Arc of Justice

On Tuesday, November 3, Johnny Smith wins reelection by a "31,000 vote margin" (264), having secured a majority of votes on the city's east side, and even winning some of the west side, including the Garland Avenue area. This victory gives Darrow hope that, following the trial's weekend recess, favorable jury selection will be possible. When, on Wednesday afternoon, Darrow and the prosecution come to an agreement on the jury's composition, Darrow is pleased. All of the jurors are white men, though, "every one of them was related to immigrants." Some were homeowners, some retired, all were working class. After the jury selection, Darrow remarks that "the case is won or lost now" (267).

The court proceedings resume on Thursday, November 5, as prosecutor Robert Toms begins his interrogation of his witnesses: "twenty policemen" and "forty-one of the Sweets’ Garland Avenue neighbors" (267), chosen with the help of the Waterworks Park Improvement Association. Toms calls Inspector Schuknecht to the stand and the man sticks to his original story that "there was no crowd on the street" (269), nor had anyone "been throwing rocks or yelling or threatening the bungalow…before the Negroes opened fire" (269). Each of the other policemen confirm this version of events, emphasizing the small size of the crowd and the emptiness of the Sweets’ house, implying that the Sweets had moved in not with the intention of living there, but to provoke the neighborhood. The neighbors, on the other hand, stumble a few times in their testimony. Some can't recall anything, some claim they heard breaking glass before the gunfire, and some say they saw "a great number" (271) of people gathered outside the Sweets' home, though they all revise their stories to match the prosecution's version. By the end of the questionings, though, "the prosecution's case started to seem ironclad" (273).

Darrow, like Toms, decides to take a gentle approach to his cross-examination. Beginning with Inspector Schuknecht, Darrow begins to tear holes in the prosecution's carefully manipulated version of the event. After four hours of questioning, Darrow transforms Schuknecht from an "authority figure" to the kind of "sullenly indifferent cop" (274) familiar to some of the jurors. By the end of his cross-examination, Schuknecht admits that in the Sweets’ bedroom he found not only a bed, but a rock and glass "shards scattered about the room" (275). Darrow gets Ray Dove and others from the neighborhood to admit that they did not "want coloreds in their neighborhood" (277), and exposes the Waterworks Park Improvement Association's terrorist intentions of keeping Garland Avenue "lily-white." Darrow also, with a "softer approach" (278), gets thirteen-year-olds George Suppus and Ulric Arthur to admit that they had seen kids throwing rocks at the Sweets’ house before shots were fired.

On Saturday, November 14, Arthur Hays and Clarence Darrow decide how to prepare the defense's case. Hays makes a motion to the court to dismiss all charges, based on his demand that the prosecution present a "bill of particulars,” which stated that the state's case rests on "a charge of conspiracy." Hays, appealing to both logic and flattery of Judge Murphy, states that "the prosecution hadn't presented the court a single shred of evidence" establishing a conspiracy among the accused. Hays tells Judge Murphy that anyone with the judge's "learning and knowledge" (284) can see that this case must be thrown out. As though orchestrated, Iva Sweet, Ossian and Gladys's baby, cries out from the back of the courtroom, which Hays hopes will sway the judge's sympathies. For his part, Darrow emphasizes how the prosecution's witnesses have "purposely and consistently misstated the facts in the case" (285).

On Monday, November 15, Toms offers to drop the charges against Gladys. Gladys refuses, though, and ultimately Judge Murphy decides to set the motion aside. It's unclear whether he does this in hopes of securing white votes for his future mayoral campaign, or if he feels that a verdict passed down by a jury will have a greater impact than one handed down by a judge.

As the trial continues, the defense calls its witnesses. Hays begins his opening statements by telling the jury Ossian's story, asking Ossian to rise so the jury can "look you over" (287) as Hays tells of Ossian's journey from poverty to medical school to buying a home on Garland Avenue. After this, Hays calls John Fletcher and Vollington Bristol to the stand to recount their own brushes with white mob violence. Hays brings Gladys' friends Serena Rochelle and Edna Butler. He calls Philip Adler, the white Detroit News reporter whose story of seeing the mob four hundred people deep had been buried. Hays calls on the black couples and individuals who had driven by the intersection of Garland and Charlevoix, who had witnessed the mob and police barricade.

