Sweet, Ossian Haven (1895-1960), physician, was born in Orlando, Florida, the son of Henry Sweet, a Methodist minister and farmer, and Dora DeVaughn. He was the second of nine children (one of whom, his older brother Oscar, died in childhood). In 1910 he journeyed to Xenia, Ohio, to attend Wilberforce Academy and complete his schooling. He graduated with a college degree in 1917. That September he enrolled in the medical school at Howard University. In 1921 he received his medical degree and moved to Detroit, Michigan, a fast-growing city with plenty of opportunities for a new physician, to establish his fledgling medical practice. In 1922 he married Gladys Mitchell, who was from an established family in Detroit. For their honeymoon the Sweets traveled to Europe for a year of study and touring. After taking graduate courses in pediatrics and gynecology at the University of Vienna during 1923, Sweet journeyed to Paris to study radiology at the Curie Institute. The next year, while in Paris, the Sweets' daughter Marguerite was born (the year before they had lost a son through miscarriage). In the fall of 1924 they returned to Detroit and moved in with Gladys's mother.

Ossian Sweet soon sought better housing for his new family, and in the summer of 1925 purchased a house at 2905 Garland Avenue in a lower-middle-class white area in northeastern Detroit. The choice of neighborhood for Sweet, who was African American, was fateful. Detroit's African American population had increased nearly tenfold during the previous decade, spurred by wartime production and the new automobile industry. Some of Detroit's whites reacted with dismay and, stirred up by an active Ku Klux Klan, with violence. Whites had already forced several African American families to leave homes in formerly white neighborhoods. Rocks had been thrown and shots were fired, but so far no one had died from these incidents. By the time Sweet moved into his home in early September, whites in the area had formed a "Waterworks Park Improvement Association" dedicated to blocking any African American encroachment into the Garland Avenue area.

On 8 September 1925, Ossian Sweet, his wife, his two brothers--Henry, a law student, and Otis, a dentist--along with seven other friends moved Sweet's few pieces of furniture into his new house on Garland Avenue. Along with the furniture, Sweet brought a supply of guns and ammunition to his new house. That night a crowd taunted the Sweets, but nothing much happened. The next morning, however, a crowd of whites began to congregate across the street from the house. How many were in the crowd became a matter of debate, but it could have been as many as four or five hundred people. As evening fell, rocks and stones struck the house and windows were shattered. Suddenly, several shots came from the Sweet house. Across the street Leon Breiner fell dead--shot in the back--while standing on the front door of a neighbor's house, and another man, Eric Houghberg, received a bullet wound in his leg. The police, who had been keeping watch over the house, immediately arrested Sweet, his wife, and his companions, denied them access to legal counsel, and tossed them in the city jail. They were all charged with assault, murder, and conspiracy to commit murder, and they were denied bail.

James Weldon Johnson, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, quickly saw that the Sweet case had national implications for African American home-ownership rights. Johnson dispatched his assistant, Walter White, to convince Clarence Darrow to serve as lead defense attorney. Darrow, who had made his fame fighting prominent civil liberties cases, readily took on this new assignment, although he was sixty-eight and still tired from the recent Scopes trial in Tennessee. He was assisted by Arthur Garfield Hays, another well-known civil rights attorney who had labored with Darrow in Tennessee, along with several African American lawyers from Detroit. The prosecution was led by the district attorney, Robert M. Toms, and his assistant, Lester S. Moll. The trial, which began on 30 October 1925, was presided over by thirty-five-year-old Frank Murphy, who would later serve as mayor of Detroit, governor of Michigan, and associate justice of the Supreme Court.

The trial before an all-white jury lasted most of November 1925, with a parade of witnesses on both sides. The prosecution called over seventy individuals to the stand in an effort to argue that the crowd outside the house was quite small and peaceful. Darrow countered that if the legal definition of a mob was twenty-five people, the seventy witnesses clearly demonstrated that a much larger group was probably in attendance that night. The crux of the issue centered on two basic questions: Did Ossian Sweet and his companions fear for their lives? And did any man, white or black, have the right to defend his home from perceived attack? The prosecution argued that, threatened or not, Sweet and his companions did not have the right to shoot unarmed people. As the trial approached its climax, Ossian Sweet was called to the stand, where his calm testimony proved crucial to the eventual outcome:

When I opened the door and saw that mob, I realized in a way that it was that same mob that had hounded my people through its entire history. I realized my back was against the wall and I was filled with a peculiar type of fear--the fear of one who knows the history of my race.

Despite deliberating for over forty-six hours, the jury could not agree on a verdict, and Judge Murphy declared a mistrial. Henry Sweet was subsequently tried separately and acquitted of all charges, and by May 1926 the charges against the rest of the defendants had been dropped. Although the Sweet trial ended in victory for Sweet, efforts to restrict African American home ownership by various legal means continued unabated throughout the United States until the Supreme Court declared such practices illegal in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).

For Ossian Sweet, his acquittal was bittersweet. He returned to his bungalow on Garland Avenue and his medical practice, but he suffered the loss of his daughter in 1926 from tuberculosis. The same disease claimed Gladys, at the age of twenty-seven, in 1928. Ossian later purchased a small drugstore and managed several small hospitals. He married twice more, but each one ended in divorce. Turning to politics, he unsuccessfully sought election to the state senate, and another time he tried--again without success--for a seat in the U.S. Congress. Finally, in ill health with acute arthritis and in debt from failed businesses, he took his own life.

Materials relating to Ossian Sweet and the trial can be found in the Detroit Public Library's Burton Historical Collection and the Michigan Historical Collection at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library. An obituary appears in the Detroit Free Press, 20 March 1960. Two recent historical accounts provide valuable assessments: Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), and Phyllis Vine, One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream (2005).