This tautly told story steps back to a time when Detroit's boosters described their city as one of the most cosmopolitan in the world. It was also a city in which tensions between blacks and whites seemed manageable. Yet all that changed in 1925, when a black family named Sweet bought and moved into a house in a white neighborhood.
The violence that ensued landed Ossian Sweet, a doctor from the "Talented Tenth," and others from his family in jail and compelled the NAACP - which had taken up Sweet's case - to hire famed attorney Clarence Darrow, who had just finished the Scopes trial. Darrow's defense led to one of the most incendiary courtroom dramas in the history of the United States.
Phyllis Vine
2004, cloth, 337 pp.
ISBN: 9780066214153
999-V1415
