Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  Near the end of the decade, the percentage of black workers at Ford was greater than the percentage of blacks in the city’s population. Blacks numbered some fifty thousand out of a total population of a little over 1.5 million, or 3.3 percent, while blacks at Ford represented at least 10 percent of the overall workforce. The Ford Motor Company was the largest employer of African Americans in the city.6

  There weren’t as many job opportunities for black women, women like Shahida Mausi’s great grandmother, who arrived in the city in 1918 from South Carolina and went directly to the Rev. Bradby’s church, seeking comfort and assistance for herself and her three children. “When the church was unable to help her, she played the numbers and hit 420 for enough money to get her started,” said Mausi, the city’s current culture maven. Some years later, the family purchased a home on East Ferry, and, incidentally, the address was 420. “That house has been in the family since the 1930s,” she said, adding that today it is ideally located near the M1 rail line under construction on Woodward Avenue.7

  Business was bustling again at Ford after a terrible recession in the early 1920s, but there was growing dissatisfaction from the salesmen, executives, and even some consumers, who insisted that it was time to dump the Model T and move on to a more efficient car. It is not known if any of these complaints reached Dr. Sweet and his wife as they drove around town in their Model T, gathering the essentials for their new home. Among these essentials was an arsenal of rifles and ammunition. Dr. Sweet’s intent to be ready for racist attacks would soon be construed by the prosecution as grounds for its conspiracy charge against Dr. Sweet.

  The Sweets, a young black married couple seeking the American dream, desired a comfortable home in a quiet neighborhood where they could raise their children. Instead of settling in to enjoy domestic bliss, they faced an angry mob of white neighbors, all determined to stop what they viewed as a violation of their restrictive covenant.

  When Dr. Sweet and his wife, Gladys, moved to 2905 Garland, they had been living in cramped quarters with his wife’s relatives. They wanted a home beyond the teeming Black Bottom. Word of their purchase spread, and a mob of neighbors assembled outside their home, cursing and threatening. The second day, September 9, was noisier. The Sweets were joined by two relatives—Otis and Henry Sweet, Dr. Sweet’s brothers—and seven other friends and associates. Terrified by the hostile crowd and by a subsequent barrage of stones and other objects, Henry later admitted that he fired two shots, one of them a warning shot over the heads of the mob, the other into the crowd. Two white men were shot. Eric Hogsburg was wounded in the leg, and Leon Breiner died from a bullet to the back. Shortly after the shooting, all who were in the Sweets’ home were arrested and a trial date was set. Deciding who would defend the eleven—the Sweets: Ossian, Otis, Gladys, and Henry; John Latting, Norris Murray, Joe Mack, Charles Washington, Hewitt Watson, William Davis, and Leonard Morse—was a source of contention that was finally settled when the NAACP insisted that they retain the best lawyer in the land, Clarence Darrow.

  The racial animus and the restrictive covenants faced by the Sweets were becoming increasingly common in Northern neighborhoods.8 Equally repugnant was the rise of the KKK; by the time the Sweets settled on the east side of Detroit, there were more than twenty thousand Klan members in the city. Phyllis Vine, in her book One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream, provides a perspective on Dr. Sweet’s Southern background, which taught him to expect an attack by a white mob. His education began at Wilberforce Academy in Ohio, where he experienced the teachings of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Vine recounts an incident that Sweet witnessed in Florida when he was seven years old. It needs no novelistic touches to embellish the grisly reality of the lynching of a black man, Fred Rochelle, accused of killing a white woman. “When the entire posse had assembled, Rochelle was dragged to the spot and tied securely. The mob poured drinks for spectators while he cried for mercy. They ignored him and instead behaved as if they were guests at one of the popular outdoor parties. Eventually Mr. Taggart [the leader of the mob] was ready, and they took their places so he could strike a match. For the next eight minutes, Rochelle shrieked. Flames climbed up his legs, formed a curtain around his torso, and draped his face. After the flames died back, souvenir hunters pocketed pieces of his charred remains—a digit, part of the femur, a piece of his foot.”9