Finally, Hays calls Ossian to the stand. In "his precise and methodical way," Hays walks the jury through Ossian's entire life story, from "Bartow to Howard, Detroit to Paris, and back again." Hays asks Ossian to recount the "litany of horrors" (288) he witnessed, acts of violence against blacks, throughout his life. Ossian recalls the immolation of Fred Rochelle, the riots in Washington, the pogrom in Chicago, and finally the attacks on black homeowners on Detroit's west side the past July. When Toms objects to this line of questioning, Darrow interjects, as he had during his famous defense of Leopold and Loeb, that these questions establish "the psychology of the race" (289). Judge Murphy allows Hays to continue. Hays concludes his questioning by asking Ossian to recount his version of the events on Garland Avenue. Ossian relays his fears, the menace of the crowd, "like a human sea" (290), the barrage of projectiles, and, finally, hearing gunfire break out.

On Monday, November 23, the final witness steps down and the attorneys give their closing arguments. Lester Moll, prosecutor Toms' assistant, delivers the prosecution's by "building a gigantic structure of reason." He hopes the jury will take the defense as nothing more than a "fear complex theory," incapable of standing up to the law and logic. Hays starts off the defense's statement by quoting Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and pleading with the jurors to seize the "opportunity to write a charter of freedom" (291). Finally, Darrow takes his turn, speaking for three hours on Monday and resuming at nine o'clock Tuesday morning. He keeps a casual tone, admitting that "the jurors surely were prejudiced…as was he" (292). However, he says, the jurors are not sointolerant as their Klansmen peers. The jurors are, in fact, capable of seeing that the black people on trial, and those called to the witness stand, are "as intelligent, as attractive, as good-looking as any white man or woman" (293). Darrow continues by explicating the generations-long plight of African-Americans, brought to the country as slaves, then subjected to systemic violence and oppression upon being freed. He then positions Ossian as a "hero who fought a brave fight against fearful odds" in defending his home, "integrity and the independence of the abused race to which he belonged" (294). Darrow ends by asking the jurors to "see that no harm" comes to Ossian the others on "behalf of justice" and "in the name of the future" (295).

The jurors begin their deliberation on Wednesday, November 25, the day before Thanksgiving. Confident that the jurors will reach an amenable verdict, Ossian, Gladys, and the others chat and laugh, "as if the verdict were a foregone conclusion" (296). Hays and Walter White buy tickets to catch the seven o'clock train back to Manhattan, and Darrow heads out to dinner with his wife. However, the jurors do not come to an easy conclusion. They want to know if they can convict some but not all of the accused, and whether the murder could be justified if Dr. Sweet's perception of danger was wrong. The attorneys confirm both. The deliberations drag out until Friday afternoon, the jurors having eaten Thanksgiving dinner at a nearby hotel. From inside the deliberation room comes the occasional shout or "crash of furniture" (298). Some of the jurors want to let all of the accused walk free, while others want to see Ossian, Henry Sweet, and Leonard Morse convicted of second-degree murder. When by Friday afternoon the jurors haven't been able to reach a verdict they all agree upon, Judge Murphy declares a mistrial.

Following Judge Murphy's decision, Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Walter White leave Detroit with haste. Darrow and Hays ask for each accused to be released on bail and request "separate trials for each defendant" (300) in the future. After returning to Manhattan, White makes efforts to maintain good relationships with Hays, Frank Murphy, and even prosecutor Robert Toms, knowing that this might come in handy for the defendants' future trials. White also knows that the NAACP will need much more money to pay for each of the defendants' trials.

In Manhattan, White and James Weldon Johnson use the publicity and momentum generated by interest in the Sweets’ trial to begin fundraising for their Legal Defense Fund. White uses his connections to the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance to orchestrate "a Park Avenue fund-raiser” and solicits his friends in the literary world to do an interest piece on the Sweets. In December 1925, Clarence Darrow, a hero of the trial, arrives in New York City. He attends a meeting of the NAACP at Salem Methodist Episcopal in Harlem and delivers a speech in which he condemns "the Noble Nordics" (303) of the KKK. By the end of the day, the NAACP has received $5,057 in donations.

Though Joe Mack and Norris Murray, the two working class defendants struggle to get their bail paid, Detroit's Talented Tenth clamor to post Ossian's bond. Rather than return to the bungalow on Garland Avenue right away, as Hays had "desperately wanted" (304) Ossian to do, Ossian joins Gladys in the rented flat a mile northwest of Garland. During the trial, a police force had kept watch over the Sweets’ home and prevented a gasoline-soaked rag thrown into the garage from starting a serious fire, but they leave as soon as the trial ends.

