Negroes and the Gun (38 page)

Detroit was a hot destination in the black migration of the early twentieth century. In 1910, there were fewer than six thousand Negroes in Detroit. By 1925, the city's black population had grown to eighty-one thousand. Along with the influx of Negroes came a rising Klan presence. By 1924, the Klan had thirty-five thousand members in Detroit, and Klansmen vied openly for municipal office. In 1925, the Klan put forward a candidate for mayor and that summer demonstrated its growing political power with spectacle. In a huge field on Detroit's west side, a sea of robes and hoods swayed around a fiery cross, and angry men screeched about the scourge of Negroes, Jews, Catholics, Italians, and other “non-Americans.”
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The Klan surged on anxiety about the building wave of Negro immigration. But for Detroit's Talented Tenth, the increasingly crowded and tumultuous black ghetto of Black Bottom carried things that they too wanted to escape. Some said publicly that the habits and culture that pervaded Black Bottom as southern migrants piled in were part of the reason for increasing racism among whites. The head of the Detroit Urban League, Forrester Washington, with degrees from Tufts and Harvard, criticized that segregation was increasing in the city, “chiefly on account of the loud, noisy, almost nude women in ‘Mother Hubbard's' standing around on the public thoroughfares.” This assessment was complicated by the reception that Ossian Sweet and other black strivers received when they tried to move onto white blocks.
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Ossian Sweet was not the first doctor from Dunbar Memorial Hospital to venture into Detroit's white neighborhoods. And one earlier attempt carried hard lessons that help explain why the first night in his new home, Sweet recruited a squad of men to stay over, and why he carried in two bundles of guns and ammunition. In the summer of 1925, five black families who attempted to move onto white blocks were mobbed and run out by their new neighbors. This tally included Dr. Alexander Turner, a colleague of Sweet's at Dunbar. Turner did not even get to spend the night in his new home on Spokane Avenue. Within hours of moving in, a mob descended, breaking windows and then breaching the door. They trashed the inside and ran off with the few things that the Turners had brought in.

Alexander Turner escaped with his skin, but not his dignity. The story of him cowering on the floor of his flashy, chauffeured Lincoln sedan, and subsequently signing over the deed of his new home to the “neighborhood improvement association” was widely recounted, to the delight of many whites and the horror and shame of blacks.

The image of Turner huddled on the floor of his car haunted Ossian Sweet. Across the community and even among the doctors at Dunbar Memorial Hospital, Turner's retreat was reviled. Perhaps projecting a touch of class envy, one common man criticized, “The dirty coward got down on the floor of his car and made his chauffeur drive through the mob.” Another critic complained that Turner “knew when he moved in he was going to have trouble and he should have gone prepared to stay or die.”

Removed from the terror of the mob, and mostly behind Turner's back, the doctors at Dunbar uniformly proclaimed that they would have made a stand. And their recommended tools and tactics were quite specific. One armchair defender proclaimed, “I have made up my mind what I would do if a mob comes to drive me out of my home. I have a revolver and a shotgun. I have a rifle. I'm not going to attack anyone that does not attack me, but the first individual that comes over to tear up my home, he'll pay with his life.” This was the sentiment in the summer of 1925 when Gladys Sweet pressed her cautious husband to act on the principle that they had a right to live wherever they wanted.

The Sweets bought their new home from Ed and Marie Smith, a nominally white couple who had lived on Garland Avenue for years. Ed Smith was actually a Negro passing for white. But this submerged kinship was no proof against gouging. Like many “first Negroes on my block,” the Sweets paid a monstrous premium for the Garland property, roughly $18,500 for a house worth $12,000 to white people.

The Smiths financed the property because Detroit banks would not lend to Negroes. The banks said that blacks drove down property values and no one could predict how far. Here again the Smiths offered no tribal discount. In fact, just the opposite. Ossian and Gladys put 20 percent down and then agreed to pay off the rest over ten years at 18 percent interest.

The economics were familiar. The first few sellers could demand premium prices. Then, as more Negroes bought in the neighborhood, whites would flee, dumping their homes at fire-sale prices. That fear, the worry that their little piece of the American dream would dissolve under a wave of Negroes, combined with the enduring tribalism that fuels racism, pushed the white people of Garland Avenue to organize and take to the streets, to keep the Negroes out.

