The demands for Sweet to appear around the country were so overwhelming that the NAACP took over the scheduling, declining the countless lesser requests in favor of a high-profile tour starting in New York City at the association’s annual meeting. At the Lenox Avenue Baptist Church, 1,500 black folk sprang to their feet when Ossian and Gladys entered the room. They clapped and cheered and cried, and finally stopped only because the old people had to sit down.
From New York, the NAACP sent the Sweets on a tour of the largest branches. More than 2,500 turned out in Philadelphia, 1,200 in Pittsburgh, and 2,000 in Cleveland. Feeding on the adulation of the crowd, Ossian grew beyond himself. The man who thought hard about walking away from the Garland Avenue deal, who trembled loading his revolver, grew positively heroic, intimating that the conflict was preordained.42
The final legal maneuver in the Sweet case was prosaic. Prosecutors decided to retry only Henry Sweet, who in initial questioning had admitted firing a rifle. Clarence Darrow teased the truth out of neighborhood witnesses who had conspired to testify that there was no mob outside the Sweet home and that the Negroes started firing without provocation. Deflated by the first trial, some now admitted that the Klan had whipped up anger and urged violent removal of the blacks at a schoolyard rally attended by a crowd of seven hundred. Finally, the evidence was clear that on the night of the shooting, several hundred angry whites were outside the Sweets’ house.
Darrow hammered at Michigan’s legal definition of mob and the presumptions granted to people who fought mob attacks. He shattered the conspiracy of police on the scene to dance around this formula with specious estimates of the crowd that stayed right under the legal definition of mob—twelve or more armed people or thirty unarmed people assembled to intimidate or harm. And while it struck different people differently, the fact that twenty-five blacks had died in police custody in 1925 generally dragged down the credibility of police claims that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on until the Negroes opened fire on their incredulous white neighbors.
The white adults of Garland were able to keep their fabricated chronology basically straight, claiming that they heard no glass breaking until after the gunfire, suggesting that the Sweets had not been assaulted before they opened fire. But that crumbled when Darrow asked a simple question and got a truthful answer from one of the children whose parents had brought him out to witness the spectacle.
By the end of it, Darrow put American racism itself on trial. And it is hard to know what precisely caused the all-white, all-male jury to acquit Henry Sweet. Similarly configured juries on far clearer cases of self-defense had happily sent Negroes to prison and the gallows. Was it the beginning of a new age? Was it the residue of co-counsel Arthur Garfield Hays’s invocation of the ancient principles and great documents that established the right of self-defense—the Castle doctrine, the federal and state constitutional rights to arms, and even the Emancipation Proclamation, which extolled “necessary self-defense”? Or was it Darrow’s exposure of the poisonous tribal prejudice that seeped from witnesses in comments about “Eye Talians,” “Pollocks,” and Jews? Maybe it was recognition that the Klan tirades against Catholics and the immigrant masses left an awfully small slice of “true Americans” to sustain the republic.43
But hopes that the Sweet case alone would stem the tide of residential segregation were disappointed. The same year Henry Sweet was acquitted, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of restrictive covenants in residential real estate. It would take another twenty years to reverse that decision. It would be another forty before federal law, drawn out of the cauldron of the 1960s, made housing discrimination illegal.
The ordeal in Detroit took a tremendous toll on the Sweets. During the middle of the trial, Gladys learned she had tuberculosis. The family suspected she contracted it in the long weeks spent in dank Detroit city jails following the shooting. After the trial, she and two-year-old daughter Iva, also afflicted, traveled to Arizona, seeking relief. Gladys found some comfort in the dry desert air, but the disease claimed Iva.
Gladys returned home with a small coffin while Ossian made funeral arrangements. Iva would be buried in Chicago’s Roseland Park Cemetery, next to her brother, the boy Ossian and Gladys lost in 1923. Even on the day of the funeral, the petty nastiness of racism intruded. As the procession approached the gates to the cemetery, a white groundsman stepped out and snarled that “Coloreds” had to use the back entrance.
