Today in our History – October 30, 1985 - Ossian Sweet was born.
GM – LIF – Today’s American Champion was an African-American physician in Detroit, Michigan. He is known for being charged with murder in 1925 after he and his friends used armed self-defense against a hostile white crowd protesting after he moved into their neighborhood. Stones were thrown at his house, breaking windows. Shots were fired, and one white man was killed and another wounded. He and his wife, and nine associates at the house (including two brothers) were all arrested and charged with murder.
At the first trial, the jury could not agree on verdicts for several defendants. The judge declared a mistrial. The court accepted the defense motion to sever the defendants, and the prosecutor decided to first try Henry Sweet, his youngest brother. After the all-white jury acquitted Henry Sweet, the prosecutor declined to prosecute the rest of the defendants and dismissed the charges against them. Collectively these were known as the Sweet Trials. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) provided assistance for the defense of he and his co-defendants, first hiring Charles H. Mahoney to represent the clients, then hiring the noted attorney Clarence Darrow which brought more national attention and media to the trial.
Born in Florida to a farming family, he went to Wilberforce College for preparatory work and his undergraduate degree. He earned his medical degree from Howard University, also a historically black university. In the years after the trial in Detroit, his daughter Iva, wife Gladys, and brother Henry all died of tuberculosis.
Today in our History – October 30, 1985 - Ossian Sweet was born.
The trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet along with ten family members and friends for murder after a mob attacked his Detroit home caught the nation’s attention in 1925-1926. This trial and a re-trial of Ossian Sweet’s younger brother Henry exposed racial tensions in northern cities in the years following the Great Migration.
Born in Bartow, Florida in 1895, Ossian Sweet and his siblings grew up within the segregated culture of Jim Crow. Sweet left the South to escape racial proscription, earning a medical degree at Howard University and setting up practice in Detroit in 1924. Although African Americans faced de facto segregation in northern cities, Ossian Sweet represented the “new” black middle class of the early 20th century, a professional and entrepreneurial class based within expanding black urban communities. The success of Sweet’s medical practice allowed the doctor to purchase a new home for his wife Gladys and his young daughter.
Although home ownership marked respectability for most Americans in the early 20th century, homes in the 1920s were also racially restrictive, either by custom or by codes within real estate deeds. Aware of ongoing tensions over race but insistent upon his rights to home ownership, Ossian Sweet moved into a new home on Garland Avenue, an all white neighborhood, in September 1925. He brought his brothers Otis and Henry and several friends for protection. When a mob began throwing rocks at the home, someone fired out of a second floor window, killing one mob member and wounding another.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hired Clarence Darrow and a team of lawyers to defend the Sweets, insisting that the case revolved around a man’s right to defend his home. In a case heard by an all-white jury, Detroit prosecutors argued that the shots fired were reckless and that Sweet’s move to the “white” suburbs violated social norms. The first jury proved unable to reach a verdict and a second trial of Henry Sweet, Ossian’s youngest brother, resulted in an acquittal. The NAACP celebrated the case as an example of progress and urban racial liberalism. In the midst of a decade noted for hardening racial attitudes, the Sweet cases were a significant public relations victory for the NAACP. Yet racial tensions remained so heated in Detroit that Ossian Sweet and his family never lived in the home he purchased, and Sweet’s wife and daughter died shortly after the trial. Sweet himself later committed suicide after several decades of frustration. Additionally, restrictive covenants written into real estate deeds continued to prevent African Americans and other minorities from moving into suburban developments until the Supreme Court outlawed such covenants in the Shelley v. Kraemer decision in 1947. Research more about this great American Champion and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!