Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle

Mark's latest book report:

Arc of Justice, by Kevin Boyle, was published in 2004, won the National Book Award, and I finally got around to reading it (though I took a few breaks along the way). I had the book on my “to read” list for many years.

The book is the painstakingly researched and detailed story of Ossian Sweet, a young, successful Black doctor who bought an attractive brick bungalow on the corner of Charlevoix and Garland in an all-white neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. On the evening after Ossian and his wife moved into the house in September 1925, a white mob gathered outside, and chaos ensued. Stones were thrown at the house and shots were fired from an upstairs window. Two people were struck by bullets, one of whom died. 

What unfolds is a kaleidoscopic view of 1920s Detroit. The city was a rapidly growing industrial metropolis, with thousands of people of all races and nationalities flooding the city to work in auto (and auto-related) factories. At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan had staked out Detroit in its strategy of extending white supremacy in the North. The 1924 mayoral election pitted a candidate (Charles Bowles) supported by the KKK against the progressive Republican John “Johnny” Smith. Smith gathered a coalition of immigrants and Blacks and won the election. 

Still, the city was teeming with racial tension. Segregation, housing discrimination, and intolerance were firmly entrenched in the city. Ossian Sweet’s attempt to move into a white neighborhood, and the ensuing trials, brought to sharp focus a homeowner’s rights to self-defense as well as the white “neighborhood associations” created to reinforce racial discrimination and intimidation.

Boyle does an excellent job in painting a vivid picture of Detroit in the 1920s. There are many colorful characters who make appearances in the book, most notably the flamboyant and eloquent Clarence Darrow—fresh off the Scopes Monkey Trial--who was the Sweets’ defense attorney.

Boyle also spends a significant portion of the book describing who Ossian Sweet was. We learn about his industrious and loving parents, his occasionally harrowing childhood in Bartow, Florida, and his education at both Wilberforce and Howard Universities. Sweet’s life was touched by both professional success and personal tragedies.

In light of the racial hatred that sadly continues in the United States in 2021, Arc of Justice is a reminder of how the “good old days” are “old” but definitely were not “good.” Some improvements have been made in race relations since 1925, but we still have a long way to go.