Ossian Sweet facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ossian Sweet
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| Born | October 30, 1895 Bartow, Florida, U.S.
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| Died | March 20, 1960 (aged 64) |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Internal medicine |
| Institutions | Dunbar Hospital |
Ossian Sweet (born October 30, 1895 – died March 20, 1960) was an African-American doctor from Detroit, Michigan. He became well-known in 1925 when he and his friends were charged with murder. This happened after they defended themselves against an angry white crowd. The crowd was protesting because Dr. Sweet, who was Black, had moved into a mostly white neighborhood.
Stones were thrown at his house, breaking windows. Shots were fired from the house, and one white man was killed, and another was hurt. Dr. Sweet, his wife, and nine other people in the house were arrested and charged with murder.
At the first trial, the jury could not agree on a decision, so the judge stopped the trial. Later, the court decided to try each person separately. Dr. Sweet's youngest brother, Henry Sweet, was tried first. An all-white jury found Henry Sweet not guilty. After this, the prosecutor decided not to continue with the charges against the other people, including Dr. Sweet. These events became known as the Sweet Trials.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a group that works for civil rights, helped with the defense. They first hired Charles H. Mahoney and then the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow. This brought a lot of national attention to the case.
Ossian Sweet was born in Florida to a farming family. He went to Wilberforce University and Howard University, which are both historically Black colleges. He earned his medical degree from Howard. After the trial, his daughter Iva, his wife Gladys, and his brother Henry all sadly died from tuberculosis, a serious illness at the time.
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A Doctor's Journey
Ossian Sweet was born in 1895 in Bartow, Florida. He was the second son of Henry Sweet and Dora Devaughn. In 1898, his father bought a farm in Bartow, where the family lived in a small farmhouse. Ossian was one of ten children, and they worked hard on the farm.
Getting an Education
In September 1909, when he was thirteen, Ossian left Florida. His parents wanted him to get a better education than what was available in the segregated schools in Florida. He went to Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. This was the first college in the United States to be owned and run by African Americans. It also had special classes to prepare students for college.
Wilberforce College was started in 1855. After the American Civil War, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) took over the college.
Ossian Sweet studied at Wilberforce for eight years. For the first four years, he attended its prep school, where he learned many subjects like Latin, history, math, and English. He worked hard to pay for his tuition and books. He shoveled snow, stoked furnaces, washed dishes, and worked as a hotel bellhop. At Wilberforce, he became a founding member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. He earned his bachelor's degree at age 25. After Wilberforce, Sweet went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., another historically black college, where he earned his medical degree.
Even as a young man, Sweet was very dedicated to his studies. He wanted to succeed as a Black man in the Jim Crow era, a time when laws created racial segregation. He hoped to be part of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the Talented Tenth. This was a group of Black professionals who would work to improve life for their community.
Witnessing Unrest
In July 1919, while studying at Howard University, Sweet saw the Washington, D.C. race riot. This was one of many racial conflicts that happened in 1919, known as the Red Summer. These conflicts were caused by tensions after World War I, as soldiers returned home and competed for jobs and housing.
During the riot, white mobs attacked Black people on the streets. Black civilians armed themselves and fought back. For safety, Sweet and his classmates stayed inside their fraternity house. He had seen a white gang stop a streetcar and beat a Black passenger. This memory stayed with him throughout his life.
Starting His Career
After finishing medical school, Dr. Sweet moved to Detroit in 1921. It was hard for him to find work at a hospital because of his race. He worked in restaurants during the summers. He saw that the people in Black Bottom, Detroit, a neighborhood mostly of working-class Black families, really needed medical care.
Sweet decided to open his own medical office in a local pharmacy. His first patient, Elizabeth Riley, thought she had a serious infection, but Dr. Sweet diagnosed a dislocated jaw. He fixed it, and she told her friends about him. Soon, his patient list grew. He also became a medical examiner for Liberty Life Insurance, which gave him a steady flow of patients.
Family Life
In 1922, Sweet married Gladys Mitchell. She grew up in Detroit and came from a well-known middle-class Black family.
