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Book Review
| Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004. Pp. 415. $26 (ISBN 0-8050-7145-8).
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| In Arc of Justice historian Kevin Boyle promises a "saga of race, civil rights, and murder in the Jazz Age" and delivers just that. Boyle delves into an extraordinary case of residential segregation in 1925 Detroit and situates it, rightly, at the intersection of the Great Migration, the rise of the NAACP, the Harlem Renaissance, the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the burgeoning racism in the northern cities of 1920s America. |
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Set in the familiar context of racial strife and racial uplift in early twentieth-century America, Arc of Justice recovers an important moment in the history of American race relations. At the center of Boyle's saga is the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet, his wife Gladys, and nine others, all African Americans, accused of murdering a white man outside the Sweets' home. When the Sweets moved into their new home in a white neighborhood in Detroit, they soon found themselves in the midst of a near-riot as hundreds of white neighbors gathered outside the house. Before long the crowd began damaging the home and one of the eleven people in the house (the Sweets and others who had come to help them protect the home) fired a gun into the crowd and killed a man. The trial that ensued focused on one major issue: Had the person wielding the gun acted in self-defense? Or had Sweet, who had stockpiled guns and invited people over to help him protect his home, provoked his neighbors? |
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The Sweets' case came to national attention when James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the NAACP in 1925, heard about it. Johnson had been looking for a case to illustrate to the public the growing problem of residential segregation and the Sweets' case provided him the opportunity to do just that (205). Boyle offers a detailed, riveting account of the trial itself, employing local newspaper accounts, personal correspondence of the trial's key figures, and trial records, among other sources. Boyle reveals the effort by local police to cover up the existence of a mob outside the Sweets' house and deftly demonstrates how Clarence Darrow, brought in by the NAACP to represent the defendants in the trial, brilliantly undermined the cover up. Although the first trial ended in mistrial, Darrow successfully defended Sweet's brother in what was to be the first of the individual retrials of each defendant. After this success, however, none of the other defendants were tried again. |
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Throughout the book, Boyle painstakingly constructs the context of the case at the local and national levels. If these stories are familiar, Boyle brilliantly recounts them to reveal how they all converged in the trial itself. Boyle traces the history of W. E. B. DuBois and the Niagara Movement, and the formation of the NAACP. He examines the growth of residential segregation in northern cities whose African American populations grew as a result of the Great Migration and the efforts of the NAACP to combat this segregation both locally and nationally. Boyle explores local politics in Detroit, heavily affected by the growth of the KKK there. As well he recounts the actions of leaders and activists in the black community in Detroit, whom Boyle refers to as Detroit's "Talented Tenth." While Boyle handles much of this history with ease, his treatment of the "Talented Tenth" as if it was an organization rather than an ideal is confusing. |
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Beyond the trial and the events surrounding it, Arc of Justice tells the very human story of Doctor Ossian Sweet, the man at the center of the trial. Sweet was the grandson of slaves who lived to see freedom, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow, and the son of African American landowners who worked hard to send their children north to find a better life for themselves. Educated at Ohio's Wilberforce University and earning a medical degree at Howard University, Sweet achieved his parents' dream for his future and, as a result of the trial, became "a national symbol of New Negro militancy" (245). Boyle is careful to present Sweet in his complexity. For example, readers learn that an average student, Sweet got into medical school because WWI minimized the competition; he chose to become a doctor particularly for the status it afforded him; and when he achieved his success, he became arrogant. When Sweet bought a house in a white neighborhood, it was another step toward securing his status among Detroit's African American elite. As Boyle puts it, Sweet "stood on the fringes of New Negro activism ... " (137). Sweet's story is compelling precisely because he was a reluctant figure in America's civil rights history, a man unwittingly caught up in the maelstrom of violence, racism, and hope that characterized America in 1925. |
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Arc of Justice is a thoroughly researched and beautifully written book. Boyle's seamless storytelling underscores for readers the centrality of the realm of law in history. |
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| Elizabeth Regosin
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| St. Lawrence University |
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