Arc of Justice: Epilogue Summary & Analysis

One month after the second Sweet trial ends, the NAACP holds its annual convention in Chicago’s South Side. James Weldon Johnson celebrates the promise of the now fully funded Legal Defense Fund; W. E. B. Du Bois lectures about the Harlem Renaissance’s upward trajectory; Walter White networks and promotes his newly-published second novel. When Clarence Darrow takes the stage, however, he outclasses them all; 2,000 people must be turned away from the Auditorium Theatre, which is filled to capacity. Although Darrow still sees prejudice, he now confidently predicts that its decline has begun. And although racial and ethnic hatred persist well into the 21st century, the legal and social changes in American society in the 1930s, 40s, 50s do show progress. Klan power evaporates and Jim Crow segregation drains away in the North, where white people convince themselves again that they are a tolerant, forward-thinking group, unlike their Southern peers.

Clarence Darrow spends the rest of his life advocating for civil rights. He joins the NAACP’s executive board in 1926 and becomes one of its most dedicated champions. He donates a portion of his lecture fees to the organization as well as regularly consulting with Johnson and White and contributing his writing to the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. He even joins the defense in a 1932 trial for nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white girls in Alabama. He passes away in the spring of 1938 at the age of 80.

In contrast, others associated with the political and legal events of 1925 and 1926 fail to advance civil rights. Thomas Chawke returns to a lucrative career defending mob bosses. John Smith’s promising political career crumbles in the face of the Detroit business and social elite’s coordinated campaigns against him. Without the foil of the Klan to rally progressive groups behind him, Smith fails to achieve a workable coalition again.

However, to a remarkable degree, others involved in the Sweet case do move America “away from the brutal intolerance of the 1920s.” Arthur Garfield Hays spends a legal career defending the rights of men and women from marginalized groups. Reinhold Niebuhr studies Detroit’s racial problems deeply on the mayor’s blue-ribbon commission. And while this group’s work fails to suggest meaningful changes, it also moves Niebuhr to develop a “radical” form of “politically involved” theology that inspires a generation of clergy, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Josephine Gomon transforms Detroit’s struggling welfare system into a “model of well-managed generosity,” and Robert Toms’ career becomes so deeply involved in pursuing equal rights that he’s called on prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials.

Although Detroit’s elite defeat John Smith, they fail to topple Frank Murphy, who becomes mayor of Detroit in 1930 with the support of the same coalition of Black and white working people who carried Smith to power earlier. This launches a political career which sees Murphy becoming governor-general of the Philippines, governor of Michigan, attorney-general of the United States, and, finally, a Supreme Court Justice. During his tenure on the court, he defends the rights of marginalized groups of all types and condemns the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII. 

James Weldon Johnson steps away from NAACP leadership to protect his health in 1929, and Walter White succeeds him. Under White’s direction, the NAACP “doggedly pursue[s]” Johnson’s legal strategy, using Supreme Court challenges to chip away at Jim Crow laws, including a landmark civil rights victory in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, which receives its decision a year before White’s death.

But racism and segregation still flourish, even in the North. The NAACP’s challenge of the restrictive covenants in Washington D.C. fails its Supreme Court challenge shortly after Henry Sweet’s acquittal. Social and economic forces, rather than legal ones, conspire to further solidify the color line in American real estate during the late 1920s and 1930s. As racism comes to be seen as a personal failure rather than a set of social systems conspiring to divide society, northern white progressives decry Southern lynchings while ignoring solidifying segregation in their own cities. Only in 1968, more than 40 years after the violent summer of 1925, does federal legislation begin to prohibit racial discrimination in buying and selling homes. But by then, segregation has become thoroughly entrenched, and today, Detroit is the most segregated city in America.

For Ossian and Gladys, tragedy ruins the news of Henry’s acquittal and the subsequent dropping of charges against the remaining defendants. Iva and Gladys are diagnosed with tuberculosis, which Gladys likely caught in jail and passed on to her daughter. Despite the family moving temporarily to Arizona in hopes that the hot, dry climate would allow her lungs to heal, Iva dies just before her second birthday. At Detroit’s Roseland Park Cemetery, the white groundskeeper refuses to allow the family through the main gate until Ossian threatens him with a gun. Ossian remains in Detroit, purchasing a drugstore and founding his own Black hospital while Gladys returns to Arizona in an attempt to recuperate. But in 1928, a few months after Ossian finally takes possession of the house on Garland Avenue, she dies at the age of 27.

Ossian’s personal life spirals downwards after Gladys’ death; two subsequent marriages end in divorce, and he remains childless. His attempts to run for the presidency of the NAACP’s Detroit chapter, the Michigan State Senate, and the U.S. Congress all fail despite his fierce pride in his own accomplishments and his faith in “the American way of life.” In contrast, Henry’s star rises, allowing him to become president of the Michigan NAACP conference before he, too, dies prematurely of tuberculosis. In 1950, Ossian sells the house to a Black family recently arrived from the American South. And in the spring of 1960, just as the Civil Rights movement is poised to take off, he takes his own life in a tiny apartment above his drugstore in Black Bottom, the predominantly Black neighborhood he tried so hard to leave behind.