Arc Of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin

Description: Arc Of Justice by Kevin Boyle Ossian Sweet, a Negro doctor and grandson of a slave, or one of his defenders, accidentally killed a white man who had threatened them. This book weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweets murder trial into a narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz, speakeasies and assembly lines. Tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and the soon-to-be-legendary violence of a terrible era rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor and grandson of a slave, had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own. Shortly after his arrival a mob gathered outside his house: shots rang out. Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the white men threatening their lives and home. And so it began - a chain of events that brought Americas greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweets murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly recreates the Sweet familys journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the American middle class. Ossian Sweets story, so richly and poignantly captured, is an epic tale of one man trapped by his own life and times - and a landmark episode in the history of modern civil rights. Back Cover In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fist-fights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house. Suddenly shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and home. And so it began-a chain of events that brought Americas greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweets murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet familys journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweets story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his eras changing times. Author Biography Kevin Boyle is a professor of history at Ohio State University. Review "Dr. Ossian Sweet bought a house in a white neighborhood in 1925. Detroit exploded as a result, and a largely forgotten, yet pivotal, civil rights moment in modern American history unfolded. Kevin Boyles vivid, deeply researched Arc of Justice is a powerful document that reads like a Greek tragedy in black and white. The lessons in liberty and law to be learned from it are color blind." --David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W. E. B. Du Bois "Arc of Justice perfectly illustrates why W.E.B. Du Bois insisted that a keen sense of drama and tragedy is the ally, not the enemy, of clear-eyed historical analysis of race in U.S. history. By turns a crime story and a gripping courtroom drama, a family tale and a stirring account of resistance, an evocation of American dreams and a narration of American violence, Boyles study takes us to the heart of interior lives and racist social processes at a key juncture in U.S. history." --David Roediger, Babcock Professor of African American Studies and History, University of Illinois, author of Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past "What a powerful and beautiful book! Kevin Boyle has done a great service to history with Arc of Justice. With deep research and graceful prose, he has taken a single moment, the hot September day in 1925 when Ossian and Gladys Sweet moved into a bungalow on Garland Avenue in Detroit, and from that woven an amazing and unforgettable story of prejudice and justice at the dawn of Americas racial awakening." --David Maraniss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of They Marched Into Sunlight and When Pride Still Mattered "There are many hidden and semi-hidden and half-forgotten markers of the civil rights movement. Kevin Boyles careful, detailed study of a 1925 murder trial in Detroit is one such precursing marker. Arc of Justice is a necessary contribution to what seems like an insoluble moral dilemma: race in America." --Paul Hendrickson, author of Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy "A welcome book on an important case. In Kevin Boyles evocative account, the civil rights saga of Gladys and Ossian Sweet finally has the home it has long deserved." --Philip Dray, author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America "Arc of Justice is one of the most engrossing books I have ever read. It is, at once, a poignant biography, a tour-de-force of historical detective work, a gripping courtroom drama, and a powerful reflection on race relations in America. Better than any historian to date, Kevin Boyle captures the tensions of the Jazz Age: a period that witnessed the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance; the clampdown on immigration and the emergence of an ethnic insurgency; the crystallization of racial segregation both north and south and the rise of the modern civil rights movement. The troubled and exciting history of America in the 1920s comes alive in his vivid portraits of striving black physician Ossian Sweet, charged with murder; Sweets brilliant legal team led by the incomparable Clarence Darrow; his tireless advocates James Weldon Johnson and Walter White; and trial judge and future Supreme Court justice Frank Murphy. Arc of Justice is a masterpiece." --Thomas J. Sugrue, Bicentennial Class of 1940 Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning, Origins of the Urban Crisis Review Quote What a powerful and beautiful