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Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
Arc of Justice A Saga of Race Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age Author:Kevin Boyle 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 doctor -- grandson of a slave -- had 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 sho... more »ts rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and home.
And so it began -- a 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 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.« less