bristol was a prosperous undertaker who owned several rental properties, including a house on American Avenue that he had rented to a series of troublesome white tenants. Finally, Bristol decided to move into the house himself.33

  Bristol outstripped his white neighbors on every measure of economics and education. But the neighborhood was only willing to tolerate him as a landlord, not as a resident. After the standard progression from nasty notes to a neighborhood delegation, the mob appeared. Luckily, Vollington Bristol had enough standing to secure a contingent of police guards who resisted the entreaty to “step aside just for five minutes,” while the neighborhood men took care of things. Then, as the mob heated up, the police fired warning shots into the air. Someone from the mob fired back. That was enough to precipitate a call for reinforcements that finally sent the crowd running.

  Later that night, though, after word of the incident had spread across black Detroit, there was evidence of a now-familiar turn of the black tradition of arms. After midnight, police were still patrolling the area and stopped a group of eight black men on their way to Vollington Bristol’s home. They were all armed and were candid about their intent to defend Bristol against further attacks.
/>
  Thinking about these incidents, Ossian Sweet might have calculated that a strong show of force would quell hostile neighbors and help him endure the first dangerous days in his new home without any of the more worrisome hazards of gunplay. On the other hand, he also had to consider the July 9 mobbing of John Fletcher on Stoepel Avenue, just a few days after the attacks on Vollington Bristol and only a few blocks away.

  This time the mob had a special temptation. The house next to Fletcher’s had received a fresh delivery of coal. Just after nightfall, Fletcher’s new neighbors appeared and took full advantage of the shiny black missiles. Under a barrage that broke out every window of the house, and amidst venomous cries of “Lynch him,” Fletcher laid down rifle fire from an upstairs window, wounding one man in the hip.

  In his defense, Fletcher told the simple truth, “I was afraid for my life,” and ultimately no indictments were issued. What Sweet did not appreciate is that both Fletcher’s case and Fleta Mathies’s case were assigned to judges on the local court’s progressive wing. These men were far more sympathetic to the plight of Detroit’s black population than many of their brethren.34

  Sweet might actually have been emboldened by the response of the NAACP to this spate of mobbings. From New York, James Weldon Johnson penned an angry missive that was circulated nationwide. “Negroes,” he said, “have been driven from their homes by mobs [in Detroit], those who refused to go having defend and themselves in absence of adequate police protection. We now have the spectacle of white . . . newspapers taking sides with the mob and warning Negroes that if they cleave to their citizenship rights they are inviting a ‘race riot.’”

  These episodes were a high priority for the NAACP. James Weldon Johnson was already focused on the case of Lola Turner, a black woman who was chased out of white neighborhood in Los Angeles by a mob. Were it not for Ossian Sweet, Lola Turner might have been the rallying point for national protest and fundraising.

  For James Weldon Johnson, the Sweets presented the possibility of fulfilling his long ambition of a standing legal defense fund that could bankroll important litigation without taking the organization to the brink of insolvency. He imagined a fund of $50,000 raised from the contributions from thousands of black folk. Ossian Sweet would never fully appreciate the politics, egos, and strategic tight ropes that James Weldon Johnson and Walter White navigated between the initial work by the Detroit branch and the decision of the national office to hire the legendary Clarence Darrow, storied defender of Debs and Scopes.

  Through reports of their courage and stoicism, the Sweets became national heroes, at least among Negroes. From the jailhouse, Ossian declared, “for a good cause and for the dignity of my people, I’m willing to stay indefinitely in the cell and be punished. . . . I denounce the theory of Ku Kluxism and uphold the theory of manhood with a wife and a tiny baby to protect.” Ossian’s father, Henry, who traveled from Florida in support of his sons, grew the legend with a colorful and poignant response to Ossian’s apology for embarrassing the family by ending up in jail. Henry comforted his sons and commended Ossian’s violent stand, telling him, “You got nothing to be embarrassed about. Ain’t nothing in the woods that runoff from family but a rabbit. All you were doing was fighting for your family.”35

  The case resonated so strongly among Negroes that it fueled a fundraising juggernaut. When the NAACP took on the case, resources were so thin that it was unclear how the $5,000 fee demanded by the initial team of lawyers would be paid. Funds on hand had been nearly exhausted by another case where the association defended a group of sharecroppers who were convicted of murder under circumstances that seemed like self-defense.

