Synopsis "The Trials of Ossian Sweet - A Stand for Justice: A Screenplay"
In In 1924, a young black American doctor, Ossian Sweet, was studying at the prestigious Curie Institute in Paris, France. His wife, Gladys, was pregnant and went into labor while there. Ossian takes his wife to the American hospital there, a place he had given a $300 donation to while there. The hospital refused to admit the Sweets, because they followed the American policy of not serving Negroes. The Sweets' daughter was born in a French hospital. 1925, Ossian Sweet had a successful practice in Detroit's Paradise Valley. His family lived with his mother-in-law in a small house in Detroit's near northeast side. After tending to a young child who'd been hit by a car on a crowded street, Ossian decided to move his family to a home on the corner of Garland and Charlevoix on the far eastside. The all white neighbors formed the Waterworks Improvement Association to fight the move of the Negro family into their neighborhood. The summer of 1925 had seen other Negroes move into white neighborhoods only to be attacked by mobs or removed from the homes and sent back to where they moved from. Before he moved his family into the home, Ossian bought nine guns and rounded up several friends and his two brothers to accompany him in the move. The Sweets moved into the house early in the day on September 8, 1925. The two brothers and seven friends were there to provide protection for the family and home. That night, a mob gathered outside the house and later, in the middle of the night, threw rocks and bottles at the house, eventually breaking an upstairs window. The next night as the men in the house played cards, an enormous mob gathered outside. When a taxi drove up, one of Ossian's brothers and a friend got out. They ran to the house while the mob attacked them with rocks and bottles. At 8:30 that night shots were fired from the upstairs and back porch of the house. One white man was killed and another wounded. The police arrested everyone in the house, Gladys included. James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP saw this Sweet trial as an opportunity for the organization to get involved in a high profile case and convinced the Sweets to allow the NAACP to bring in prominent defense attorney Clarence Darrow to defend them. Darrow was a highly recognized and prominent defense attorney in the Leopold-Loeb Murder Trial in Chicago in 1924 and the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in Tennessee earlier that year. The judge for the Sweet trial was Frank Murphy who later became governor of Michigan and an Associate justice on the Supreme Court. The trial ended in a mistrial. Henry Sweet, Ossian's brother was the only one charged with murder in the second trial and was eventually acquitted. Darrow's closing statement became known as a landmark speech in the civil rights movement and was labeled as "I Believe in the Law of Love." The prosecution eventually dropped the charges against the others.