Ossian and Gladys arrive in New York on January 3, 1926. Walter White sets the couple on a "six-day tour of NAACP branches" (306), with Ossian holding forth in increasingly egotistic ways. Though this annoys Gladys and Robert Bagnall, Gladys' former pastor who is the Sweets’ handler in New York, Ossian's appearances bring in enough money to surpass the Legal Defense Fund's original goal. By the end of the tour, the fund has seventy-six thousand dollars in it, "enough to carry" the "pending cases" (307).

The first great test of the Legal Defense Fund comes when James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP's case against restrictive covenants gets its day in the United States Supreme Court. On January 8, 1926, NAACP lawyers James Cobb, Arthur Spingarn, Moorfield Storey, and Louis Marshal present their arguments to the court, presided over by Chief Justice William Howard Taft. Storey begins the NAACP's case, but stumbles through it due to "age and illness" (308). Marshall picks up, but quickly realizes that his argument is "by necessity, complex." He tries to argue that the restrictive covenants violate the equal protection granted to black Americans by clauses in the fourteenth and fifteenth constitutional amendments, but knows, as private covenants, they fall "outside the amendments' purview" (309). He instead argues that though the covenants may exist, legally, their discriminatory nature should prohibit judges from enforcing those provisions, citing the Louisville decision as precedent.

Back in Detroit, awaiting trial, Ossian keeps up an appearance of confidence and optimism. Even the news that his brother Henry will be tried before any other defendant, starting on April 1, does not make a dent in Ossian's optimism. Darrow shares Ossian's outlook. He feels that it was a mistake to try the eleven defendants as a group, rather than getting the jury to either send someone to prison or let them go. When other obligations keep Arthur Garfield Hays from returning to the defense team, White hires Thomas Chawke, "the Detroit mob's favorite" (315) attorney, at Darrow's insistence.

When Henry Sweet's trial finally begins in late April, Darrow learns that prosecutor Robert Toms will only try the other defendants if Henry gets convicted. If not, all charges will be dropped. During jury selection, Darrow and Chawke systematically winnow down the group from 198 to 12 men, all of whom they believe won't exercise racist prejudices. Though Toms objects to the way Darrow does this, introducing the defense's argument as a way of screening the potential jurors, Judge Murphy allows it.

During the trial, Toms again brings out the police officers and Garland Avenue residents from the original trial. He asks them the same kinds of questions, and the defense, again, tries to get the witnesses to reveal that they've been coached into "hedging, quibbling, and lying" (322) on the stand. This time, though, Darrow and Chawke focus on exposing the Waterworks Park Improvement Association's true intention: protecting "property from colored people" (323). To do this, Darrow uses a much more aggressive approach in his cross-examination, getting multiple witnesses to admit they joined the Association to keep black people out of the neighborhood. In a particularly aggressive show of force, Darrow gets Alf Andrews, the witness who revealed there were six or seven hundred people in the Garland Avenue mob, to say that the Association's schoolyard rally had featured a speaker from the Tireman Avenue Improvement Association. Darrow gets Andrews to further admit that the man, "a radical" (325), advocated for the use of violence to get black people to leave the neighborhood.

After the cross-examination, Darrow and Chawke call the same group of witnesses to the stand from the first trial: Edna Butler, Serena Rochelle, Philip Adler, the black individuals who had driven by the Sweets’ home, and finally, Ossian. During Toms' cross-examination, Ossian falters only once, revealing that he had supplied the men in his house with guns on the night of the incident. Toms asks Ossian why he said he didn't on the night he was questioned at Wayne County Jail, and Ossian admits that, being denied an attorney, he was scared "to make an incriminating statement" (327).