book! Kevin Boyle has done a great service to history with Arc of Justice. With deep research and graceful prose, he has taken a single moment, the hot September day in 1925 when Ossian and Gladys Sweet moved into a bungalow on Garland Avenue in Detroit, and from that woven an amazing and unforgettable story of prejudice and justice at the dawn of Americas racial awakening. Excerpt from Book ONE WHERE DEATH WAITS The streets of Detroit shimmered with heat. Most years, autumn arrived the first week of September. Not in 1925. Two days past Labor Day and the sun blazed like July. Heat curled up from the asphalt, wrapped around telephone poles and streetlight stanchions, drifted past the unmarked doors of darkened speakeasies, seeped through windows thrown open to catch a breeze, and settled into the citys flats and houses where it lay, thick and oppressive, as afternoon edged into evening.1 Detroit had been an attractive place in the nineteenth century, a medium-size midwestern city made graceful by its founders French design. Five broad boulevards radiated outward like the spokes of a wheel-one each running east, northeast, north, northwest, and west-from the compact downtown. Detroits grand promenades, these boulevards were lined with the mansions of the well-to-do, mammoth stone churches, imposing businesses, and exclusive clubs. Between the boulevards lay Detroits neighborhoods, row after row of modest single-family homes interspersed with empty lots, waiting for the development that boosters continually claimed was coming but never seemed to arrive.2 The auto boom changed everything. Plenty of cities had automakers in the early days, but Detroit had the young industrys geniuses, practical men seduced by the beauty of well-ordered mechanical systems and fascinated by the challenge of efficiency. German and French manufacturers had invented automobiles in the 1870s. It was Detroits brilliance to reinvent them. In the early days of the twentieth century, the citys aspiring automakers had disassembled the European-made horseless carriages, studying every part, tinkering with the designs, searching for ways to make them work more smoothly and to manufacture them more cheaply. By 1914, when Henry Ford unveiled his restructured Highland Park plant north of downtown, the process was complete. Ford had created a factory as complex as the automobile itself, floor after floor full of machines intricately designed and artfully arranged to make and assemble auto parts faster than anyone thought possible. Three hundred thousand Model Ts rolled out of the factory that year, inexpensive, elegantly simple, utterly dependable cars for ordinary folk like Ford himself.3 Fords triumph triggered the industrial version of a gold rush. Other manufacturers grabbed great parcels of land for factories. The Dodge Brothers, John and Horace, started work on a complex large enough to rival Fords on the northeast side; Walter Chrysler built a sprawling plant on the far reaches of the east side, near the Detroit River; Walter O. Briggs scattered a series of factories across the city. Aspiring entrepreneurs filled the side streets with tiny machine shops and parts plants that they hoped would earn them a cut of seemingly unending profits. The frenzy transformed Detroit itself into a great machine. By 1925, its grand boulevards were shadowed by stark factory walls and canopied by tangles of telephone lines and streetcar cables. Once fine buildings were now enveloped in a perpetual haze from dozens of coal-fired furnaces.4 More than a decade had passed since Henry Ford, desperate to keep his workers on the line, doubled their wages to an unprecedented five dollars a day. Word of Detroits high-paying jobs had shot through Pennsylvania mining camps, British shipyards, Mississippi farmhouses, and peasant villages from Sonora to Abruzzi. Tens of thousands of working people poured into the city, lining up at the factory gates, looking for their share of the machinists dream. Eleven years on, they were still coming. In 1900, when Ford was first organizing his company, Detroit had 285,000 people living within its city limits. By 1925, it had 1.25 million. Only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia were bigger, and Detroit was rapidly closing the gap. "Detroit is Eldorado," wrote an awed magazine reporter. "It is staccato American. It is shockingly dynamic."5 And it was completely overwhelming. While the auto magnates retreated to the serenity of their sparkling new suburban estates, working people struggled to hold on to a sliver of space somewhere in Detroits vast grid of smoke gray side streets. In the center city, where Negroes and the poorest immigrants lived, two, three, or more families shared tiny workmens cottages built generations before. Single men jammed into desperately overcrowded rooming houses, sleeping in shifts so that landlords could double the fees they collected for the privilege of eight hours rest on flea-infested mattresses. Beyond the inner ring, a mile or so from downtown, the nineteenth-century city gradually gave way to a sprawl of new neighborhoods. First came vast tracts of flats and jerry-rigged houses for those members of the working class lucky enough to find five-dollar-a-day jobs. Immigrants clustered on the east side of the city, the native-born on the west side, all of them paying premium prices for