Ossian Sweet had his own fears, not just of the violence that snagged Al Turner, but also the humiliation that now hounded him. So as they undertook what should have been the happy task of house buying, Ossian proceeded with the resolve of a man headed into combat. After the first hints that he would not be welcome in the
neighborhood where he had wildly overpaid for a nice home on a neat corner lot, Sweet told a friend, “Well, we have decided we are not going to run. We're not going to look for any trouble, but we're going to be prepared to protect ourselves if trouble arises.” The determination to be a different kind of man from Al Turner would drive Sweet to actions that reverberated nationwide.

By September, the word had spread along Garland Avenue that Negroes had bought the Smith house. Ossian and Gladys actually completed the transaction more than a month earlier. But they decided to delay moving in until after school started, reasoning that fewer kids out on the streets would lessen the chance of a moving-day incident. The strategy seemed to work. The initial move provoked only a clutch of teenage boys running by and yelling “Nigger.”

The Sweets resolved to capture the happiness and conviviality of moving into a new home. Two of Gladys's friends, her maid-of-honor and another woman, stopped by to compliment the house and hear Gladys's decorating plans. One of Ossian's hospital colleagues stopped by with a gift. Soon the house warmed with compliments and laughter of guests, now including Ossian's brothers Otis and Henry; the chauffer, Joe Mack; and their handyman, Murray. Things must have seemed almost normal because they lost track of time and failed to appreciate the descending menace of nightfall.

As the sun set, a crowd gathered across the street. Four Detroit policemen walked the block and kept the crowd off the walkway directly in front of the house. Now, fully enveloped in nightfall, the crowd grew to about two hundred.
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Sweet called the men upstairs and showed them the guns that he had stowed in the hall closet. They talked about who would stand watch where. They would work in shifts, guns in hand, or close by for those assigned to sleep. But no one really slept. Around midnight, a barrage of stones crashed into the house. Then there was silence. When Gladys looked out the window later that night, the crowd was gone.

The morning was bright and beautiful, oddly cheerful against the previous night's trauma. With two men left to watch the house, Joe Mack drove Ossian and Gladys to shop for furniture and then dropped Ossian off at his office. Sweet worked through a round of patients, then took a call from Hewitt Watson, who had written the insurance policy on the new house. There was some problem with the description of the property and Watson needed to amend the documents. Sweet quickly poured out his tale from the previous night. Watson, unlike some of Sweet's tough-talking hospital friends, immediately volunteered to come over and sit up through the night.

Watson also promised to bring two other agents from the black-owned Liberty Insurance company. Compared to Sweet's colleagues at Dunbar, these three men were relative strangers. It is unclear what motivated their willingness to help. Watson
may have empathized with Sweet because he was also the lone Negro on his block. The other two men, Leonard Morse and Charles Washington, Sweet only knew in passing. Whether they would show up as Watson promised remained to be seen.

That evening as they assembled for dinner, Gladys picked up the phone to a hysterical Edna Butler, her guest from the previous day. Butler had overheard a conversation on the streetcar where a Garland resident explained to the conductor, “Some niggers have moved in and we're going to get rid of them. They stayed there last night but they will be put out tonight.” Brother Henry chimed in with an unfortunate confirmation of the rumor. While he was keeping watch, a beat cop came to the door and warned vaguely, “you better be on your guard.” There had been a meeting last night to plan the details of the coming assault.

Ossian tried to put up a brave front, but he was shaken. Hoping for a display of strength in numbers, he sent his driver to Black Bottom to retrieve their handyman, Norris Murray, on the promise to pay him five dollars to stay at the house again. By the time Mack returned with Murray, the insurance men also had arrived. With his brother Otis and friend William Davis en route, Ossian stepped back from the edge of panic. He tried briefly to act like an ordinary homeowner, inviting the men to sit down at the card table for a couple of hands of bid whist while Gladys put the final touches on dinner.

The veneer of normalcy was obliterated when something heavy crashed into the house. Henry Sweet peeked around the drawn shade and exclaimed, “My God, look at the people!” There were hundreds of them, far more than last night. And tonight, said the rumors, there was a plan of attack, a plan for running them out.

