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

In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz, speakeasies, and assembly lines and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctorgrandson of a slavehad made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own. 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 home. And so it begana chain of events that brought Americas 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 Sweets murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet familys journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweets story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his eras changing times.

Kevin Boyle, a professor of history at Ohio State University, is the author of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968. A former associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, he is also the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
He lives in Bexley, Ohio.