Arc of Justice: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Ossian Sweet arrives in Detroit a newly minted doctor in the late summer of 1925, with little more than $200 in his pocket. In the 10 years since he first came to the city for summer work, the city’s economy has rapidly expanded and its population has boomed. Although initially, the founders of industry, like Henry Ford, thought they could create a city as mechanical and tidy as their factories, early efforts to encourage clean living, a culturally American population, and a Protestant work ethic have been overrun by expansion. Drugs, alcohol, sex work, and other vices are rife. As industrial leaders lose faith in their ability to forge society according to their ideals, racism, xenophobia, and antisemitic sentiment increase. Henry Ford spreads virulently antisemitic conspiracy theories. And violence simmers constantly just below the surface.

Ossian rents a room in Black Bottom, the neighborhood where most of Detroit’s Black population lives. When he came to the city a decade earlier, it mostly housed people considered less desirable by native-born white residents (immigrants from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean). But by the early 20s, the demographics have shifted. Black people from the South, traveling north during the Great War, have inundated Black Bottom and changed its character. Predictably, an increasing Black population means deteriorating race relations and increasing segregation and violence. Factories start segregating bathrooms, while white laborers terrorize and sabotage their Black colleagues. Black women must take low paying, exhausting domestic jobs.

Some Black immigrants to Detroit come to Black Bottom knowing that it’s where they will find community and opportunity. And many of the poorest European immigrants still live there, too. But increasingly, redlining practices confine Black residents to this area of the city. Real estate agents often refuse to show Black families houses in white neighborhoods. And the few Black families that try to encroach into these enclaves often face violence from their neighbors. For example, in 1917, a greedy landlord started renting apartments in an all-white neighborhood to Black families since he could charge them more. A white crowd threatened the new residents and they appealed to some passing policemen for protection. The officers instead stood by while the crowd ransacked the home.

Black Bottom is an older neighborhood that struggles under the strain of thousands of newcomers. Near the river, flophouses and rat-infested boarding houses provide scant shelter for the poorest residents, while better-off residents live in tiny, cramped, dilapidated buildings. Deprived of options, people pay exorbitant rents for rundown buildings that landlords fail to maintain. Few have amenities like electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. The most destitute pay a fee to sleep on tables in the pool halls. In addition, Detroit policemen frequently subject residents to indignities like random searches and arrests. The preventable diseases linked to poverty and lack of sanitation run rampant through the population: Black residents die of pneumonia at twice the rate and of tuberculosis at three times the rate of white Detroiters. Most can’t afford—or even access—doctors of the city’s predominantly white hospitals.

Ossian establishes his medical practice in Black Bottom at the back of the centrally-located Palace Drug store just a few blocks from his rooms. His first patients, Lucius and Elizabeth Riley, come to him fearing that Elizabeth’s stiff jaw signifies a potentially deadly tetanus infection. Fortunately, it’s just dislocated. Ossian resets it for the modest fee of $5. And the Rileys’ word-of-mouth recommendation encourages new patients to try Ossian’s tiny practice. Most can’t afford to pay much, but Ossian works hard and carefully squirrels away his cash.

Ossian also begins to network in the Black Bottom community, joining fraternal organizations like the Elks and the Masons, and starting to attend Ebenezer AME Church. His connections earn him the role of medical examiner for an insurance company, vastly expanding his practice. And he makes a few friends, including lawyer and fellow Howard alum Julian Perry and Dr. Edward Carter, a colleague and fellow Elk and Mason. Carter has the life Ossian wants in the upper reaches of Black society, comprised of mostly Northern-born, well-educated ministers, lawyers, and doctors. Most work in Black Bottom, but few of the elite live there, commuting from houses in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Ossian and Carter both work at Dunbar Memorial, a tiny, threadbare hospital founded by the city’s Black doctors in 1918. It represents a proud achievement—a place where Black residents can receive care with dignity—although its resources are severely limited. But it’s a place where Ossian can rub elbows with the city’s established, elite Black doctors.

In the early 1920s, the civil rights movement gains momentum. However, it’s increasingly divided between competing impulses for integration (spearheaded by W. E. B. Du Bois) and Black nationalism. More and more activists preach the value of armed resistance. While Black nationalist ideas draw some Black Bottom residents, most of the Black talented tenth, including Ossian and his medical colleagues, remain staunch integrationists. Their efforts to improve the lot of the city’s Black residents often take on a tone of condescension, lecturing poorer residents about the need to behave with decorum and embrace hygiene. At the same time, the local NAACP branch engages in litigation fighting segregationist policies. And they step in to provide legal aid for a Black man who murdered his abusive landlord. They protect him from lynching and help him to earn a judgment of justifiable homicide.

But when the national organization poaches the Detroit NAACP branch’s charismatic leader, the local branch disintegrates. By the time Ossian arrives, despite solidifying power in the white supremacist movement, local civil rights campaigns have become sporadic. Ossian resents growing discrimination, but he joins the fight against it reluctantly. He participates in a small, safe protest, joining nine of his Black colleagues in very visibly attending an event in honor of a notoriously racist baseball star. Although this action makes Ossian feel powerful, in the context of the city’s increasing segregation, it does little to improve the lives of Black Detroiters or Black Americans. Race riots destroy the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. In 1922, 51 Black men are lynched. And in 1923, race riots destroy Rosewood, Florida.

Against this backdrop of increasing violence, Ossian meets Gladys at a dance in 1922. Gladys was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her single mother luckily married a young Black musician, who took his family to Detroit and then built a successful career. The family could afford to live in a white neighborhood, allowing Gladys to attend white schools. To Ossian, the graceful, cultured, and educated Gladys represents the perfect wife. They marry in December 1922 and move in with Gladys’ parents—Black Bottom is no place for a lady like Gladys to live.

Following his marriage, Ossian plans to spend a year in Europe studying the latest medical advances. Not only will this polish his medical credentials, but it adds a layer of elite sophistication to his growing self-presentation. Moreover, the relative lack of overt racism in Europe promises a welcome respite from the exhaustion of survival in America. Through the spring and summer of 1923, he works out the trip’s logistics, despite Gladys’ pregnancy. She delivers a premature baby boy in July who dies three days later. Thus, the European trip provides a distraction from the couples’ personal grief in addition to a break from Jim Crow-style racism. Their ship cabin for the European voyage sits between two white couples’ cabins.

The Sweets stop in Vienna first, and Ossian attends lectures by Baron von Eiselberg, the father of neurosurgery. Studying at the Eiselberg Institute itself would have given him better access to cutting-edge medical research, but just attending such a famous man’s lectures provides Ossian with knowledge far beyond the medicine practiced in the  resource-starved Dunbar Hospital. In Vienna, Gladys discovers that she is pregnant again. Then the couple moves to Paris, where Ossian listens to Marie Curie, the mother of radiology. In Europe, the Sweets relish the lack of racial discrimination, much like the growing community of Black expatriate artists, musicians, and writers converging on Paris.

But Jim Crow follows the Sweets abroad, too. Although Ossian makes a sizeable donation to the American Hospital in Paris, it refuses to allow Gladys to deliver there, saying that she would make white patients uncomfortable. Fortunately, baby Iva arrives without incident in May, shortly before the family’s return home to Detroit.