home defense against a mob

Situation: A mob motivated by racial hatred is surrounding and attacking your home. Do you open fire?

Lesson: It’s not “a good shoot” until the triers of the facts say it is, and the aftermath can still be brutal.

2905 Garland Avenue is a handsome brick and clapboard single-family house, which sits at the corner of Garland and Charlevoix in Detroit, Michigan. It’s also the only house I can think of offhand that is now in the National Register of Historical Sites because of a controversial shooting that took place there.

Before the 1967 Detroit race riot that left 43 dead and hundreds injured … before the 1943 Detroit race riot that killed 34 people and injured 433 … there was the Ossian Sweet case.

Prelude

Ossian Sweet was an African-American born in the deep South in 1895. Growing up in a rural small-town setting in Polk County, Florida, he was five years old when he witnessed the lynching of a black man. He watched in horror as a white mob soaked the victim with gasoline and burned him alive and would vividly remember for as long as he lived some ghoulish observers taking chunks of charred flesh from the corpse for souvenirs.

Sweet took menial jobs to work his way through school, ultimately earning his MD degree, and moved to Detroit where he began his practice. In 1922 he married his wife Gladys. The couple exemplified what some sociologists called “the black bourgeoisie,” African-Americans who had diligently achieved upward mobility. Living in the heart of the Jim Crow era, he had hoped to find equality in the North, only to discover that Detroit was very much segregated. In 1924, a candidate supported by the then-resurgent Ku Klux Klan had missed being elected mayor of the city by only a small margin of votes.

After taking advanced medical study in Vienna and Paris in 1923 and ’24, Sweet returned with his wife to Detroit, hoping to raise a family. Unable to find a suitable home in the black neighborhoods, they purchased the Garland Street house in an all-white part of the city in June 1925. They had struggled to find realtors who would work with them and homeowners who would sell to them, finally sealing the deal with a purchase price of half again its then-current value. Hostility from their new white neighbors became immediately evident.

The Sweets scheduled their move for the day following Labor Day. The stage was set.

The Decision to Arm

Ossian Sweet was not a “gun guy.” Historian Phyllis Vine has written what I consider the best book on the Sweet case, One Man’s Castle. Therein, she explains the Sweets’ decision to be armed as follows:

“One summer day (between the purchase and moving in), a group of doctors found themselves talking in an office at the Dunbar Memorial Hospital. Drs. Sweet, Edward Carter and Herbert Simms, along with William Osby, the general manager, were listening to Dr. Turner describe his ordeal.” Alexander Turner, considered the most prominent black physician in the city, had recently been forced at gunpoint by white men to sign his Detroit home over to them. Vine continues, “A telephone call from Mrs. Marie Smith pulled Sweet away. She had just been threatened, she said, because she was selling her house to him. The aggressors told her they would get Sweet too. After hanging up the phone, Sweet returned to the conversation about the Turner incident and raised his own concerns. He told his colleagues he wasn’t going to run away.

“We’re not going to look for any trouble,” he said, “but we’re going to protect ourselves if trouble arises.”

“Years later, Osby described the advice he gave to Sweet two days before the move. If he were in Sweet’s situation, Osby said, he would send his wife and son out of town. But he would also get his revolver, shotgun and ammunition. About 400 rounds sounded right to him. He wouldn’t attack first, but he would not hesitate after the first person attacked him.

“After speaking with Osby, Ossian Sweet purchased guns and ammunition to protect himself and his family in the event of trouble.” (1)

Shots Fired

Ossian Sweet called on friends and relatives to assist in the move. Dr. Sweet had picked the Labor Day time period on the theory neighbors would have better things to do than harass black folks then, but that turned out not to be the case. As the Sweet allies arrived, they found a crowd of angry white people gathered at the scene, shouting racial slurs. Inside the home, doors were locked, curtains were drawn, and guns and ammo were distributed. Boxes of ammo were placed on windowsills. All save Mrs. Sweet appear to have been armed.

After a sleepless night, the harassment continued. Sweet had requested police protection beforehand, and by evening of the second day, September 9, an estimated eight to 10 Detroit police officers had been assigned to control the scene but appear to have done little if anything to disperse the crowd. Things escalated. A barrage of rocks was thrown at the Sweet house and through the windows. Dr. Sweet himself was showered with broken glass when a rock crashed through his bedroom window.