In 1923, Dr. Sweet and Gladys traveled to Vienna and Paris for him to study medicine further. He attended lectures by famous scientists like Marie Curie. In Paris, they felt treated as equals by the French people, which was a new kind of freedom for them. However, they faced prejudice at the American Hospital, which refused to admit his pregnant wife because of discrimination. On May 29, 1924, Gladys gave birth to their daughter, Marguerite, whom they called Iva.
By June 1924, the Sweets returned to Detroit. Dr. Sweet joined Dunbar Hospital, the first hospital in Detroit founded to serve the Black community. He earned the respect of his fellow doctors there. After saving enough money, he bought a house at 2905 Garland Street, which was in an all-white neighborhood.
Dr. Sweet liked the house and its location. Most African Americans in Detroit still lived in Black Bottom, but those who were successful wanted to move to better neighborhoods. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Detroit was also working to challenge the city's unfair housing rules that separated people by race. It seemed like a good time to buy a house in a different neighborhood.
Housing Discrimination
Restrictive covenants were rules written into property deeds, starting around 1917 in the United States. These rules controlled who could live on the land. They were mainly used to keep lower-income families and racial minorities out of certain neighborhoods. This was done to keep neighborhoods mostly white. Sometimes, these rules directly said that a property could only be sold to a white buyer. Other times, they had rules about poorer buyers, like saying that multiple families could not live on the property. By making rules for low-income families, they also targeted ethnic immigrants and racial minorities, who often had lower-paying jobs.
In 1948, the Supreme Court said that racially restrictive housing covenants were illegal. However, real estate agents, banks, and white homeowners found other ways to keep neighborhoods separated. One way was redlining, which meant banks would not give loans for homes in certain areas, often Black neighborhoods.
For Dr. Ossian Sweet, his doctor's salary meant that rules about low-income families would not stop him from buying a house. But white residents still used other methods to prevent Black people from moving into their neighborhoods.
The Sweet family had a hard time finding a real estate agent and then a family willing to sell them a house. The house they were shown on Garland Street was in a working-class area, but it was close to Dr. Sweet's office and Gladys's parents' home. On June 7, 1925, the Sweets bought the house for $18,500. This was about $6,000 more than the house was truly worth. The Sweets moved into their new home on September 8, 1925.
Dr. Sweet knew that many white residents in the area had strong prejudices against Black people.
Garland Street House Attack
In the spring of 1925, other houses bought by middle-class Black families in white neighborhoods had been attacked. A group called the Waterworks Park Improvement Association was formed by white people who did not want Black people moving into their neighborhoods. They worried about social problems and their home values dropping. Buying a home was already difficult for white homeowners, but it was even harder for non-white buyers. Most Black buyers had to take out many loans to buy a home, taking on more debt than white people with similar incomes.
Many working-class white people in the neighborhood, who earned less money than Dr. Sweet, were angry about his success. Because of a conflict with these neighbors on the night of September 9, 1925, police officers were assigned to stand outside the Sweet house to keep the peace. Dr. Sweet also privately arranged for family and friends to help defend his home if needed. These men included his brothers, Otis and Henry Sweet, and other friends. Gladys Sweet also stayed in the house with them.
When an angry crowd gathered for the second night in front of his home, Dr. Sweet felt that some people in the crowd would cause violence. As the crowd became more restless, they threw stones at the house, breaking an upstairs window. Several of Sweet's friends were armed with guns and were upstairs. Someone fired from the house, hitting two white men. Eric Houghberg was wounded in the leg, and Leon Breiner, who was watching from a porch, was killed.
The eleven African Americans in the house were taken to police headquarters. They were questioned for five hours. All of them were arrested for murder after more questioning. Gladys Sweet was released on bail in early October, but the men were held in jail until the trial ended.
