Arc of Justice: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays ask for their clients to be released on bail and inform Frank Murphy they want each defendant to be retried separately. While the mistrial hardly represents a surprise, given the length of the jury’s deliberations, it’s still a disappointing setback, given how well things seemed to have been going for the defense. The defense exposed glaring holes in the state’s case.

Although attention in the white press has shifted from Detroit to a more salacious race trial in New York, the Sweets’ story has successfully crossed the press’s color line in strategic places such as the progressive magazine The Nation. And in Detroit, all the dailies side with the Sweets, representing a remarkable turnaround in white opinion in the city. Further, ongoing rallies—including a mid-December event in New York featuring Clarence Darrow himself—fill the coffers of the hoped-for Legal Defense Fund.

Frank Murphy grants the defense’s request to release the remaining defendants but sets their bail prohibitively high. The poorer men, like Joe Mack and Norris Murray, have trouble securing funds, but the higher-profile ones—including Ossian—soon walk free. The Sweets don’t return to Garland Avenue; the Waterworks Association has resumed meeting and the house has been subject to vandalism. They stay in the apartment Gladys rented in another white neighborhood. Throughout December, Black and progressive newspapers roundly praise Ossian’s “unparalleled courage” and hold him up as “an exemplar of the New Negro ideal,” fighting for his rights as a citizen.

Ossian and Gladys travel to New York City as the special guests and headlining celebrities of the NAACP’s annual business meeting in January 1925 where a crowd of 1,500 Black Harlem residents applauds them at a rally. From there, they spend two weeks touring various NAACP branches in Northeast and Midwest states. Ossian, his ego inflated by the stories he hears about himself, begins “thunder[ing]” at the audiences with a mix of “exaggeration, self-righteousness, and more than a touch of arrogance,” according to NAACP representatives. And his growing hero complex leads to conflict with Gladys, who had been the defendants’ public face since the fall. But their tour pushes the Legal Defense Fund to $76,000—one and a half times its initial goal.

The NAACP’s Washington, D.C. segregation case finally reaches the Supreme Court late in 1925, after the Sweet trial ends. Although the NAACP’s venerable lawyers put forth their best case, their presentation lacks vigor. Their claim—that the government can’t legislate individual homeowners’ decisions to add restrictive covenants to their deeds, but it can refuse to honor them, thus legally defanging them—is hardly straightforward. With little expectation of success, the NAACP must wait to see what the Supreme Court decides.

Ossian and Gladys wait, too; Robert Toms has another big case to try, and the court’s packed schedule pushes the retrials into the spring of 1926. Without a doubt, the first trial has greatly enhanced Ossian’s social standing. Patients flood his practice and NAACP officers like White treat him deferentially. Concerns do pop up: Gladys and Iva spend much of the winter sick with racking coughs, and the local defense team—Cecil Rowlette, Julian Perry, and Charles Mahoney—express frustration with Hays’s and Darrow’s defense. They think it would be safer to defend all 11 together rather than separately. But Ossian doesn’t argue when White tries to purge the Black lawyers from the team or when Robert Toms announces his plan to retry the men separately, starting with Henry. Jury selection will begin on April 1, 1926.

Over the months between the end of the first trial and the beginning of the second, Darrow reverts to his normal life of public appearances. His uncharacteristic optimism about the outcome of the second trial may come from the shifting political tides in Detroit, which begin to change when mayor John Smith is inaugurated on the first of the year. Smith appoints a blue-ribbon commission to study race relations in the city, headed by Reinhold Niebuhr, who packs the committee with progressives and Sweet supporters, including Edward Carter. And a scandal has imploded the Detroit Klan, greatly reducing its power.

In early March, Arthur Garfield Hays becomes involved in a high-profile case that prevents him from rejoining the defense. Darrow insists that Thomas Chawke replace Hays. This horrifies White, who earlier judged Chawke an inappropriate representative for such a high-profile trial associated with the NAACP thanks to his mob ties and no-holds-barred courtroom style. After a few days of negotiation, Chawke officially joins the defense team.

Henry Sweet’s slightly delayed second trial begins on Monday April 19th. Prosecutor Toms has recently announced that he will drop the charges against the rest of the defendants if the jury finds Henry not guilty. And he makes it clear that he intends to call the same witnesses and make the exact same case as in the first trial. When Darrow and Chawke examine potential jurors, their questions point inexorably towards the idea of prejudice; they turn jury selection into a covert opening statement on their central argument and excuse jurors unlikely to agree with them. Over the course of the week, they examine 198 people before settling on the final jury.

Opening arguments begin on the Monday morning of the next week. Toms’s opening statement outlines his plan to build up a circumstantial case against Henry. If Toms expects Darrow to put off his opening statement until after the prosecution rests, as he did in the first trial, he is disappointed. Instead, Darrow stands up and coolly tells the jury that Henry likely fired the fatal shot. But, he says, the real villains are the average people who threatened the Sweets’ safety.