It hurts to think how this petty rebuke must have torn at Ossian and Gladys. And one wonders what was going on in the head and the heart of the man who in the name of white supremacy felt it his duty to dump another shovelful of misery onto parents headed to bury their child.
We can never know what was swirling in the minds of the Negroes standing at the cemetery gates, some crying, the men shooting cold stares. But we do gain some sense of how Ossian Sweet perceived the world that day. He could have turned away from the dirty-fingered groundskeeper and directed the funeral procession to the back entrance. But instead, Dr. Ossian Sweet of Dunbar Hospital, hero of Garland Avenue, drew a gun from his pocket and demanded entry through the front gate.44
The next chapter in this saga is frankly so remarkable that it is best just to let one of the witnesses tell it. Black mortician M. Kelley Fritz, the funeral director who stood beside Ossian Sweet when he demanded entry to the front gate of Roseland Park Cemetery to bury his daughter, reported this in a collection of oral histories:
We had a very prominent man in town. He was a doctor. His child died. We took him out to the cemetery and they said go around to the back gate. He pulled his pistol out and made them open the door. A few years later his wife died, and the same thing happened. They still wouldn’t let him in. He pulled his pistol out. His name was Dr. Ossian Sweet.45
Many of the early stories of Negroes with guns leave us wondering how the lives of those people turned out. This becomes easier to track over time. For Ossian Sweet, we know that after Gladys died of tuberculosis at twenty-seven. Ossian went on to enjoy a period of financial success. He actually moved in to the Garland Avenue bungalow and lived there in relative peace for more than twenty-five years. Two more marriages ended in divorce, and he pursued failed campaigns for state senate, US Congress, and the presidency of the Detroit NAACP.
By the 1950s, friends observed that he was slowing. Some commented that his countenance was darker. He seemed haunted by loss and trauma. And on March 20, 1960, as the modern civil-rights movement was unfolding toward great promise, Ossian Sweet picked up a pistol and shot himself in the head.46
Sweet’s death by his own hand conjures the modern debate about the multiple hazards of firearms and perhaps even a parable about those who live by the gun. His suicide underscores what we have long known, that the majority of firearms deaths in our exceptionally armed society are suicides, with many of those coming from the population of older men.
The violent final episode of Ossian Sweet’s life both complicates and sharpens our sense of the black tradition of arms. It alters our assessment of the hero worship and hyperbole that surrounded Sweet after the shooting at Garland. We wonder now how much the public adulation obscured the anguish and trauma that follows any use of deadly force? How did the event change Ossian Sweet? Without it, would he have been the same man who carried a gun to the funerals of his wife and his child? And what about the thousands of people who flocked into churches to cheer Ossian and Gladys, to cheer an act of violence and bloodshed? Yes, they were celebrating a kind of triumph. But the celebrations elided the full imagery of flesh ripped open by lead and the life-altering trauma it caused for the dusky heroes of Garland Avenue.
Fuller consideration of the black tradition of arms evokes similar themes. It happens whenever we celebrate heroes who fight essential battles. And perhaps celebration is the wrong way to think about what we do here. We celebrate the birth of a child. We celebrate the commitment of newlyweds, and the enduring love and patience
of a golden anniversary. There is a plain difference between those things and what legions of black folk celebrated in the Sweet case.
We are happy that Sweet survived and we relish the symbolism of his fight. We might even broadly embrace the principle of armed self-defense as a fundamental right and an important private resource. But ultimately we know that shooting someone in self-defense is next to the last thing anyone wants to do. Yes, it is better than dying under a murderous assault. But it is a deeply traumatic thing that scars everyone involved. That bloody reality introduces an element of reserve against glib lessons or platitudes that might attach to unalloyed tales of heroic violence.
