Kevin Boyle's Arc Of Justice

"When the politicians and businessmen extended rail lines into the smallest of southern hamlets in the years after Reconstruction, they had wanted simply to connect the region 's fields and forests to the North 's great factories. But the process also provided Negroes with a thousand escape routes. It was never easy to leave, to slip free of piles of debts, to shutter homes and abandon lands, to say good-bye to family and friends. But a hundred thousand colored people did just that…” Years prior to the early 20th century, much of African American culture was centered around plantations and domestic work in the South. But beginning in 1915, Blacks started to make one of the largest migration in American history to the “promise land” of the North, …show more content…
Blacks went to school’s miles away from their house. Sometimes these schools would only operate around sharecropping schedules, limiting the amount the time a child had to learn. They lacked the necessary books, equipment, and teaching staff to complete a well rounded education. In Kevin Boyle’s book, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, the author tells the true story of Ossian Sweet, a young doctor living in Detroit during the 1920s and his journey to become so. For some of the same reasons listed above, Sweet was sent away from his kin in Bartow, Florida, at the age of thirteen. He leaves the south in hopes of completing his high school and college degree at Wilberforce in Xenia, Ohio. When Sweet 's promised scholarship did not matriculate, Ossian works odd end jobs to pay his was through school, ultimately ending up at Howard Medical School. He becomes a doctor giving primary care to Africans Americans in the Black Bottom ghetto of …show more content…
There influence spread from political leader to business owners. This type of influence leads to Blacks being subject to race riots such as the East St. Louis Race riots in 1917. Doctor Sweet met this same violence from whites when he and his wife, Gladys, moved from the Black Bottom ghetto to a home on Garland Avenue. Garland Avenue was primarily a white neighborhood that blacks never had to opportunity to move in to. When they did, the white population would find ways to threaten and scare blacks into leaving. In the case of Ossian, the white community banded together to form the Waterworks Park Improvement Association and use violence to threaten Sweet’s home and family. Faced with angry mobs outside, Ossian armed his family and friends to defend their home with guns. This resulted in, Henry Sweet, his brother, opening fire and killing a white man named Leon Breiner in the crowd. With Americans involvement in WWI, blacks enlisted in the army, fought aboard, and started to understand the contradiction of US democracy. With this new understanding came a militancy to protect the black community when threatened by white injustice. Ossian was a product of this ideology, but like most African Americans of the time suffered the consequences, even with the help of the NAACP, ultimately leaving the house on Garland