Suddenly, shots were fired. Across the street, one man staggered, and another collapsed. Twenty-five-year-old Eric Hogsburg (spelled Houghsberg in some accounts) had been shot in the leg. Leon Breiner, 33, had been hit in the back. His last words before he died were “Boys, they’ve shot me.”

All 11 people in the Sweet household were arrested. After hours of interrogation without counsel present, all were charged with murder.

First Trial

All 11 defendants were tried together. Testimony varied wildly, often contradictory and with some witnesses even self-contradictory. How large was the crowd harassing the Sweet home? Prosecution witnesses claimed as little as ordinary neighborhood foot traffic, while defense witnesses described as many as 300 to 15-hundred hostile people. Detroit News reporter Philip Adler, who had happened onto the scene, triggered an objection from the prosecutor when he described the group as “a mob” while testifying as an eyewitness.

Dr. Sweet’s younger brother Henry was the only defendant who admitted firing a gun, described as a “.38 caliber Winchester” rifle. He said, “I looked out and saw the crowd across the street throwing stones. I tried to protect myself. I fired the rifle in the air the first time. The second time I fired at the crowd standing between the store and the first house.”

The NAACP funded trial expenses, hiring the legendary Clarence Darrow to lead the defense, supplementing local counsel Charles Mahoney. Darrow, in his waning years at age 68, was the most famous lawyer in the country at the time, having recently finished the legendary “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee.

In the course of trial Darrow argued since the State could not prove which of the 11 defendants had fired the fatal shot, none should be found guilty of the killing. In the end, this argument proved insurmountable. The all-white-male jury deadlocked, resulting in a mistrial. It soon came out some two-thirds of the jury had voted to acquit all defendants of all charges. (2)

A new trial was scheduled. To avoid the same mistake, the prosecution decided to try each defendant separately, beginning with Henry Sweet, the only one who admitted he fired at all.

The Reasonable Man

In the second trial, People v. Henry Sweet, Darrow eloquently explained to the jury a cornerstone of any self-defense plea, what is generically known as the reasonable person doctrine: “What would a reasonable and prudent person have done, in the exact same situation, knowing what the defendant knew?” Here is how Darrow put it to the jury:

“Men are out in a boat, in an angry sea, with little food, and less water. No hope in sight. What will they do? They throw a companion overboard to save themselves, or they kill somebody to save themselves. Juries have come into court and passed on the question of whether they should have waited longer, or not. Later, the survivors were picked up by a ship and perhaps, if they had waited longer, all would have been saved; yet a jury, months after it was over, sitting safely in their jury-box, pass upon the question of whether they acted too quickly or not. Can they tell? No.

“To decide that case, you must be in a small boat, with little food and water; in a wild sea, with no sail in sight, and drifting around for hours or days in the face of the deep, beset by hunger and darkness and fear and hope. Then you can tell; but no man can tell without it. It can’t be done, gentlemen, and the law says so, and this Court will tell you so.

“Let me tell you what you must do, gentlemen. It is fine for lawyers to say, naively, that nothing happened. No foot was set upon that ground; as if you had to put your foot on the premises. You might put your hand on. The foot isn’t sacred. No foot was set upon their home. No shot was fired, nothing except that the house was stoned and windows broken; and an angry crowd was outside seeking their destruction. That is all. That is all, gentlemen.

“I say that no American citizen, unless he is black, need wait until an angry mob sets foot upon his premises before he kills. I say that no free man need wait to see just how far an aggressor will go before he takes life. The first instinct a man has is to save his life. He doesn’t need to experiment. He hasn’t time to experiment. When he thinks it is time to save his life, he has the right to act. There isn’t any question about it. It has been the law of every English-speaking country, so long as we have had law. Every man’s home is his castle, which even the King may not enter. Every man has a right to kill to defend himself or his family, or others, either in the defense of the home or in the defense of themselves.” (3)

Darrow’s argument worked. This second jury, again made up of all white males, found Henry Sweet not guilty on all charges. Despairing of any convictions, the prosecution dropped all remaining charges. The Sweet trials were over.
But the Sweets’ travails were not.