Ossian Sweet was not the black Leonidas. Of course, with enough detail, Leonidas himself surely would disappoint the legend. Ossian Sweet in the role of hero is similar. And that actually is better. Sweet was a brave and frightened and flawed man whose story leavens our sense of the black tradition of arms and brings us closer to the perspective that we need in order to consider its implications in the modern era.
“Does The Crisis mean to imply that its policy is to defend colored people who kill sheriffs?”
The question was posed by a young Roy Wilkins, future head of the NAACP, writing in 1936 as the new editor of the association’s public voice, the Crisis. The answer, if one is patient, turns out to be an emphatic yes.
By now the prickly W. E. B. Du Bois had left the NAACP in a huff, his growing economic radicalism and conflicts with Walter White a major source of the split. With roughly five years of service under his belt, Roy Wilkins was already savvy and judicious, prefiguring the man who would shepherd the association through the tumult of the 1960s.
Wilkins faced in 1936 a question at the heart of the black tradition of arms. And consistent with his growing reputation for careful calculation, appeared to answer it both ways. Wilkins, the diplomat, took a law-and-order stance as a matter of broad policy. At the same time, recognizing the practical limits of the law even in the best of circumstances, he championed armed self-defense.
His canvas was the mob killing of William Wales and his sister Cora in Gordonsville, Virginia. The Waleses had resisted local government attempts to take their property for cemetery expansion. Finally, officials tried to pressure William with a specious charge of being forward with a white woman. No one would survive to record the precise details. But two things are clear. The sheriff went to serve a warrant on William Wales. And Wales shot the sheriff dead.
The aftermath is signaled in the title of Roy Wilkins’s critique of the episode, “Two against 5,000.” It is a blistering commentary that in many ways frames Wilkins’s continuing approach to issues of self-defense. Wilkins deploys sharp tools with a sarcastic appraisal of the good citizens who descended on the Wales. “A mob of 5,000 persons including all the sheriffs, constables, deputies and state police for miles around, armed with everything from machine guns on down, was held at bay by a 60-year-old Negro man and his 62-year-old sister for six hours. The pitched battle of two against 5,000 was finally won by the mob only after a gasoline-soaked torch was tossed into the house and the occupants burned to death.”1
William and Cora turn from victims into heroes as Wilkins celebrates their fight against insurmountable odds. “Even as the flames ate away at their fortress, the man and woman kept up their rifle and shotgun fire until the blazing roof caved in upon their heads.” Wilkins mocks the mob, taunting,
if one has fancy words, this killing was not a lynching. It was sport—sport on a grand scale. Hunting possum compared to this is tiddlywinks. Here were a man and a woman cooped up in a frame house, and all one had to do was shoot. . . . There was a slight flaw in the setup, however. The man and woman had arms and they were not afraid to shoot. . . . The leaders of the 5,000 looked about and took counsel together. They had numbers. They had machine guns. They had sulfur bombs. They had teargas bombs. But the two in the house had rifles, shotguns and perhaps a pistol or two. Not so good. Not half as good as one lone Negro with nothing but his bare hands, easily dangled at the end of a rope. . . . A hanging, manacled Negro cannot shoot back. No, this was a different proposition.
With the coals stoked, Wilkins expands the web of villains to politicians who thwarted the NAACP’s long and fruitless pursuit of federal anti-lynching legislation. Again, mocking, he recounts how town authorities, ducking under the Waleses’ gunfire, requested reinforcements from the Marine base at nearby Quantico. “You see, gentle reader, the federal government must never interfere with the citizens of a sovereign state who wish to stage lynchings, but it is alright for the sovereign states to call on United States troops when some Negro is crazy enough not to want to be lynched. What the hell is government for, anyway?”
Still innately cautious, Wilkins engages and retreats and engages again the core dilemma of the precipitating bloodshed. “William Wales did kill a Sheriff, did he not? Are the colored people for law and order? Does the Crisis mean to imply by this article that its policy is to defend colored people who kill sheriffs?”
