On September 8, 1925, a prominent and successful black physician named Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family into their new two-story brick home on Detroit's east side. The neighborhood was generally populated by poor, working class whites of much lower income and education. Another black doctor had been driven out of the Waterworks Park area some weeks before.
A mob of hundreds calling themselves the Waterworks Park Improvement Association gathered in the schoolyard across the street while a dozen police cordoned off the area and walked between the mob and the Sweet residence.
When the mob started howling and threw stones at the house, Dr. Sweet grabbed a gun and ran to an upstairs window to get a better view of what was going on. His dentist brother, Henry and a friend arrived just then and ran into the house as a rock smashed a window. That's when the first shot rang out.
When it was all finished, six of the eleven people inside the house had fired their weapons and one of the police officers had emptied his revolver. Two members of the mob were struck, one fatally. At this point, the police, who had mostly stood by until gunfire erupted now stormed the house and arrested everyone inside for murder. [
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After two trials (the first one ending in a mistrial) wherein the defendants were defended by Clarence Darrow, no convictions were obtained and Henry (who, in essence, admitted firing the fatal shot) was acquitted as acting in self-defense.