The following Monday, the prosecution and defense make their closingstatements. The prosecution, led by Lester Moll, asks the jurors to consider not Ossian's beleaguered family history, so eloquently told by the defense, but "the dead body of Leon Breiner" (329), just as Toms had done in the previous trial. When Chawke gives his statement, he appeals to current Detroit politics, citing Mayor Johnny Smith's recent victory as something to stand behind. Chawke asks whether the jurors will follow the man they put in office "under the standard of tolerance and charity and good will toward all men" (330) when they make their verdict decision. Darrow, delivering his statement the following morning to a packed courtroom, holds up Ossian as "the embodiment of the American dream" (332), while ridiculing the ignorance of the Garland Avenue residents, who can't even properly pronounce the name of their own street: Goethe. He then launches, once again, into a recounting of the horrors black Americans have suffered, from slavery to lynching, and asks the jurors, after six hours of speaking, "in the name of progress and the human race" (334), to return a verdict of not guilty. When Toms delivers the prosecution's final statements the next morning, it has all the charisma of "the clatter of folding chairs after a symphony concert" (335).

Judge Frank Murphy issues a final statement on the morning of May 13 to the jurors before they begin their deliberations: "all men are equal before the law" (335). With that, the twelve men adjourn to discuss their verdict. Knowing that it could take some time, Darrow, Chawke, and their wives and friends also adjourn to a nearby speakeasy. They return to the court room around four o'clock. When Judge Murphy summons the jury's foreman and asks if they've reached a decision, the man says that they have: "not guilty." A "single burst of cheer" (336) rings out in the court room as Darrow, Chawke, and James Weldon Johnson begin congratulating each other. Ossian Sweet sits by himself, in the row behind his brother, Henry, with his head in his hands. 

A month after Henry Sweet's trial, the NAACP holds its annual convention on Chicago's south side. Along with James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Walter White, Clarence Darrow appears to give a speech, proclaiming that prejudice, though still "a mighty force," is on its way to "being defeated" (337). Darrow gets appointed to the executive board of the NAACP and continues to handle defense for various NAACP-sponsored cases. Walter White, who replaces James Weldon Johnson after Johnson steps down to pursue a professorship at Fisk, spends the next two decades putting Johnson's Legal Defense Fund to use. The NAACP helps to dismantle some of the prejudices of "the southern system," including segregation of "interstate transportation" (342).

Many others involved in the casecontinue the case's cause. Arthur Garfield Hays continues litigation for racial justice, and Reinhold Niebuhr, appointed by Johnny Smith to a commission on race relations in Detroit, presents to Mayor Smith "a marvelous piece of social research…detailing the depths of discrimination black Detroiters faced." Niebuhr goes on to write books about "man's duty to confront society's sins" (340) that prove profoundly influential to activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. Robert Toms becomes a circuit court judge and "a solid support of civil rights," later presiding over the trial for Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg. Finally, Frank Murphy, champion of the working people, climbs his way to Attorney General of the United States, "always with the studied sympathy for the underdog" (341).

Unfortunately, Thomas Chawke returns to defending his regular mobster clients, and Mayor Johnny Smith gets run out of further political aspirations by "Detroit's elite" (339). In the weeks after Henry's trial, the Supreme Court rules against the NAACP's restrictive covenant case. This decision allows for a solidifying of the color line's proliferation across the country. 

Ossian and Gladys return to the apartment they've rented, relieved that there will be no further trials. However, Gladys learns that she's contracted tuberculosisfrom her stay in jail and passed it on to their two-year-old daughter, Iva. Gladys and Iva move to Tucson, Arizona where the dry air "was better for their damaged lungs" (344), but to no avail. Iva passes away in August, 1926. When the funeral cortege arrives at the cemetery in Detroit, the white groundskeeper tells Ossian they have to go through the back entrance. Ossian pulls out a gun and demands

the man open the gates. Gladys passes away in 1928 at the age of twenty-seven. Ossian moves into the bungalow on Garland Avenue and opens his own practice in a drugstore he buys in Black Bottom. He buys property around Bartow and visits it to tend his citrus trees. He also starts running a series of "small, rival hospitals in the heart of the ghetto" that compete with Dunbar Memorial. He marries twice, both end in divorce, and one in accusations of physical abuse by Ossian. He takes in a few teens from Black Bottom and offers to adopt them, but they refuse as Ossian subjects the teens to the "sort of backbreaking labor" he'd done as a young man. Ossian runs for president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP against members of the Talented Tenth who had "rushed to his defense five years earlier" (345). They never forgive him. Ossian also runs, unsuccessfully, for office in the state Senate and U.S. Congress. Unable to pay off the house on Garland Avenue, Ossian sells the property to a family of black, Southern migrants, and moves into a space above his office. On March 20, 1960, having lost everything he had, Ossian Sweet kills himself with a handgun in his home.