homes slapped up amid factories, warehouses, and railroad yards or along barren streetscapes. Workers neighborhoods blended almost imperceptibly into areas dominated by craftsmen and clerks, Detroits solid middle strata, who struggled mightily to afford the tiny touches that set them apart from the masses: a bit of distance from the factory gates, a patch of grass front and back. Finally, out near the suburbs borders lay pockets of comfortable middle-class houses, miniature versions of the mock Tudors and colonial revivals favored by the upper crust, so beyond the means of most Detroiters it wasnt even worth the effort of dreaming about them.6 Garland Avenue sat squarely in the middle range, four miles east of downtown, halfway between the squalor of the inner city and the splendor of suburban Grosse Pointe. Despite its name, it wasnt an avenue at all. It was just a side street, two miles of pavement running straight north from Jefferson Avenue, Detroits southeastern boulevard, to Gratiot Avenue, the northeastern boulevard. In 1900, Garland was nothing more than a plan on a plat book, but developers had raced to fill it in. To squeeze out every bit of space, they cut the street into long blocks, broken by cross streets that could serve as business strips. Then they sliced each block into twenty or thirty thin lots 35 feet wide and 125 feet deep. A few plots were sold to families who wanted to build their own homes, the way working people always used to do. On the remaining lots, developers built utilitarian houses for the middling sort: long, narrow wood-frame, two-family flats, one apartment up, another down, each with its own entrance off a porch that ran the length of the front. Behind each house was a small yard, barely big enough for a garden, leading out to the alleyway; in front was a postage-stamp lawn running from the porch to the spindly elms planted at curb-side. Only a few feet of open space separated one building from another, a space so small that, from the right angle, the houses seemed to fade one into another, much as one machine seemed to fade into another along an assembly line.7 The people who lived up and down the street didnt have the education, the credentials, or the polish of the lawyers, accountants, and college professors who lived in the citys outer reaches. But they had all the attributes necessary to keep themselves out of the inner city, and thats what mattered most. Of course, they were white, each and every one. The vast majority of them were American born, and the few foreigners living on the street came from respectable stock; they were Germans, Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotsmen, not the Poles or Russians or Greeks who filled so much of the east side. Some of them were native Detroiters, and virtually all the rest had come to the city from other northern states, so they knew how to make their way in the big city: they understood how to work their way into the trades, how to use a membership in the Masons or the Odd Fellows to pry open employment-office doors, how to flash a bit of fast talk to sway a reluctant buyer.8 Such advantages helped the people of Garland find solid jobs, a blessing in a city that burned through workingmen, then tossed them aside. A minority of the men worked as salesmen, teachers, and shop clerks, the sort of jobs that didnt pay particularly well but kept the hands clean. A few more were craftsmen, the elite of the working class, trained in metal work or carpentry or machine repair and fiercely proud of the knowledge they carried under their cloth caps. Many more had clawed their way to the top rung of factory labor. They were foremen, inspectors, supervisors, men who spent their days in the noise and dirt of the shop floor making sure that others did the backbreaking, mind-numbing work required to keep shiny new cars flowing out of the factories.9 Most of the women worked at home. They rose early to make husbands and boarders breakfasts sufficient to steel them for a day of work, then bustled children off to school-the youngest to Julia Ward Howe Elementary, a brooding two-story brick building at the intersection of Garland and Charlevoix, three blocks north of Jefferson; the older ones to Foch Middle School and Southeastern High. Mornings and afternoons were spent shopping and sweeping and washing clothes streaked with machine oil and alley dirt. Their evenings were devoted to cooking and cleaning dishes while their husbands relaxed with the newspaper or puttered out in the garage. No matter how many advantages the families along Garland Avenue enjoyed, though, it was always a struggle to hold on. Housing prices had spiraled upward so fearfully Details ISBN0805079335 Author Kevin Boyle Short Title ARC OF JUSTICE Pages 448 Language English ISBN-10 0805079335 ISBN-13 9780805079333 Media Book Format Paperback Illustrations Yes Year 2005 Imprint Owl Books,U.S. Country of Publication United States Place of Publication New York Residence MA, US Birth 1960 Subtitle A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age DOI 10.1604/9780805079333 AU Release Date 2005-12-08 NZ Release Date 2005-12-08 US Release Date 2005-12-08 UK Release Date 2005-12-08 Publisher Henry Holt & Company Inc Publication Date 2005-12-08 DEWEY 323 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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