Line after line, he dissembles and equivocates. “Colored people have to be for law and order even though the law has given them little protection. They are a relatively helpless minority. They have to place their reliance in the law which the powerful majority has made.” But the fact that black folk must favor law and order, said Wilkins, “does not mean that they necessarily approve of the law or the way it is administered or of the people who administer it.”
Then, in a more dangerous turn, Wilkins argues that “all too infrequently, [blacks] express their disapproval and resentment in a forthright manner. They have good cause to resort to direct action. It is a marvel of the age that they have been so meek and mild.”
But even as he edges toward militancy, Wilkins reflects the long caution against political violence. “The law is stacked against all poor people, and especially against Negroes. Yet they turn to it.” Prudence demanded as much because “[Negroes] as a group are not in a position to change the law by democratic means or to defy it with arms.”
Wilkins’s restraint here sharpens a crucial point. The boundary against political violence is not a bright line. Rather, it is a contestable zone of action and rhetoric that people under disparate influences will navigate differently. It is a zone that prudent men will approach with caution. But some things will push even prudent men into the breach.
One expects a more detailed consideration of whether William Wales’s shootout ranged into the forbidden zone of political violence. But Wilkins was now channeling the rage of the community. He was speaking for William and Cora Wales, burned to a cinder, bits of their remains “reposed now on the mantelpieces of many a Virginia home . . . preserved in a jar of alcohol to remind children and grandchildren of the indomitable courage of a brother, father or son of the family who battled to the death to prevent two Negroes from overcoming 5,000 white Virginians.”
It was plain desperation, said Wilkins, that explained William Wales’s violent stand. Wales “had had his fill of [injustice]. He probably decided that he did not intend to stand anymore from the system set up and maintained to exploit, humiliate and crush him. . . . He probably felt that in this matter he was right and that he was not going to knuckle under to the white folk no matter what happened. Death was preferable to life as he had been forced to live it.”
From here, Wilkins engages the range of evils that the NAACP would spend decades fighting in the courts.
As Wales looked back upon his 60 years what did he see? He saw courts controlled by whites, responsive to whites, giving verdicts pleasing to whites. He saw his race’s children cheated out of the schooling for which their parents pay taxes to the state. He saw the separation of the races everywhere, with his having always the little end of the deal. He saw jobs, health, opportunity, prestige, family life and success denied upon the flimsy excuse of skin color. He saw his people hanged, roasted and mutilated by mobs while legislators called points of order and an aspirant to the Presidency f
iddled with clauses, phrases, periods and commas in the so-called Bill of Rights.
Confronting the final act of violence, William Wales’s gun blast to the chest of a lawman clothed in the authority of the state, Wilkins diverts the blame. William Wales might have pulled the trigger, but American apartheid was the real culprit. “The system killed that Sheriff,” Wilkins declared, “Wales was the agent.”
Finally, with the worry about respect for badges of authority fully submerged, Wilkins directly answers the starting question: “Yes, The Crisis defends William and Cora Wales.” But that was not all. Wilkins not only defended William and Cora. He cast them as heroes, boldly celebrating the act of “stubborn, thrilling, crazy bravery by an aging colored man and his sister.”2
It would be many years before the case of Jerome Wilson earned the kind of attention that Roy Wilkins gave to William and Cora Wales. But the basic scene was the same. Jerome Wilson of Washington Parish, Louisiana, came from a relatively prosperous black family. They owned land, livestock, and guns. Perhaps that made Jerome Wilson proud, a little too willing under the circumstances to claim that he was a man equal to any other. Perhaps if the Wilson clan had been more willing to bow and scrape, Jerome would not have gotten lynched.
Jerome was one of eleven children of John Wilson and Tempe McGee. As the Wilson boys grew older, John bought an adjacent farm for them to make their start. With John’s accumulated resources and his boys’ energy and ambition, the family thrived. But their relative prosperity rested on a fragile foundation of wavering protection for Negro property and Negro interests that would worry black strivers for years to come.
Negroes and the Gun Page 27