Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin G. BoyleMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a detailed study of the life of Ossian Sweet. Sweet was an American physician in Detroit, Michigan, noted for his armed self-defense in 1925 of his newly purchased home in a white Detroit neighborhood against a racist mob trying to force him out. This lengthy account is his life from Bartow, FL to his lonely suicide March 20, 1960, in his office apartment in Detroit, MI. Beside details of the day Sweet, family members, and friends found themselves in an armed stand-off with the crowd (I am sure some details are up for debate), much is told about this was the genesis of the nascent NAACP's legal defense fun and experience, leading up to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. Also, there is the background of frumpy idealist attorney Clarence Darrow who came in to fight for Sweet et al in the first and subsequent trials. Much of this is approaching a scholarly level of detail, which made this a longer time in reading than I expected, but a very important chapter of U.S. and Detroit history.
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