  Vine graphically depicts the Great Migration, with “140 trains arriving daily,” before moving on to assess how dynamic Detroit was becoming, a fitting environment for Sweet’s achievements in medicine and his association with a number of the city’s black movers and shakers, including attorney Julian Perry and Dr. Alexander L. Turner, Sweet’s colleague, who had encountered a similar mob attack on the city’s west side. While Detroit was rapidly expressing appealing elements of modernity, there were still remnants of the vicious, racist past. “Detroit is Eldorado,” one magazine gushed, but, at the same time, there was the other Detroit, where pestilence, violence, and squalor festered to make life almost unbearable for most black Detroiters bottled up in Black Bottom. The Garland neighborhood, comprised of working-class whites, stood in stark contrast to the ghetto.

  When the trial began on November 9, the opening statement was delivered by defense attorney Arthur Garfield Hays, not Darrow. After stating his theory of law and the right of self-defense, Hays told the court and the jury that “to shoot to protect oneself is a right arising from the necessities of a particular situation as the facts appear to the person involved.” The persons involved, the state of mind of the defendants, he said, was a “trapped state of mind induced by what has happened to others of their race, not only in the South where their ancestors were once slaves, but even in the North in the states which once fought for their freedom.”10 By contrasting the Northern and Southern experiences of black Americans, Hays invoked the lynching Dr. Sweet witnessed as a child. He could have gone further with his analogy, by noting, for example, that twenty-five blacks had been killed in Detroit while in police custody in 1925, eight times the number killed under police supervision that year in New York City, whose black population was at least twice as large.11

  At one point during the deliberations, one of the prosecutors defined the mob outside the Sweets’ house as merely a “neighborly” gathering. He went on to say that Darrow “ ‘. . . is going to make his own witnesses liars when he tells of that crowd. I don’t know how long he is going to talk—two hours, maybe; maybe two days. He is going to tell you about that howling, bloodthirsty crowd—’ With masterful timing, Darrow interjected, ‘just neighborly.’ Laughter erupted in the packed courtroom, the judge’s reprimand followed.”12

  Darrow didn’t mention the howling, bloodthirsty crowd when he cross-examined Ray Dove, who lived directly across the street from the Sweet home. “You didn’t want him there?” Darrow asked Dove. “I am not prejudiced against them, but I don’t believe in mixing whites and blacks,” Dove answered. “So, you didn’t want him there?” Darrow repeated. “No, I guess not . . .” Dove said.13

  When Dr. Sweet took the stand, a collective sound of exhalation filled the courtroom. With his usual debonair demeanor, he took the oath and stared intently at the jury. He was questioned by attorney Hays, and at some points in his testimony, it was as if he were recounting the lynching he had witnessed many years ago.

  Q: What did you do when you got home on the evening of September 9th?

  A: First thing I remember is my wife telling me about a phone conversation she had with Mrs. Butler, in which the latter told her of overhearing a conversation between the motorman of a street car and a woman passenger, to the effect that Negro family had moved into the neighborhood and they would be out before the next night.

  Q: When did you first observe anything outside?

  A: We were playing cards; it was about eight o’clock when something hit the roof of the house.

  Q: What happened after that?

  A: Somebody went to t
he window and then I heard the remark, “The people, the people.”

  Q: And then?

  A: I ran out to the kitchen where my wife was. There were several lights burning. I turned them out and opened the door.

  I heard someone yell, “Go and raise hell in front, I’m going back.” I was frightened, and after getting a gun, ran upstairs. Stones kept hitting our house intermittently. I threw myself on the bed and lay there a short while. Perhaps fifteen minutes, when a stone came through the window. Part of the glass hit me.

  Q: What happened then?

