Home, Sweet's Home

The Paczki Principle

Just like Grandma's kitchen
Smells like something's baking!

The east-side home of African-American physician Ossian Sweet serves as one of the important landmarks of the early civil-rights era. Sweet moved his family into the all-white neighborhood near Waterworks Park in 1925, and neighbors greeted the newcomers with taunts and rocks. Shots were fired, a man died, and the subsequent criminal case polarized the city.

Sweet was a Florida-born, European-trained obstetrician who was a staff doctor at Dunbar, the city's black hospital. He was dismayed by the dismal housing stock in Detroit's overcrowded black neighborhoods around the now-gone Paradise Valley area. Married and with a new daughter, Sweet bought a home in an all-white neighborhood, on 2905 Garland Street at Charlevoix, and moved in on September 8, 1925, despite anonymous phone threats. Aware of the potentially inflammatory situation, the doctor had asked friends and family members to stay with him the first few days. A crowd of troublemakers gathered outside, swelling to numbers estimated from 400 and 800. On the second night, they began pelting the house with rocks; one broke an upstairs window, and Sweet looked out and saw his young brother and a friend making their way into the house. The mob was swelling behind them, apparently determined to get in as well. Shots rang out, and one man died.

Detroit police, who had been stationed near the house to keep an eye on things, finally acted: they arrested everyone inside. Noted defense attorney Clarence Darrow took the case, and argued that Sweet had been protecting his property against clearly stated threats. The presiding judge, Frank Murphy  later Detroit mayor, Michigan governor, and Supreme Court justice  reminded the all-white jury that a man's home is his castle and no one has a right to invade it. Both Sweet and his brother were acquitted, but the doctor tragically lost both his wife and his daughter a few years later to tuberculosis. He moved out of the house in 1944, and his health declined. Suffering from arthritis, he took his own life in 1960.

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Ossian Sweet House