  As word of the case spread, so did the community support. After Darrow wrestled the first prosecution to a mistrial, a nationwide tour feting Ossian and Gladys raised more than $75,000—enough to pay for the Sweet’s defense, with surplus left to seed the long-discussed and soon-legendary NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

  In the black press, the case was compelling copy and was plastered across the front pages nationwide. The Chicago Defender repeatedly played the case as its lead story, and publisher Robert Abbott wrote a blistering editorial proclaiming, “If it is true that Dr. Sweet fired into the crowd of whites to keep them from rushing his home, he was certainly within his rights and should be supported by every law-abiding citizen in Detroit. White people in Detroit, as well as other cities, may as well know now as later that our race will no longer run from our homes because they object to us.”36

  The Washington Daily American applauded Sweet’s violent stand, declaring, “We have learned through the years since slavery passed to fight our enemies with their own weapons. If physical violence is offered we kill in self-defense.” A Houston paper exhorted “as goes Dr. Sweet so goes the American Negro.” Harlem’s Amsterdam News called it “possibly the most important court case the Negro has ever figured in the history of the United States. [Sweet represented] the spirit of unity the Negro must more and more evidence if he is to survive. He must face death if he is to live. He must be willing to die fighting when he is right! When police authorities fail to protect him and his family; when courts of law desert him; when his own government fails to take a stand on his behalf, he faces death anyway, and may just as well die fighting!”37

  The Arizona Times, with evidently little worry about advocating political violence, said, “The Sweet case has positively proved to the world at large that the American Negro will fight and stand up for his rights as a citizen until every ounce of blood is spilled from his veins.” The editor of the Cleveland Call, who witnessed the trial, actually compared Sweet’s stoic fearlessness to Christ, reporting that Sweet on the stand was “like one other scene two thousand years ago when One Who Opened Not His Mouth was being baited.”

  One of the most searing critiques of the case came from W. E. B. Du Bois. Writing for the Crisis, Du Bois contrasted the courage of Ossian Sweet to the cowardice Alexander Turner. Sweet, said Du Bois, was a model of manhood for the Talented Tenth. On the decision to fight or flee from the mob, Du Bois prodded the century’s New Negroes, “which example would you follow if you were free black and 21.” James Weldon Johnson drew the broad lesson from the case, “If in Detroit the Negro was not upheld in the right to defend his home . . . then no decent Negro home anywhere in the United States will be safe.” It was a simple and powerful point that spoke to the hopes and fears of countless ordinary folk.38

  At New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Sweet case consumed the congregation and pushed local concerns off the agenda. Even some of the white press picked up and advanced the Sweets’ basic claims. The New York World characterized the case as one of clear, legitimate self-defense, declaring that “the Negroes had a right to protect their own lives by firing on those who sought to kill them. The law of America is presumably broad enough to cover the Negro as well as the white man.”39

  Fig. 6.3. Dr. Ossian Sweet. (Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.)

  The case of State v. Sweet et al. ended in the acquittal of eight defendants and a mistrial for Ossian, his brother Henry, and Leonard Morse. The victory was a testament to, well . . . to what? The brilliance of Clarence Darrow? The strong hand of fate? Perhaps to the conscience and humanity of the twelve white men who sat in judgment? Surely it was some of each, although who knows how much. And what to make of the report from snoops at the jury-room door who heard one juror say, “I’ll sit here forever before I condemn those niggers”?

  Ultimately, it was the simple, earnest testimony of Ossian Sweet that captured the scene. He recounted somberly the mob of hundreds outside his home, stones crashing through windows, and the venomous yelps, “Here’s Niggers, Get them, Get them.” Asked by Darrow to describe his state of mind at that moment, Sweet conjured the collective consciousness of the race.

  I realized I was facing the same mob that had hounded my people through its entire history. In my mind I was pretty confident of what I was
up against, with my back against the wall. I was filled with a peculiar fear, the fear of one who knows the history of my race.40

  For Darrow, it was left to seal the message, to tug on the pride and shame and guilt of the jurors. His summation, in the marathon style of the day, ran for hours. One observer said that he had never believed the stories that Darrow could make men weep, but now he had seen it. We don’t know whether Walter White wept under the power of Darrow’s summation. But White clearly had tremendous respect and affection for Darrow. So much so that he gave his firstborn son the middle name Darrow.

  The magic of Darrow was that he had something for everyone. It was the same basic message conveyed in multiple cultural dialects. Although it is hard to know precisely what within the six-hour summation especially appealed to pivotal jurors, for black folk there was a crucial moment where Darrow articulated the longing of the race for their own Leonidas. And there he sat, said Darrow, in the person of Dr. Ossian Sweet, who had seen his people

  tied to stakes in free America and a fire built around living human beings until they roasted to death; he knew they had been driven from their homes in the North and in great cities and here in Detroit, and he was there not only to defend himself and his house and his friends but to stand up for the integrity and independence of the abused race . . . a hero who fought a brave fight against fearful odds, the fight for right, for justice, for freedom, and his name will live and he will be honored when most of us are forgotten.41

  Calculations were made for a subsequent retrial, but the results would be anticlimactic. And until then, at least in the black community, the Sweets were feted as national heroes, and exemplars of the New Negro. While the idea of the New Negro had appeared at least as early as T. Thomas Fortune’s 1889 declaration that the old shuffling generation was done, Ossian Sweet showed the New Negro standing and fighting and actually prevailing inside a system that had for so long been rigged against him.