The men dashed upstairs and grabbed rifles, the shotgun, and revolvers. Ossian groped in the closet for one of the revolvers and cartridges. He was unprepared for the effect of adrenaline on his fine motor skills. His hands were shaking so badly that he had difficulty loading the gun.

And then there was calm. The mob did not surge. Whatever had crashed into the house did not explode or catch fire. Sweet thought for a moment that perhaps his colleague Edward Carter was right. These mobs were mainly about intimidation, not action. The idea was a mild comfort and helped Sweet regain his composure. He lay down on the bed, closed his eyes, and relaxed his grip on the revolver.

The brief calm was shattered when a brick crashed through the window. From downstairs someone shouted, “There's someone coming!” Sweet rushed down the stairs, pistol in hand, pushing past Henry, who was headed in the opposite direction, clutching a Winchester rifle. A taxi slowed in front of the house. Before it really stopped, the door flew open. Otis Sweet and William Davies exited at a dead run. Someone in the crowd yelled, “Here's niggers! There they go! Get them!” Otis and William dashed under a hail of stones to the dubious shelter of the bungalow.
They were welcomed in, issued guns, and huddled for cover. They would wish later that they had crouched in the backseat and told the cabbie to drive on.

With rocks and debris crashing down like a hailstorm, Ossian was swept back into fear, pleading to no one really, “What shall I do? What shall I do?” Then, upstairs, another window shattered, followed by two volleys of gunfire
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And out in the crowd, two men fell wounded, one of them fatally.

The police on the scene had multiple problems. One of them, who lived in the neighborhood, would initially testify that it was a calm summer night when the Negroes opened fire on their white neighbors, who were just strolling and enjoying the evening. None of that comported with the difficulty of getting the Sweets through the mob, into police cars, and down to the station. It was only a quick-thinking lieutenant, newly on the scene, who leveled his revolver at the mob, freezing them just long enough to push the Negroes into squad cars.

Ossian Sweet had more than ample warning that buying the house on Garland Avenue was a bad idea. Between January and March 1920, the homes of eight Negro strivers recently purchased in or on the boundary of white neighborhoods were firebombed. But in fuller context, Sweet's decision to buy the house on Garland and protect it with a sack full of guns was not irrational. Yes, he knew about Al Turner being mobbed out of his new home. But he also knew about Aladeine and Fleta Mathies. And that made Sweet's Garland Avenue strategy seem plausible.

The Mathieses were part of the latest wave of southern migrants into Detroit. Just arrived from the Georgia countryside, they went in with another couple, the Burtons, to rent an apartment on the border of Black Bottom and an ethnic white neighborhood. As soon as they moved in, the Klan called, first with a threatening letter demanding that they give up the flat. Then menacing men came over to explain why they did not belong. After that, the mob descended.

Two nights in a row, the men of the house stared down the mob, standing under the porch light, armed with rifles. But this strategy raised obvious problems. The men also had to sleep and work. So it was inevitable that at some point the women would be home alone.

Left on their own early in the week, the wives were shocked into action by shattering glass. On raw instinct, Fleta Mathies grabbed her bedside pistol and fired through the broken window. Police were fast on the scene and arrested Fleta on firearms charges.

The Michigan justice system actually worked for Fleta Mathies. Represented by the former head of the Detroit NAACP, she convinced the court that she feared for her life and had fired the gun in self-defense. On the courthouse steps, Fleta was full of defiance, and a touch of hubris, declaring, “The race needs people who are not
afraid to die to defend their pride.” Whatever the wisdom of that approach, it suggests that Fleta Mathies was playing for higher stakes than her unhappy neighbors. After Fleta's return from jail the threats and midnight attacks ended.

Another incident that Ossian Sweet surely knew about pushed closer to the edge and should have complicated his strategic assessment. Shortly after Al Turner was run out of his home, Vollington Bristol had his own encounter with a mob. Sweet was friends with Bristol. They had arrived in Detroit around the same time. Bristol was a prosperous undertaker who owned several rental properties, including a house on American Avenue that he had rented to a series of troublesome white tenants. Finally, Bristol decided to move into the house himself.
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