“Not Guilty,” Dr. Sweet Tells Jury

Nettie George Speedy (1878–1957)
From Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle (Part Two: 1919–1976)

Interesting Links

“Nettie Speedy: Female Journalist, Founder of Chicago Women’s G.C.” (Jacob Levin, USGA)

“The People and Places of Black Bottom, Detroit” (Ken Coleman, Humanities)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Ordeal in Levittown,” David B. Bittan
• “An Army with Banners,” James Weldon Johnson
• “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Ida B. Wells
• “The Ordeal of Bobby Cain,” George McMillan

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Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle 1876–1976
Two-volume boxed set | 1,655 pages
List Price: $80.00
Web store price: $60.00

A photo of Dr. Ossian Sweet’s two-story brick home on the East Side of Detroit, taken in 1958, the year Sweet sold the home to another family. The home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. (Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

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In late May 1901, Fred Rochelle, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager who lived in Bartow, Florida, was accused of the rape and murder of a white woman after an eyewitness identified him as the man, “35 years of age,” who had been seen near the body after the crime. The sheriff of a nearby town arrested him and turned the prisoner over to a mob, which brought him back to Bartow. Five-year-old Ossian Sweet lived nearby and, as Kevin Boyle summarizes in Arc of Justice, Sweet would recall to friends and colleagues for the rest of his life that he “could pick out individuals amid the throng, ordinary people from the white side of town—the jeweler, the livery owner, the butcher—their faces alight with anticipation as they waited for the moment when the torch met the pyre and the flames began to lick at Rochelle's battered body.”

When Sweet turned thirteen, his parents sent him to the preparatory school operated by Wilberforce College in Ohio, where he spent more than eight years and received his bachelor’s degree. He went on to earn his medical accreditation at Howard University and lived in a fraternity near campus in 1919 during the Red Summer riots in Washington. He moved to Detroit two years later to set up practice as a family doctor for patients in the city’s increasingly crowded Black Bottom neighborhood. In the spring of 1925, looking for a larger home for his family, he purchased a two-story house in an all-white neighborhood.

Between 1910 and 1925, the Black population in Detroit skyrocketed from barely more than 5,000 to well over 75,000. Any attempt by Black residents to expand beyond the boundaries of the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods were met with resistance, and several incidents during the summer of 1925 hinted at the troubles to come. In June, Alexander Turner, a surgeon and one of the founders of Dunbar Memorial Hospital, moved into a home with his wife; within hours they were forced to flee after, at gunpoint, they signed the deed to their home over to a local homeowners’ association. Vollington and Agnes Bristol operated a funeral home; they owned property in a white neighborhood but could not find satisfactory white tenants and were not able to rent to Black tenants because of threats. In July, the day after Vollington Bristol himself moved in, a white mob attacked the house but were driven back by police. John Fletcher and his family also moved into their new home in July; the following night a white mob bombarded the house with chunks of coal until Fletcher opened fire and wounded a fifteen-year-old boy. He was taken to police headquarters and charged with assault, then released on bail and permitted to remove his belongings from the house. The assault charge was later dismissed.

Ossian Sweet knew the affected families: he worked with Turner at Dunbar Memorial, and he and Vollington had both been bellhops at the Fairfax Hotel when they first moved to Detroit. Yet, with considerable difficulty and expense, he had purchased his home prior to the incidents, and on September 8 he and his family worriedly arrived in their new home. The next night a crowd gathered, rocks were thrown at the house and through windows, and a white man was killed by shots fired from the house. All the events in Sweet’s life had led up to this moment—the lynching of Fred Rochelle, the riots in Washington, the treatment of his friends, and more. During the subsequent trial, Sweet described his “state of mind at the time of the shooting”:

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, with my back against the wall. I was filled with a peculiar fear—the kind no one could feel unless they had known the history of our race.

Sweet, his wife, Gladys, his two brothers, Otis and Henry, and seven family friends were arrested, charged with first-degree murder, and (except for Gladys, who was released on bond) jailed until the trial in November. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hired Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays to work alongside local attorney Charles H. Mahoney.

The first trial ended with a hung jury. Five months later, after Darrow requested that the defendants be tried separately, the state opted to begin with Henry, the doctor’s youngest brother. James Weldon Johnson, secretary of the NAACP since 1920, attended the trial and recounted in his memoir, Along This Way, the experience of hearing sixty-eight-year-old Darrow present his closing arguments:

He talked for nearly seven hours. I sat where I could catch every word and every expression of his face. It was a wonderful performance. Clarence Darrow, the veteran criminal lawyer, the psychologist, the philosopher, the humanist, the apostle of liberty, was bringing into play every bit of skill, drawing on all the knowledge, and using every power that he possessed upon the twelve men who sat in front of him. At times his voice was as low as though he was coaxing a child. At such times, the strain upon the listeners to catch his words made them appear rigid. At other times his words came like flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. He closed his argument with a plea that left no eyes dry. I walked over to him to express my appreciation and thanks. His eyes were wet. He placed his hands on my shoulders. I tried to stammer out a few words, but broke down and wept. The jury brought in a verdict of “Not guilty,” and the Association had won another victory in its fight to maintain the common rights of citizenship for the Negro.

The prosecutor, Robert Toms, dropped the charges against the remaining defendants. The case became a milestone. As Darrow told the press afterwards, “The verdict meant simply that the doctrine that a man's house is his castle applied to the black man as well as the white man. If not the first time that a white jury had vindicated this principle, it was the first time that ever came to my notice.”

Both trials had been front-page news in Detroit and across the nation. Nettie George Speedy, known as the “Dean of Women Journalists” by her all-male peers in the Chicago Press Club, covered the first trial for The Chicago Defender. (An avid golfer, she also founded the Chicago Women's Golf Club.) We present below her article describing the cross-examination of Ossian Sweet and the testimony provided by other witnesses; it is included in the new Library of America volume Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle (Part Two: 1919-1976), which has just arrived from the printer.

Notes: In 1928 Ossian Sweet's wife, Gladys, and their two-year-old daughter both died of tuberculosis, which Gladys may have contracted while she was being held in the Wayne County jail.

The trial judge, Frank Murphy, later became mayor of Detroit, 1930–33, Democratic governor of Michigan, 1937–38, attorney general of the United States, 1939–40, and an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1940 until his death in 1949. The end of Speedy’s article refers to a booklet, which the prosecutor tried to paint as an incendiary “race pamphlet.” It is Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, published by the NAACP in April 1919. To defend the publication, the defense called to the stand Walter F. White, assistant executive secretary of the NAACP, to point out that among the members of the organization that sponsored the booklet were Ira W. Jayne, a Wayne County circuit judge; Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford and president of the Ford Motor Company, and Joseph J. Crowley, one of the founders of Crowley’s, a large department store in downtown Detroit.

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Detroit, Mich ., Nov. 27. — The merciless, pitiless and gruelling cross-examination to which Dr. Ossian H. Sweet was subjected for two days by Prosecutor Robert Toms failed to shake his story which he had told on direct examination conducted by Arthur Garfield Hayes. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.
Teachers: Note that the “n-word” appears several times in the trial testimony.