For a week and a half, Toms carefully builds his case with each witness, only to have Chawke and Darrow dismantle it through intense, sometimes combative cross-examination. When they can’t expose the lies, they expose the liar. One example is Inspector Schuknecht, who casually takes the witness stand, confident in the authority that proximity to the city’s elite provides him. Darrow presses Schuknecht to explain why he closed adjacent streets to traffic if there wasn’t a crowd and why, if the shooting was unprovoked, he entered the Sweets’ house without assuming a defensive posture. Each question reveals the inconsistencies in the Inspector’s story.

Other neighborhood residents provide even more damning testimony under cross-examination, placing more and more people on the streets and connecting the crowd’s arrival to a desire to roust the Black family from the area. By their questions and their significant looks to the jury box, Chawke and Darrow slowly transform neighborhood witnesses into “idiots” and “slope-browed simpletons.” And they press each witness on the nature and objectives of the Waterworks Park Improvement Association. Although witnesses try to claim their aim was just to “protect [their] property,” the defense gets some to admit that the undesirable characters who necessitated protection were “colored people” like “Negroes” and “Eye-talians.” Chawke and Darrow also get witnesses to describe not just the massive midsummer rally the Waterworks Association held at the school but the crowd’s enthusiastic response to its featured speaker, a member of the Tireman Association who directly advocated violence.

By the time Toms rests his case on May 4, the defense has already shown that prejudice has a home on the “cramped, crabbed houses [lining] Garland Avenue.” Witnesses from the first trial, like Edna Butler, Serena Rochelle, and Philip Adler again confirm the size and frenzy of the crowd the night before the shooting. New witnesses like Thomas Chawke’s German cleaning lady (who happens to live in the neighborhood) also corroborate reports of the crowd. Even Ossian returns to the stand, although this time his less-carefully guarded testimony almost allows Toms to catch him in a lie.

Closing arguments begin with a bitter screed from Assistant Prosecutor Lester Moll, who dismisses Ossian as “quasi-intelligent” and Rochelle and Butler as “so-called artists.” He excoriates Chawke and Darrow for their unwillingness to confront the specter of poor Leon Breiner bleeding out on the Doves’ front lawn and their preference to carry the jury on a pointless and distracting journey through “the ages of history” and Ossian’s life. In rebuttal, Chawke points out the role of prejudice on the night of the shooting and Moll’s attempt to awaken it in the jurors. He taps into Detroit’s recent racial and political conflicts much more directly than Darrow and Hays dared in the first trial. Thus, he reminds Detroiters who, like the Irish American Chawke himself, don’t fit nativist racial ideals, of their own self-interest in the case. Instead, he pleads for a vision of American equality represented by John Smith’s victory.

Hundreds of people pack the courtroom on the following day to hear Darrow’s closing argument, which is a brilliant “jeremiad for the modern age.” He begins by reminding the jurors that they are prejudiced, just like he is. Prejudice is part of the human condition. But he urges the jurors to fight this instinct as they consider the story of Henry, a “good [college] boy” and Ossian, a man who started with nothing and made himself successful in a classic iteration of the American Dream. He holds the Sweets’ achievements and class against the working-class residents of Garland Avenue who believe that “Negroes and the Eye-talians” don’t count as Americans, even though the continent was discovered by an Italian man.

Above all, Darrow takes aim at the communal nature of the violence and oppression that the Sweets suffered. A crowd of hundreds, he points out, gathered at a school funded with public money, to listen to a speaker advocate violating the constitution to protect their unearned sense of superiority. On the night of September 8, they gathered “with the backing of the law” and allowed children to throw stones at the house. Then, although the Sweets’ bravery put a stop to the crowd’s violence, a coordinated campaign of lies organized by the prosecution extended its malice from the street into the courtroom. The root cause of it all, Darrow claims, is the prejudice at the heart of the human condition which has condemned men to die at the stake and which allowed the “horrors of slavery.” Against this prejudice, the white race owes Black men and women a debt that can never be repaid, though they should try.

Extending his hands toward the jury box, Darrow declares that humans will not be civilized until they love each other regardless of “color or creed.” Although the country’s constitution gives Black Americans legal equality, too many of their fellow citizens have refused to recognize this. For the sake of the progress of humanity, he begs them to return a verdict of not guilty. Then, after nearly six hours of sermonizing, he quietly returns to his seat.

The following day, Robert Toms makes a closing argument nearly as long as Darrow’s, which tries yet again to pull the jury’s focus back to Leon Breiner, a “poor, insignificant American […] one man in thousands” who nevertheless had the right to live. Finally, on the morning of Thursday, May 13, 1926, Frank Murphy gives the jury its instructions. After the delay and acrimony of the first jury’s deliberations, no one expects a swift verdict; Darrow and his wife, Thomas Chawke, Josephine Gomon, and their entourage leaves the courthouse for a long, alcohol-fueled afternoon at a local speakeasy. But within three hours, the court reconvenes, and the jury’s foreman returns a verdict of not guilty.