Ossian Sweet

In September 1909, at age thirteen, Sweet left Florida. His parents wanted their son to obtain an education in the North beyond what had been provided in his segregated Florida schools. He was sent to Wilberforce College in Xenia, Ohio, the first college to be owned and operated by African Americans. It also had preparatory classes to ready students for college-level work.

Established in 1855 by a collaboration of white and black Methodists, the Cincinnati Methodist Church had withdrawn support due to demands of the Civil War. The school struggled financially after most of its paying students, mixed-race children of white Southern planters, were withdrawn.[3][4] The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) paid the debt and took over ownership and operation of the college.

Sweet attended Wilberforce for eight years. During the first four years, he studied in its prep school, learning Latin, history, mathematics, English, music, drawing, philosophy, social and introductory science, and foreign language (probably French) to prepare for college. Sweet took work shoveling snow, stoking furnaces, washing dishes, waiting tables, and working as a hotel bellhop to pay the $118 for his tuition and books. At Wilberforce, he became a charter member of the Delta chapter of the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. He earned a bachelor of science degree at age 25. After Wilberforce, Sweet attended Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., where he earned his medical accreditation.

As a youth Sweet had demonstrated dedication to his schoolwork, and he strove to succeed as a Southern black man in the Jim Crow era. Sweet became a leader in his family; he paved the way for his younger siblings to work hard and become educated as well. Through his education, he aspired to be among what W. E. B. Du Bois called the Talented Tenth: black professionals who would improve life for their people. Du Bois later wrote about Sweet's legal case and held the physician up as an example of achievement to inspire young African-American men.[2]

In July 1919, Sweet was attending Howard University when he witnessed the Washington, D.C. race riot. The capital was among 20 cities that had outbreaks of racial violence in the so-called Red Summer of 1919. These resulted from postwar social tensions and competition for jobs and housing as World War I veterans returned home. There was little help for veterans trying to re-enter the workforce, and both whites and blacks resented their difficulties. Rumors of a white woman being attacked by blacks set off a mob that went to a black neighborhood and attacked people on the street.[5] For the next three days, the riot flared up in different areas of the city, with white men, including many in military uniform, pulling black people from streetcars or attacking them on the street. Black civilians armed themselves and fought back. The riot resulted in the deaths of ten white people, including two police officers, and five black people. It was one of the first racial riots in which more white people died than black.[6] Some 150 persons were wounded, 50 of them severely. President Woodrow Wilson called up the National Guard to suppress the violence, but a fierce rainstorm helped end the mob's enthusiasm as well.

For safety, Sweet and classmates stayed in their fraternity house, four blocks from one area of fighting on H Street NE. He and his fraternity brothers were afraid to go out. Earlier while walking down the street, he had seen a white gang stop a passing streetcar, pull a black passenger to the sidewalk, and "beat him mercilessly".^{[page needed]} This sight stayed with him all his life.

After completing his medical degree, Sweet moved to Detroit, Michigan in the late summer of 1921. He had difficulty finding work at a hospital due to his race, and he worked during the summers at Detroit restaurants. He could see that residents of Black Bottom, a neighborhood consisting of mainly working-class black families, urgently needed medical care. According to Kevin Boyle in Arc of Justice, "rudimentary care could have saved some of them. But Black Bottom didn't get even that".[2]

Sweet saw a chance to practice medicine and help people. He paid a local pharmacy for space for an office. His first client, Elizabeth Riley, feared she had contracted tetanus because her jaw grew stiff. Sweet diagnosed a dislocated jaw rather than infection. He reset the bone, and Riley told neighborhood friends about his practice. His list of patients grew. Sweet gained a position as a medical examiner for Liberty Life Insurance, "an appointment that assured him a steady stream of patients he might not have otherwise have acquired".[2]

Sweet married Gladys Mitchell in 1922. Born in Pittsburgh, she grew up in Detroit, a few miles north of Garland Street. She came from a prominent middle-class black family.

In 1923, Sweet temporarily left his practice for further medical studies in Vienna and Paris; his wife accompanied him. He attended lectures by noted physicians and scientists, including Madame Curie. In Paris, he and his wife were treated as equals by the native French people and found it a kind of freedom. They encountered prejudice only at the American Hospital, which refused to admit his pregnant wife because of discrimination by white patients. On May 29, 1924, Gladys gave birth to a baby girl named Marguerite, whom they later called Iva. Sweet was furious that the American Hospital had "imperiled the health, and perhaps the life of Gladys and Iva".

By June 21, 1924, the Sweets returned to Detroit. Sweet became affiliated with Dunbar Hospital, Detroit's first hospital founded to serve the black community. According to Boyle, Sweet earned the respect of his colleagues at Dunbar. Having saved enough money, he purchased a house at 2905 Garland Street in an all-white neighborhood.

Sweet liked the appearance and size of the house, and what its location represented as a good neighborhood. Most African Americans in Detroit still lived in Black Bottom, but those who prospered moved to better neighborhoods, which Sweet wanted for his own family. Also, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had just been revived in Detroit after two years of inactivity. Members were organizing to challenge the city's well-defined residential color line. It seemed to be the ideal time if he wanted to buy a house in a better neighborhood.

The Sweets and their friends and family were tried for murder before Frank Murphy, who many considered to be one of the more progressive judges in the city. With the media working the city into a frenzy, Murphy denied the defendants' appeal to have the case dismissed. But Sweet and the other accused parties remained hopeful. When word of the mass arrest reached James Weldon Johnson, general secretary of the NAACP, he correctly predicted that the case could affect the civil rights struggle for African Americans.

The NAACP assisted Sweet and the other defendants in obtaining the money and support necessary for a defense at trial. The Detroit NAACP asked Johnson to send investigator Walter White to gain more information about the case. As the organization's funds were limited, it had to assess which cases to assist. They based their decision on the potential media visibility of the cases, as well as which trials would help further African Americans as a race and inspire social change, should the NAACP win. After deliberation, the NAACP supported the defendants in the Sweet trials, one of three major cases that the organization supported that year. The NAACP hired Charles H. Mahoney, a renowned African American lawyer from Detroit, Michigan, to represent the defendants.[9]

As September passed, life in the Wayne County Jail became slightly more comfortable for Sweet and the others. They received a steady stream of visitors, including Sweet's father, the elder Henry Sweet. On October 6, Gladys Sweet was released on bail provided by friends of her parents, to the relief of her husband.

In early October, the NAACP invited Clarence Darrow to join the Sweets' defense team, alongside Mahoney.[9] They expected that Darrow's national reputation as one of the most brilliant defense attorneys in the US would attract desired publicity to the trial and its issues. Darrow accepted, and on October 15 the NAACP announced he would be taking control of the defense. By the time of the trial, charges had been dropped against three of the original eleven defendants.

On the morning of Friday, October 30, Clarence Darrow was ready for trial. An all-white jury was seated. By the end of November, and after long deliberations, most members of the jury came to an agreement that the eight remaining defendants should be acquitted; there were, however, a few holdouts. At this point, Judge Murphy dismissed the hung jury and declared a mistrial.

Sweet and Gladys expected to head back to court within a few weeks, but there were delays. The court accepted Darrow's motion to have the trial of the defendants severed, with each to be tried separately. Sweet's youngest brother Henry was to be tried first. Almost three weeks after the announced trial date, the second trial started on Monday, April 19, 1926. Another all-white jury had been seated. After the jury acquitted Henry Sweet, the prosecuting attorney chose to dismiss the charges against the remaining seven defendants, including Sweet, as he concluded he was unlikely to gain conviction.