  A: Pandemonium—I guess that’s the best way of describing it—broke loose. Everyone was running from room to room. There was a general uproar. Somebody yelled, “There’s someone coming!” They said, “That’s your brother.” A car had pulled up to the curb. My brother and Mr. Davis got out. The mob yelled, “Here’s niggers! Get them, get them!” As they rushed in, the mob surged forward fifteen or twenty feet. It looked like a human sea. Stones kept coming faster. I ran downstairs. Another window was smashed. Then one shot. Then eight or ten from upstairs; then it was all over. . . .

  Q: State your mind at the time of the shooting.

  A: When I opened the door and saw the mob, I realized I was facing the same mob that had hounded my people throughout 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 kind no one could feel unless they had the history of our race. I knew what mobs had done to my people before.

  Chief Prosecutor Robert Toms [objecting]: Is everything this man saw as a child justification for a crime 25 years later?14

  At the beginning of his closing argument, Darrow slowly reviewed some of the critical moments of the trial and the various testimonies with the jury, never losing eye contact with them. “If I thought any of you had any opinion about the guilt of my clients, I wouldn’t worry, because that might be changed,” he said, pausing to make sure they were with him. “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. . . . You are facing a problem of two races, a problem that will take centuries to solve. If I felt none of you were prejudiced, I’d have no fear. I want you to be as unprejudiced as you can be.”

  He told the jury that every policeman at the scene knew the crowd was after Dr. Sweet, his family, and friends. But no one batted an eye, he said. “Draw upon your imagination and think how you would feel if you fired at some black man in a black community and then had to be tried by them. . . .” Mob psychology, he explained, is the most dreadful thing with which man has to contend. The mob was waiting to see the sacrifice of some helpless blacks, he continued. “They came with malice in their hearts.”

  Darrow paced between the judge and the jury, always directing his statements to the jury. “The Sweets spent their first night in their home afraid to go to bed,” he intoned, turning for a moment to face the Sweet family seated in the front rows. “The next night they spent in jail. Now the State wants them to spend the rest of their lives in the penitentiary. The State claims there was no mob there that night. Gentlemen, the State has put on enough witnesses who said they were there, to make a mob.”15

  Darrow’s closing argument was among the best the famous lawyer had ever uttered, said Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice. “I ask you gentlemen in behalf of my clients,” Darrow implored the jurors. “I ask you more than anything else, I ask you in behalf of justice, often maligned and downtrodden, hard to protect and hard to maintain, I ask you in behalf of yourselves, in behalf of our race, to see that no harm comes to them. I ask you gentlemen in the name of the future, the future which will one day solve these sore problems, and the future which is theirs as well as ours, I ask you in the name of the future to do justice in this case.”16 But four weeks of give and take, and Darrow’s powerful phrases, earned them only a mistrial. Nothing had been solved, and rather than a brighter future, Darrow was reacquainted with the same old nasty, dismal past.

  Leaders of the NAACP viewed the result as a “partial victory,” which to a certain degree was right for them, for the exposure the organization received surely added to its growth. During the year, 380 new affiliates were organized with more than 200 weekly newsletters. Meanwhile, the city’s 80,000 African Americans wondered, would the outcome be any brighter for the Sweets in the second trial?17

  The second trial, which began in April, was much like the first, except for John Dancy’s testimony. He deftly explained that a black family moving into a white neighborhood doesn’t bring down the property values but rather enhances them, because blacks usually were charged double the price paid by whites. Once again the prosecution and the defense—and Darrow was now joined by a new attorney, Thomas Chawke, whose reputation as a mouthpiece for the underworld was legend—had to renew the legal tactics of before. The prosecution pushed its conspiracy charge and the defense insisted that a man’s home was his castle and he had every right to defend it.

