Arc of Justice; A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
New York, N.Y. Henry Holt and Company, 2004. First Edition [stated]. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. [16], 415, [1] pages. Illustrations. Prologue. Notes. Acknowledgments. Index. DJ has some wear and soiling. Chapters include Where Death Waits; Ain't No Slavery No More; Migration; Uplist Me, Pride; White Houses; The Letter of Your Law; Freedmen, Sons of God, Americans; The Prodigal Son; Prejudice; Judgment Day; and Requiescam. Some creasing to dust jacket edges. Kevin Boyle (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1990) is an historian of the twentieth century United States, with a particular interest in modern American social movements. His publications include The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968; Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900-1930 (with Victoria Getis); Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994; and Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age, which received the National Book Award for nonfiction, The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, and the Simon Weisenthal Center’s Tolerance Book Award. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was selected for community-wide reading programs in the Detroit metropolitan area and the state of Michigan. He has published essays and reviews in The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Detroit Free Press, Inc, and Cobblestone magazines. He has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. Beginning with the hot summer night in 1925 when Ossian Sweet's outraged white neighbors circle his house to drive his family out, Arc of Justice is grand nonfiction storytelling. Historian Kevin Boyle uses the story of Sweet, caught in the grip of history, to explore America in 1925, when the Klan moved north to incite hatred, and a new organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)--led by W. E. B. Du Bois and his Talented Tenth--rallied blacks to raise their voice and to begin the march toward equality, dignity, and self-respect. With the opening of the Sweets' trial and the appearance of legal genius Darrow--whose theatrics and fiery passion made him a ferocious defender of the oppressed--Boyle's narrative becomes courtroom drama at its finest. Capturing the tense, often surprising legal battle, Boyle take us through the intricate face-offs between the wily Darrow and the adept, utterly determined prosecutors, re-creating the scenes that drew the attention of all Americans to the plight of Doctor Sweet and his wife.
Derived from a Kirkus review: A murder case in Detroit lies at the heart of labor scholar Boyle’s wide-ranging examination of race relations early in the 20th century. One September evening in 1925, physician Ossian Sweet and his young family spent their first night in their new home on Garland Avenue, a previously all-white block four miles east of downtown. The very next evening, a crowd formed across the street from the Sweets’ bungalow, which now sheltered some volunteer defenders. Rocks were thrown, shots were fired from the house, and a white man lay dead. Boyle meticulously tells the story of the Sweets, one family among the many who participated in the grand effort to do away with Jim Crow laws. The ’20s were the decade of the New Negro, the Harlem Renaissance, and the rise of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The KKK’s Invisible Empire spread in response to black militancy, but the NAACP also grew, thanks to remarkable activists like James Weldon Johnson and William White. The Great Migration brought strivers by the thousands from oppression in Dixie to unexpected prejudice in the urban North, including the Motor City. Born and raised in Detroit, Boyle depicts the politics and people of the industrial metropolis, vividly evoking life in the city’s Black Bottom ghetto. He presents a balanced, considered portrait of Sweet, born in rural Florida, a graduate of Wilberforce University and Howard Medical School, and of other players in the drama. Along the way, he establishes an early tension that, after instruction in some African-American history, culminates in a classic courtroom drama starring the Great Defender himself, Clarence Darrow. Told with exemplary care and intelligence, this narrative chronicles inflammatory times in black and white America and pays tribute to those heroes who struggled to get Old Jim Crow where he lived. The way history should be written. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Ossian Sweet; Clarence Darrow; African Americans, Civil Rights, Race Relations, Detroit, Great Migration, Immigrants, James Weldon Johnson, Ku Klux Klan, NAACP, Discrimination, Racism, Segregation, Walter White, People v. Sweet
ISBN: 0805071458
[Book #79836]
Price: $35.00