By Sarah Karush
The Associated Press

In September 1925, a successful black obstetrician moved his young family into a spacious east-side home in a predominantly white neighborhood in Detroit.

An angry mob gathered and began hurling rocks. Shots were fired, as Dr. Ossian Sweet and others inside tried to defend themselves. When a bullet struck a neighbor, Sweet, his wife and nine other black men were put on trial for murder.

In a remarkable civil rights victory for the time, two all-white juries refused to convict them - recognizing the principle that a man's house is his castle, regardless of race.

More than three-quarters of a century later, Sweet's story is getting renewed attention. Phyllis Vine's One Man's Castle has just been released. This summer, a Michigan historical marker is to be unveiled at Sweet's former house, and a second book, Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle, is due out in September.

As recounted by Vine, Sweet's defense challenged racist assumptions. Celebrated trial lawyer Clarence Darrow asked white jurors to imagine how they would feel if they were confronted by a black mob "in a black man's land."

But as a strike against residential segregation, the Sweet case carries the added poignancy of a lost opportunity, the authors of the new books said. American cities remain highly segregated, with metropolitan Detroit the second-most segregated area for blacks after Milwaukee, according to the Census Bureau.

Still relevant

That continued relevance may help explain the sudden burst of interest in Sweet.

"Historians see the past through the prism of the present," said Vine, a historian and journalist who lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., and who came across the case while doing research about her own family's Detroit roots.

Vine begins One Man's Castle in Bartow, Fla., where Sweet grew up, recounting how at age 7 he witnessed a lynching.

The young doctor settled in Detroit, then a booming city that was becoming a magnet for blacks escaping poverty and the segregated South, and soon married. The couple set about looking for a house. They found one at 2905 Garland Ave.

The Ku Klux Klan was gaining influence, but Sweet had been reassured it was not active in the neighborhood. Police were stationed near Sweet's house for the move, but apparently did little to control the growing crowd of white onlookers. On the second day, people began pelting the house with rocks and shouting slurs.

Shots were fired from the house, but prosecutors were never able to determine whose bullet killed Leon Breiner. They accused Ossian and Gladys Sweet and the nine others of conspiring to commit murder.

Juries didn't convict

The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second time, Darrow opted to let Sweet's brother, Henry, stand trial alone first. He had admitted firing a gun, so the prosecution had the strongest case against him. The jury took less than four hours to acquit him.

Despite the victory, the trial did little to bridge divisions in urban America.

"What the defense didn't do and couldn't do is to make an argument that the segregation of neighborhoods should be stopped," said author Boyle, a Detroit native and history professor at Ohio State University.

"It tells you how strong the forces were at that moment that were pushing toward segregating the cities. Even in victory ... they couldn't stop the larger dynamic."