Aftermath

Months after the trial, the Sweets’ baby daughter died of tuberculosis. Her young mother died of the same disease in 1928. During the funeral, Dr. Sweet was stopped at the cemetery’s main gate and told he had to use another point of entry, because this one was for white people only. Dr. Sweet drew a revolver, and the guards rapidly changed their minds and allowed him to lead his dead wife’s funeral cortege through the main gate after all.

There were failed marriages. When he drove to see family in the still-segregated South, Ossian Sweet wore a chauffeur’s cap to avoid being stopped by police as a black man driving a fancy car. Arthritis plagued him severely. In 1960, at age 65, Dr. Ossian Sweet picked up a gun for the last time. He used it to commit suicide.

Lessons

It is good to have trial support. The NAACP paid for the Sweets’ legal representation. Lawyers of Darrow’s caliber today charge $1,000 an hour, and most people don’t realize the long, arduous trial preparation can run into a four-figure count of those hours. Their case had become a cause célèbre among a significant, sympathetic segment of society and thus drew substantial contributions to pay for the defense. The cost of a defense such as the Sweets’ would easily go seven figures today.

Do not tarnish your own defense. Testifying in the first trial, Dr. Sweet had to admit he had ditched evidence — a pocketful of live cartridges — in a cuspidor near a chair he’d sat in at the police station during his interrogation. Hiding or altering evidence is seen as an “indicia of guilt.” Dr. Sweet’s excuse, which apparently resonated with at least some jurors, was that he feared being framed by the police. Still, this action apparently compromised his credibility with at least some other jurors.

Be certain you can justify your actions before you press the trigger. People throwing rocks at a structure from the outside does not generally warrant a lethal force response in and of itself. The prosecution had a solid argument that Leon Breiner was on his own porch chatting with friends and family and smoking a pipe, with his back to the Sweet home, when he was fatally shot. The wound track — entry in lower back, exit near the navel — was straight horizontal. This, Darrow argued, was inconsistent with a shot fired downward from Henry Sweet’s position on the second floor of 2905 Garland. The prosecution explained that it could be accounted for if Breiner had been leaning slightly forward when shot, but the jury clearly had doubts. It appears Breiner was the classic innocent bystander. Henry Sweet firing intentionally “at the crowd” and striking an uninvolved neighbor would be construable as reckless, wanton behavior and certainly enough to sustain a manslaughter conviction.

Understand that bringing friends into such a conflict can jeopardize them. Only Mrs. Gladys Sweet was allowed bail; the rest of friends and family remained in jail until the last trial was done and the last charges were dropped. They had answered Dr. Sweet’s call for assistance in what they could reasonably see as righteous cause, but all paid a price whether they pulled a trigger or not.

Attorneys can establish multiple branches of reasonable doubt. Detroit Police Officer Frank Gill claimed to see two of the Sweet party open fire from the upper back porch of the home, and said he returned one shot at them himself with his .38 service revolver, from ground level. The defense tried to indicate the cop’s bullet could have traveled parallel across the street, consistent with the trajectory of the fatal wound. If you fire a shot, you should be certain where the bullet is going to end up.

It is critical to understand who is and isn’t part of the mob. At the time of the Sweet incident, historian Vines notes, “Michigan law was clear about what constituted a mob. ‘Ordinance 15001 of Offenses Against the Public Peace defined a mob as ‘12 or more people armed with clubs or other dangerous weapons … or 30 or more, whether armed or not.’” (4) A “mob” is generally seen at law as a group with shared criminal intentions. The legal principle is when such a mob attacks you, each member of the mob — a lynch mob, for example — shares culpability and therefore shares vulnerability to lawful defense of self or others. This is not true of a bystander neighbor on his own porch, and in today’s pattern of urban violence that begins as a peaceful demonstration, does not extend to protesters as opposed to rioters, looters, and those committing arson of occupied dwellings. This helps to explain some of today’s confusion between “protesters” and “rioters and arsonists.” Their identity as one or the other must be determined by their observed actions, not assumption based on their mere presence.

Footnotes: (1): Vine, Phyllis, One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream, Harper-Collins, NY, 2004, P. 113. (2): The [Baltimore] Afro-American, 28 Nov. 1925, P. 1. (3): People v. Henry Sweet, trial transcript published by NAACP, 1927 (4): Vines, op. cit., P. 167

Subscribe To American Handgunner

Purchase A PDF Download Of The American Handgunner May/June 2021 Issue Now!