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Arc of Justice

A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction

An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle

In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing 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 homes.

And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's 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 Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.

"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 Boyle's 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

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Lizan Mitchell knows how to mix just the right amount of narrative with an appropriate amount of drama. She reads the true story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man who in 1925 moves his young family to an all- white neighborhood in Detroit. When his home is stormed by a white mob and one of them is killed, Sweet is charged with murder. Through the fledgling NAACP, Sweet is defended by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow and tried before Judge Frank Murphy, who later became a Supreme Court justice. Mitchell knows how to garner emotion from listeners. After one particularly moving scene, you can feel your anger well up inside. Boyle won a National Book Award for this finely documented history. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 2, 2004
      History professor Boyle (The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968
      ) has brilliantly rescued from obscurity a fascinating chapter in American history that had profound implications for the rise of the Civil Rights movement. With a novelist's craft, Boyle opens with a compelling prologue portraying the migration of African-Americans in the 1920s to the industrial cities of the North, where they sought a better life and economic opportunity. This stirring section, with echoes of Dickens's Hard Times
      , sets the stage for the ordeal of Dr. Ossian Sweet, who moves with his young family to a previously all-white Detroit neighborhood. When the local block association incites a mob to drive Sweet back to the ghetto, he gathers friends and acquaintances to defend his new home with a deadly arsenal. The resulting shooting death of a white man leads to a sensational murder trial, featuring the legendary Clarence Darrow, fresh from the Scopes Monkey trial, defending Sweet, his family and their associates. This popular history, which explores the politics of racism and the internecine battles within the nascent Civil Rights movement, grips right up to the stunning jaw-dropper of an ending. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW
      .

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  • English

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