Negroes and the Gun (39 page)

Bristol outstripped his white neighbors on every measure of economics and education. But the neighborhood was only willing to tolerate him as a landlord, not as a resident. After the standard progression from nasty notes to a neighborhood delegation, the mob appeared. Luckily, Vollington Bristol had enough standing to secure a contingent of police guards who resisted the entreaty to “step aside just for five minutes,” while the neighborhood men took care of things. Then, as the mob heated up, the police fired warning shots into the air. Someone from the mob fired back. That was enough to precipitate a call for reinforcements that finally sent the crowd running.

Later that night, though, after word of the incident had spread across black Detroit, there was evidence of a now-familiar turn of the black tradition of arms. After midnight, police were still patrolling the area and stopped a group of eight black men on their way to Vollington Bristol's home. They were all armed and were candid about their intent to defend Bristol against further attacks.

Thinking about these incidents, Ossian Sweet might have calculated that a strong show of force would quell hostile neighbors and help him endure the first dangerous days in his new home without any of the more worrisome hazards of gunplay. On the other hand, he also had to consider the July 9 mobbing of John Fletcher on Stoepel Avenue, just a few days after the attacks on Vollington Bristol and only a few blocks away.

This time the mob had a special temptation. The house next to Fletcher's had received a fresh delivery of coal. Just after nightfall, Fletcher's new neighbors appeared and took full advantage of the shiny black missiles. Under a barrage that broke out every window of the house, and amidst venomous cries of “Lynch him,” Fletcher laid down rifle fire from an upstairs window, wounding one man in the hip.

In his defense, Fletcher told the simple truth, “I was afraid for my life,” and ultimately no indictments were issued. What Sweet did not appreciate is that both Fletcher's case and Fleta Mathies's case were assigned to judges on the local court's progressive wing. These men were far more sympathetic to the plight of Detroit's black population than many of their brethren.
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Sweet might actually have been emboldened by the response of the NAACP to this spate of mobbings. From New York, James Weldon Johnson penned an angry missive that was circulated nationwide. “Negroes,” he said, “have been driven from their homes by mobs [in Detroit], those who refused to go having defend and themselves in absence of adequate police protection. We now have the spectacle of white . . . newspapers taking sides with the mob and warning Negroes that if they cleave to their citizenship rights they are inviting a ‘race riot.'”

These episodes were a high priority for the NAACP. James Weldon Johnson was already focused on the case of Lola Turner, a black woman who was chased out of white neighborhood in Los Angeles by a mob. Were it not for Ossian Sweet, Lola Turner might have been the rallying point for national protest and fundraising.

For James Weldon Johnson, the Sweets presented the possibility of fulfilling his long ambition of a standing legal defense fund that could bankroll important litigation without taking the organization to the brink of insolvency. He imagined a fund of $50,000 raised from the contributions from thousands of black folk. Ossian Sweet would never fully appreciate the politics, egos, and strategic tight ropes that James Weldon Johnson and Walter White navigated between the initial work by the Detroit branch and the decision of the national office to hire the legendary Clarence Darrow, storied defender of Debs and Scopes.

Through reports of their courage and stoicism, the Sweets became national heroes, at least among Negroes. From the jailhouse, Ossian declared, “for a good cause and for the dignity of my people, I'm willing to stay indefinitely in the cell and be punished. . . . I denounce the theory of Ku Kluxism and uphold the theory of manhood with a wife and a tiny baby to protect.” Ossian's father, Henry, who traveled from Florida in support of his sons, grew the legend with a colorful and poignant response to Ossian's apology for embarrassing the family by ending up in jail. Henry comforted his sons and commended Ossian's violent stand, telling him, “You got nothing to be embarrassed about. Ain't nothing in the woods that runoff from family but a rabbit. All you were doing was fighting for your family.”
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The case resonated so strongly among Negroes that it fueled a fundraising juggernaut. When the NAACP took on the case, resources were so thin that it was unclear how the $5,000 fee demanded by the initial team of lawyers would be paid. Funds on hand had been nearly exhausted by another case where the association defended a group of sharecroppers who were convicted of murder under circumstances that seemed like self-defense.

As word of the case spread, so did the community support. After Darrow wrestled the first prosecution to a mistrial, a nationwide tour feting Ossian and Gladys raised more than $75,000—enough to pay for the Sweet's defense, with surplus left to seed the long-discussed and soon-legendary NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In the black press, the case was compelling copy and was plastered across the front pages nationwide. The
Chicago Defender
repeatedly played the case as its lead story, and publisher Robert Abbott wrote a blistering editorial proclaiming, “If it is true that Dr. Sweet fired into the crowd of whites to keep them from rushing his home, he was certainly within his rights and should be supported by every law-abiding citizen in Detroit. White people in Detroit, as well as other cities, may as well know now as later that our race will no longer run from our homes because they object to us.”
36

The
Washington Daily American
applauded Sweet's violent stand, declaring, “We have learned through the years since slavery passed to fight our enemies with their own weapons. If physical violence is offered we kill in self-defense.” A Houston paper exhorted “as goes Dr. Sweet so goes the American Negro.” Harlem's
Amsterdam News
called it “possibly the most important court case the Negro has ever figured in the history of the United States. [Sweet represented] the spirit of unity the Negro must more and more evidence if he is to survive. He must face death if he is to live. He must be willing to die fighting when he is right! When police authorities fail to protect him and his family; when courts of law desert him; when his own government fails to take a stand on his behalf, he faces death anyway, and may just as well die fighting!”
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The
Arizona Times
, with evidently little worry about advocating political violence, said, “The Sweet case has positively proved to the world at large that the American Negro will fight and stand up for his rights as a citizen until every ounce of blood is spilled from his veins.” The editor of the
Cleveland Call
, who witnessed the trial, actually compared Sweet's stoic fearlessness to Christ, reporting that Sweet on the stand was “like one other scene two thousand years ago when One Who Opened Not His Mouth was being baited.”

