Tonight NewMexiKen completed reading historian Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. The book tells the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a grandson of slaves who bought a house in a white neighborhood in Detroit in 1925 and the violence that ensued. There is informative and interesting background on the south during and after Reconstruction, racial politics in Detroit, the evolution of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the trial of Sweet, his family and friends led by the NAACP and Clarence Darrow.
Boyle’s book won the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction last month. I recommend it as an important story exceptionally well told.