| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. By Kevin Boyle. (New York: Holt, 2004. 415 pp. $26.00, ISBN 08050-7145-8.)

Kevin Boyle's account of the murder trials of Ossian Sweet and ten other African Americans (including his wife and brother) for the murder of a white man during a mob attack on the Sweet home is a story reminiscent of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925). It reminds one of the aspirations of a working-class youth who struggled to make the middle class and who was destroyed in the process, of the senseless deaths of the characters at the center of the tale, and of the lives ruined in their wake. It is an epic tale, which not only details the sweep of Ossian's life from boyhood poverty in rural Florida to college at Wilberforce University in Ohio, to Howard Medical School, to successful practice in Detroit, to postgraduate study in Paris, and then to a white neighborhood in Detroit. It also uses Ossian's life as the organizing principle for a study of race and violence during the Progressive Era. We learn in great detail about the Sweet family from the days of slavery, as well as about events well beyond Sweet's family, such as the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings; the ideas of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois; and the power of such newspapers as the Chicago Defender.

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