One of the most searing critiques of the case came from W. E. B. Du Bois. Writing for the
Crisis
, Du Bois contrasted the courage of Ossian Sweet to the cowardice Alexander Turner. Sweet, said Du Bois, was a model of manhood for the Talented Tenth. On the decision to fight or flee from the mob, Du Bois prodded the century's New Negroes, “which example would you follow if you were free black and 21.” James Weldon Johnson drew the broad lesson from the case, “If in Detroit the Negro was not upheld in the right to defend his home . . . then no decent Negro home anywhere in the United States will be safe.” It was a simple and powerful point that spoke to the hopes and fears of countless ordinary folk.
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At New York's Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Sweet case consumed the congregation and pushed local concerns off the agenda. Even some of the white press picked up and advanced the Sweets' basic claims. The
New York World
characterized the case as one of clear, legitimate self-defense, declaring that “the Negroes
had a right to protect their own lives by firing on those who sought to kill them. The law of America is presumably broad enough to cover the Negro as well as the white man.”
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Fig. 6.3. Dr. Ossian Sweet. (Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.)

The case of
State v. Sweet et al.
ended in the acquittal of eight defendants and a mistrial for Ossian, his brother Henry, and Leonard Morse. The victory was a testament to, well . . . to what? The brilliance of Clarence Darrow? The strong hand of
fate? Perhaps to the conscience and humanity of the twelve white men who sat in judgment? Surely it was some of each, although who knows how much. And what to make of the report from snoops at the jury-room door who heard one juror say, “I'll sit here forever before I condemn those niggers”?

Ultimately, it was the simple, earnest testimony of Ossian Sweet that captured the scene. He recounted somberly the mob of hundreds outside his home, stones crashing through windows, and the venomous yelps, “Here's Niggers, Get them, Get them.” Asked by Darrow to describe his state of mind at that moment, Sweet conjured the collective consciousness of the race.

I realized I was facing the same mob that had hounded my people through 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 fear of one who knows the history of my race.
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For Darrow, it was left to seal the message, to tug on the pride and shame and guilt of the jurors. His summation, in the marathon style of the day, ran for hours. One observer said that he had never believed the stories that Darrow could make men weep, but now he had seen it. We don't know whether Walter White wept under the power of Darrow's summation. But White clearly had tremendous respect and affection for Darrow. So much so that he gave his firstborn son the middle name Darrow.

The magic of Darrow was that he had something for everyone. It was the same basic message conveyed in multiple cultural dialects. Although it is hard to know precisely what within the six-hour summation especially appealed to pivotal jurors, for black folk there was a crucial moment where Darrow articulated the longing of the race for their own Leonidas. And there he sat, said Darrow, in the person of Dr. Ossian Sweet, who had seen his people

tied to stakes in free America and a fire built around living human beings until they roasted to death; he knew they had been driven from their homes in the North and in great cities and here in Detroit, and he was there not only to defend himself and his house and his friends but to stand up for the integrity and independence of the abused race . . . a hero who fought a brave fight against fearful odds, the fight for right, for justice, for freedom, and his name will live and he will be honored when most of us are forgotten.
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Calculations were made for a subsequent retrial, but the results would be anticlimactic. And until then, at least in the black community, the Sweets were feted as national heroes, and exemplars of the New Negro. While the idea of the New Negro had
appeared at least as early as T. Thomas Fortune's 1889 declaration that the old shuffling generation was done, Ossian Sweet showed the New Negro standing and fighting and actually prevailing inside a system that had for so long been rigged against him.

The demands for Sweet to appear around the country were so overwhelming that the NAACP took over the scheduling, declining the countless lesser requests in favor of a high-profile tour starting in New York City at the association's annual meeting. At the Lenox Avenue Baptist Church, 1,500 black folk sprang to their feet when Ossian and Gladys entered the room. They clapped and cheered and cried, and finally stopped only because the old people had to sit down.

From New York, the NAACP sent the Sweets on a tour of the largest branches. More than 2,500 turned out in Philadelphia, 1,200 in Pittsburgh, and 2,000 in Cleveland. Feeding on the adulation of the crowd, Ossian grew beyond himself. The man who thought hard about walking away from the Garland Avenue deal, who trembled loading his revolver, grew positively heroic, intimating that the conflict was preordained.
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The final legal maneuver in the Sweet case was prosaic. Prosecutors decided to retry only Henry Sweet, who in initial questioning had admitted firing a rifle. Clarence Darrow teased the truth out of neighborhood witnesses who had conspired to testify that there was no mob outside the Sweet home and that the Negroes started firing without provocation. Deflated by the first trial, some now admitted that the Klan had whipped up anger and urged violent removal of the blacks at a schoolyard rally attended by a crowd of seven hundred. Finally, the evidence was clear that on the night of the shooting, several hundred angry whites were outside the Sweets' house.