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. By Kevin Boyle. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, c. 2004. Pp. [xvi], 415. Paper, $15.00, ISBN 0-8050-7933-5; cloth, $26.00, ISBN 0-8050-7145-8.)

In the 1920s a young African American migrant fresh from medical school staked his fortune in Detroit and purchased a bungalow in a white neighborhood. But the young Ossian Sweet faced an angry mob intent upon forcing him out, and one night he shot and killed a white man. The prosecution of Sweet for first-degree murder became a cause celebre. The leadership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Clarence Darrow descended on the tragedy and helped circulate the murder trial in newspapers across the nation, as an ascendant Ku Klux Klan (KKK) demanded revenge for whites. Unlike any history of the Great Migration, Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age explores the struggles of the so-called New Negro in the face of growing white hostility.

Writing in the grand tradition of Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York, 1988), the author admires and aspires to the prose style of David Levering Lewis. Boyle's writing demonstrates a flair for the dramatic, and some of his interpretations trade vivid imagery for accuracy and precision. On more than one occasion, I found myself searching through the footnotes for documentation, especially when the narrative speculated on the state of mind of the protagonist. Nonetheless, historians will recognize that Arc of Justice won the prestigious National Book Award for nonfiction in 2004, a feat that raises the perennial debate over popular versus scholarly historical writing.

Boyle divides the saga of Ossian Sweet into three parts, opening with the murder scene on Garland Avenue. He then travels back to Reconstruction-era Florida and returns to a day-by-day reconstruction of events leading to the courtroom. As a southern farmer, Sweet's father bequeathed to his family not only new opportunities but also his remarkable ambition, as the Sweets "made themselves into pillars of the community" (p. 61). Pulled to the North by promise of education and achievement, Sweet apparently never looked back. He matriculated at Howard University medical school. Boyle's discussions of Florida, of migration and black education, and of the process of urbanization in Detroit strike the specialist as unenlightening digressions into well-trodden historiography. Yet the vehicle of the contextualized biography appeals to the popular audience or general reader.

Boyle's portrait reminds us of the tremendous odds against social mobility for a man like Ossian Sweet, whose outlook oscillated between Booker T. Washington's accommodation and Du Boisian protest. On the one hand, Sweet's entrepreneurial spirit failed to translate into a commitment for civil rights. On the other hand, as the victimized defendant, Sweet admirably demonstrated defiance and militancy in the mode of the New Negro. Boyle's adept analysis of municipal politics in Detroit revises our understanding of 100 percent Americanism, the conservative backlash of the 1920s. Although historians such as Kenneth T. Jackson argued that the KKK in the cities organized around anti-Catholicism to a far greater extent than around anti-black racism, Boyle demonstrates the centrality of white anxieties over racial integration. Rather than a lynching, in the civilities of the north, black victims faced corruption in the police department, which operated on a "blinding prejudice that seemed to consume" (p. 171). At the same time, Sweet's prosecution stimulated a resurgence of liberalism among whites, who not only expressed repugnance at the KKK but also helped the NAACP finance a defense.

An enigmatic figure, Ossian Sweet presents the reader with a mystery: what was the nature of his extraordinary ambition? What drove this apparently average student to pursue a career in medicine; to build a practice in the ghetto of Detroit; and dangerously to purchase a home where no sane black man could believe he was welcome? In explicating this figure, Boyle refers to Sweet as "unrealistic"; "lucky"; a man haunted by white terrorism; and possessed of fleeting confidence. Thus, although Boyle renders the emotional pitch of what in his able hands appears to be race warfare in Detroit, perhaps the author also exercises his artistic license to the point of incredulity. Rather than claiming his interpretations by using the first person, Boyle chooses to remain omnipotent and anonymous. He uses the term Negro, rather than black or African American, to perpetuate this illusion that he is a contemporaneous witness.

One of the trademarks of Boyle's narrative is psychological insight, but he sometimes fails to persuade with valid historical methods. In recounting Sweet's education at Howard, Boyle comments on his poor or average academic standing and his tendency to act like a doctor rather than earn his credentials, but Boyle fails to cite either a grade transcript or Sweet's memoirs from medical school (pp. 92-93). Therefore, I was not convinced. At another point, when Boyle describes Ossian's perception of the mob gathering outside his home, he writes, "The image of the conflagration--the heart-pounding fear of it--had been seared into his memory" (p. 69). But this bold claim about state of mind rests on a text of a book about Clarence Darrow, a second-hand view at best. Perhaps the reader will never know the actual emotional outlook of a man like Sweet.

In the dramatic climax, Boyle skillfully connects the courtroom testimony to the efforts by civil rights leaders to build a national civil rights movement. A national tragedy had concluded in justice. Arc of Justice deserves a wide audience, reminding us that there are multiple roles for the historian at a time of remarkable popular interest in civil rights in America.

KEVIN MUMFORD

University of Iowa