Negroes and the Gun by Nicholas Johnson

police claims that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on until the Negroes opened fire on their incredulous white neighbors.
    The white adults of Garland were able to keep their fabricated chronology basically straight, claiming that they heard no glass breaking until after the gunfire, suggesting that the Sweets had not been assaulted before they opened fire. But that crumbled when Darrow asked a simple question and got a truthful answer from one of the children whose parents had brought him out to witness the spectacle.
    By the end of it, Darrow put American racism itself on trial. And it is hardto know what precisely caused the all-white, all-male jury to acquit Henry Sweet. Similarly configured juries on far clearer cases of self-defense had happily sent Negroes to prison and the gallows. Was it the beginning of a new age? Was it the residue of co-counsel Arthur Garfield Hays’s invocation of the ancient principles and great documents that established the right of self-defense—the Castle doctrine, the federal and state constitutional rights to arms, and even the Emancipation Proclamation, which extolled “necessary self-defense”? Or was it Darrow’s exposure of the poisonous tribal prejudice that seeped from witnesses in comments about “Eye Talians,” “Pollocks,” and Jews? Maybe it was recognition that the Klan tirades against Catholics and the immigrant masses left an awfully small slice of “true Americans” to sustain the republic. 43
    But hopes that the Sweet case alone would stem the tide of residential segregation were disappointed. The same year Henry Sweet was acquitted, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of restrictive covenants in residential real estate. It would take another twenty years to reverse that decision. It would be another forty before federal law, drawn out of the cauldron of the 1960s, made housing discrimination illegal.
    The ordeal in Detroit took a tremendous toll on the Sweets. During the middle of the trial, Gladys learned she had tuberculosis. The family suspected she contracted it in the long weeks spent in dank Detroit city jails following the shooting. After the trial, she and two-year-old daughter Iva, also afflicted, traveled to Arizona, seeking relief. Gladys found some comfort in the dry desert air, but the disease claimed Iva.
    Gladys returned home with a small coffin while Ossian made funeral arrangements. Iva would be buried in Chicago’s Roseland Park Cemetery, next to her brother, the boy Ossian and Gladys lost in 1923. Even on the day of the funeral, the petty nastiness of racism intruded. As the procession approached the gates to the cemetery, a white groundsman stepped out and snarled that “Coloreds” had to use the back entrance.
    It hurts to think how this petty rebuke must have torn at Ossian and Gladys. And one wonders what was going on in the head and the heart of the man who in the name of white supremacy felt it his duty to dump another shovelful of misery onto parents headed to bury their child.
    We can never know what was swirling in the minds of the Negroes standing at the cemetery gates, some crying, the men shooting cold stares. But we do gain some sense of how Ossian Sweet perceived the world that day. He could have turned away from the dirty-fingered groundskeeper and directed the funeral procession to the back entrance. But instead, Dr. Ossian Sweet of Dunbar Hospital, hero of Garland Avenue, drew a gun from his pocket and demanded entry through the front gate. 44
    The next chapter in this saga is frankly so remarkable that it is best just to let one of the witnesses tell it. Black mortician M. Kelley Fritz, the funeral director who stood beside Ossian Sweet when he demanded entry to the front gate of Roseland Park Cemetery to bury his daughter, reported this in a collection of oral histories:
    We had a very prominent man in town. He was a doctor. His child died. We