Dr. Ossian Sweet was an affluent doctor in Detroit, 1925, after the Great Migration had caught the industrial city unprepared to receive the masses of Blacks from the South. Wanting to get a better life for him and his family than the overpopulated slums blacks were forced to live in, he purchased a house in an all-white house neighborhood of the city. And got armed for defending his household. Soon the home was surrounded by a white mob intending to get the black family out of the area. When somebody from the Sweet house shot a gun and killed a member of the mob, everybody inside the house was arrested for murder.
At the trial, Dr. Sweet said, "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. I had my back against the wall. I was filled with a peculiar fear, the fear of one who knows the history of my race. I knew what mobs had done to my people before."
Sweet’s words on the atrocious past of fear of lynching and white mobs his race had had in the United States were admitted as having influenced the psyche of the occupants of his house.
After reviewing the slavery, the oppression, the white supremacy, Dr. Sweet’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow, a living legend of the practice at the time, declared that African-Americans were owed a debt and obligation by the white race.
“There are persons in the North and South who say a black man is inferior to the white and should be controlled by whites. There are also those who recognize his rights and say he should enjoy them. To me this case is a cross-section of human history. It involves the future and the hope of some of us that the future will be better than the past."
In the end, all charges were dropped against Ossian Sweet and his immediate family. The judge reasoned that the shooting had been in self-defense of his house. Thus, the “a man's home is his castle and that no one has a right to invade it” belief was extended, for the first time, to African- Americans, if only in paper. It was a landmark in the path to the achievement of Civil Rights for blacks, but one that stood isolated in the middle of an era of hatred and injustice.
Clarence Darrow spoke of the trial in a grandiose manner: "Your verdict means something in this case. It means something more than the fate of this boy. It is not often that a case is submitted to 12 men where the decision may mean a milestone in the history of the human race. But this case does. And I hope and trust that you have a feeling of responsibility that will make you take it and do your duty as citizens of a great nation, and as members of the human family, which is better still."
It took a long, suffering time and a painful way.