  “Henry Sweet, Negro, was acquitted of a charge of murder by a jury,” an editorial in the Boston Herald declared on May 13, adding that the “trial was an echo of Detroit’s race disturbance.”18 Prosecutor Robert Toms had focused the entire case on the conviction of Henry Sweet; he kept his promise and dropped the charges against the others. Judge Frank Murphy, who used the trial as a springboard to a career as the city’s mayor, the state’s governor, US attorney general, and a Supreme Court justice, warned the spectators not to allow their emotions to interfere with acceptance of the verdict. “Accept it courageously and with good will,” he said.19

  The celebration for the defendants, particularly for Dr. Sweet and his wife, was short-lived, because within a few months they lost their daughter, Iva, to tuberculosis, which she probably contracted from her mother, who was exposed to it during her time in jail. Two years later, in 1928, the illness felled Gladys, leaving the good doctor without comfort or rudder. By 1960 the mob violence, the trials, and the trauma it brought to his family, was an accumulation of heartbreak that overwhelmed him one evening when Dr. Sweet could take no more.

  The Ford Motor Company’s replacement of the Model T with the Model A was a shift to recover from the financial crisis of 1927. To switch, the company had to shut down the Rouge plant and pink-slip thousands of workers, including more than 1,500 black employees. Other automotive plants were experiencing similar signs of the incipient economic depression, an ominous harbinger of collapse. At the General Motors’ Pontiac plant in 1929, there were 29,000 employed in the spring. By the fall the number had dwindled to 14,000.20 The bad news hit the black community first. There were other telltale signs that the Great Depression was on its way, though it had long ago taken up permanent residence in Black Bottom and the other devastated zones of the nation. “Hey, the depression came we didn’t know the difference” was a common sentiment among many black Detroiters.

  The Sweet trials were not only a referendum on race, but also a political platform, with the outcome of the city’s mayoral race contingent on the results. During the Sweet trials, Judge Murphy was fully aware of the political implications of his presence on the bench. He knew what was at stake and how beholden he was to the city’s black electorate, which had helped him secure his position at Recorder’s Court. Of greater concern was his handling of the trials, knowing how pivotal that would be in the mayoral quest that most Detroiters assumed he was on. In 1923, black Detroiters, some of them defying their loyalty to Henry Ford, sided with Murphy in an election “that pitted the traditional Protestant industrial elite—Ford interests—against the larger population of Catholic immigrants and blacks. Murphy, a lawyer and activist in the Democratic Party, had big ambitions, especially for an Irish Catholic politician in a city con
trolled by Anglo-Saxons,” observed author Beth Bates.21 In effect, the black vote—but one wonders how many of the fourteen thousand newly arrived migrants from the South were eligible to vote—was Murphy’s for the asking. With a Klan candidate lurking on the horizon, the upcoming election was becoming increasingly significant for black Detroiters.

  Few of them were caught in such a political quandary as the Rev. Robert Bradby of Second Baptist Church. “While Bradby used his church effectively as a hiring hall for jobs at the FMC, his close affiliation and support for Frank Murphy’s reform agenda revealed that Bradby’s expectations for black Detroiters included much more than inclusion in the mainstream industrial job market. Indeed, Bradby’s close working relationships with both Henry Ford and Frank Murphy exposed his deep ambivalence toward Ford.”22 In 1930, with the election months away, Bradby had time to weigh the consequences of taking a political position.

  Charles Denby wasn’t plagued with this dilemma. As a recent migrant from Dixie in the late 1920s, he had no vow of loyalty to Ford or anyone else. In the city since 1924, he found work in the factories, mainly at Graham Paige, where it was his job in the foundry to shake out the oil pan under the motor. “I never wanted to work for Ford, and I never did work there,” Denby wrote in his autobiography. “Everyone talked about it; they said it was the house of murder.” Perhaps not exactly murder, to defuse Denby’s exaggeration, but working at Ford was the source of jokes depicting the exhausted, overworked worker. “Every worker could identify Ford workers on the streetcars going home at night,” Denby continued. “Every worker who was asleep was working for Ford. You’d see twenty asleep on the cars and everyone would say, ‘Ford workers.’ Many times the conductors looked over the car and shook a man to tell him it was his stop. On Sunday, Ford workers would sleep on the way to church.”23