The Trials
The Sweets and their friends and family were tried for murder before Judge Frank Murphy. Many people thought he was a fair judge. The media was making the city very excited about the case. Judge Murphy did not agree to dismiss the case, but Dr. Sweet and the others remained hopeful. When James Weldon Johnson, the head of the NAACP, heard about the arrests, he believed the case could be very important for the civil rights struggle for African Americans.
The NAACP helped Dr. Sweet and the other defendants get the money and support they needed for their defense. The Detroit NAACP asked Walter Francis White to investigate the case. The NAACP had limited money, so they chose cases that would get media attention and help advance civil rights for African Americans. After thinking it over, the NAACP decided to support the Sweet trials. They hired Charles H. Mahoney, a well-known African American lawyer from Detroit, to represent the defendants.
Life in the Wayne County Jail became a little more comfortable for Sweet and the others. They had many visitors, including Sweet's father. On October 6, Gladys Sweet was released on bail provided by her parents' friends, which was a great relief to her husband.
In early October, the NAACP invited Clarence Darrow to join the defense team with Mahoney. They hoped Darrow's national reputation as a brilliant defense lawyer would bring more attention to the trial and its important issues. Darrow accepted, and on October 15, the NAACP announced he would lead the defense. By the time the trial began, charges had been dropped against three of the original eleven defendants.
On Friday, October 30, Clarence Darrow was ready for trial. An all-white jury was chosen. By the end of November, after long discussions, most of the jury members agreed that the eight remaining defendants should be found not guilty. However, a few jurors disagreed. At this point, Judge Murphy declared a hung jury and stopped the trial.
Dr. Sweet and Gladys expected to go back to court soon, but there were delays. The court agreed to Darrow's request to try each defendant separately. Dr. Sweet's youngest brother, Henry, was to be tried first. Almost three weeks after the announced trial date, the second trial began on Monday, April 19, 1926. Another all-white jury was chosen. After the jury found Henry Sweet not guilty, the prosecuting attorney decided to drop the charges against the remaining seven defendants, including Dr. Sweet. He believed he would not be able to get a conviction.
Later Life
Even after Dr. Sweet and his friends were found not guilty, his life remained difficult. Both Gladys and their daughter, Iva, were diagnosed with tuberculosis. Gladys believed she got the disease while in jail. Iva died in 1926, just two months after her second birthday. Over the next two years, Gladys's illness caused her and Sweet to live apart. He returned to an apartment near Dunbar Memorial Hospital. She went to Tucson, Arizona, hoping the drier climate would help her. Tuberculosis was often a deadly disease before antibiotics were developed to treat it.
By mid-1928, Sweet finally got his house back. It had been empty since the shooting. A few months after his wife Gladys returned home, she died of tuberculosis at age twenty-seven. After her death, Sweet bought Garafalo's Drugstore. In 1929, he stopped practicing medicine to run a hospital in the heart of the Black community. He eventually operated a few small hospitals, but none of them did well financially. As he got older, Sweet started to buy land in East Bartow, Florida, like his father had. In 1930, he ran for president of the NAACP branch in Detroit but lost. In the summer of 1939, Sweet learned that his brother Henry also had tuberculosis; six months later, Henry died.
By this time, Sweet's finances were not good. He was not able to fully pay for his land until 1950, when he became the full owner of the house. But he had too much debt to keep it. After selling the house in April 1958 to another Black family, Sweet turned his old office above Garafalo's Drugstore into an apartment. Around this time, Sweet's health began to get worse. He died on March 20, 1960.
Legacy
Ossian Sweet's life and his trial for murder are remembered as important events in the Civil Rights Movement.
- The Ossian H. Sweet House at 2905 Garland was named a Michigan State Historical Site in 1975 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.
- Arthur Beer wrote a play called Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials, which explores the court cases.
- Michigan Legal Milestones placed a special plaque honoring the Sweet Trials at the Wayne County Courthouse, now called the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in Detroit.
- Kevin Boyle wrote a bestselling book called Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004). It won the National Book Award for non-fiction.
- Boyle also adapted his book into a play called The Sweet Trials.
- My Name is Ossian Sweet, a play by Gordon C. Bennett, was published in 2011.
