Arc of Justice

Detroit, early autumn, 1925. Though it's Labor Day, the city sizzles as if it's the Fourth of July. The city's architecture has changed very much since its founders' "French design," which consisted of five boulevards that radiate "outward like spokes," populated by mansions, churches, and rows of "modest single-family homes" (13) and vacant lots. Starting in the early twentieth century, Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, Walter Chrysler, and Walter O. Briggs opened automobile factories that brought them all great wealth and a boom to Detroit. Factories, "machine shops and parts plants" now overshadow its once beautiful boulevards. Ford's promise of "an unprecedented five dollars a day" attracts workers nationwide and abroad. As people flood into the city hoping to find high-paying factory jobs, the city's neighborhoods become defined. Black migrants and "the poorest immigrants" live in the "center city" (14), while the wealthiest native-born whites live in the outer suburbs. Between these lives the white working class—immigrants on the east side, and native-born on the west side.

Garland Avenue sits in this "middle range" (15). By 1925, it's been carved up into small plots on which people have either built homes or purchased prebuilt, narrow duplexes. Garland Avenue's residents are decidedly white, mostly American born, with a few "respectable" immigrants, German, English, Irish, or Scottish. Most of the men on the street work in retail, education, or as foremen or supervisors at the auto plants. Their wives typically care for the home and children. However, housing prices have "spiraled upward" (16) in recent years, and many families struggle to buy or keep their homes. Additionally, black families have begun to move into houses on Garland Avenue.

Dr. Ossian Sweet, his wife, daughter, and brother are one such family. Originally from Florida, Dr. Sweet has a medical degree from Howard University, an historically-black university in Washington, D.C. After finishing his degree, Dr. Sweet had taken his wife, Gladys, to Vienna and Paris for a yearlong postgraduate fellowship. On returning to Detroit, Dr. Sweet took a position at Dunbar Memorial, "the city's best colored hospital." He and Gladys lived in Black Bottom, "the city's largest ghetto" (21) until Dr. Sweet had saved enough money to put a down payment on the house on Garland Avenue—$18,500.

Gladys had grown up a few blocks north of Garland Avenue. She's thrilled to have a beautiful home built by a "Belgian-born contractor," with one more room than her parent's home. Dr. Sweet, though proud to own the house, feels "terribly, terribly afraid" (21) to be moving into the all-white neighborhood. He remembers seeing acts of violence done to black men and women throughout his childhood in Florida. He reads about them in the "race papers" (23), including an incident in which police shot and killed four black men in the back of a sheriff's car. Two of the men had been doctors, like Dr. Sweet. In Detroit, the KKK had begun active recruitment in 1921, and during the first half of 1925 alone, Detroit police had shot "fifty-five blacks." In July, 1925, the KKK held a rally attended by ten thousand "white-robed knights." One recent incident haunts Dr. Sweet; Dr. Alexander Turner, a highly-esteemed black doctor in Detroit, who held appointments at Dunbar Memorial and two "major white hospitals" was attacked by a white mob within five hours of moving into his newly purchased home "in an all-white area of Detroit's west side" (24). Dr. Turner escaped on the floor of his Lincoln, driven away by his chauffeur. He signed the deed of his house over to the "neighborhood improvement society" (25) and moved away in defeat.

Dr. Sweet, on the other hand, prepares himself to defend his home from a potential hostility. Armed with multiple guns, he asks male friends and relatives to accompany him and Gladys as they move into their home. They all agree to do so, gladly, and some will even stay "the first few nights." The Sweets take ownership of the property on August 1 but decide to move in the day after Labor Day, September 8. This way there's "less of a chance his white neighbors would be out" (26) when the Sweets arrive. At ten o'clock in the morning on September 8, the Sweets' caravan arrives, with their chauffeur, Joe Mack, driving their Buick, and the other men riding in the moving truck behind.

A friend of the Sweets had asked for a few police officers to stand guard outside the house, and they arrive shortly after the Sweets move in. Dr. Sweet and the men get to work moving furniture and unpacking, while Gladys and her girlfriends, a seamstress and an interior decorator, talk plans for home décor. Though the street had been mostly empty, save for a few curious housewives, all day, after school and work, crowds of neighbors have gathered on the nearby porches and schoolyard to observe the Sweet's house.

Gladys, "always the proper hostess" (28) insists everyone stay for dinner. They eat earlier than usual, so everyone can leave before dark, but finish after the sun sets. Fearing the threat of potential violence, everyone agrees to stay the night in the Sweet's bungalow. Outside, the police presence has increased, from four to a dozen, as has the crowd of white spectators. Dr. Sweet estimates there are maybe "a hundred, maybe two hundred, men, women, and children" gathered across the street. The police won't let anyone onto the sidewalk just in front of the Sweet's house. Inside, Dr. Sweet shows his brothers, Otis and Henry, his friends, William Davis and John Latting, the handyman, Norris Murray, and Joe Mack the arsenal of guns and ammunition he's stashed in the linen closet. The men plan to stay up all night, keeping watch. Dr. Edward Carter, Dr. Sweet's colleague who had encouraged him to buy the house, regrets that he won't be able to come help them. This angers Dr. Sweet, but he and the other men "do their best" (29). Though tense, the night passes without incident, beyond a few men throwing stones at the bungalow's roof.

The next day, Mack drives Dr. Sweet and Gladys to run errands, while Henry and Latting agree to stay at the bungalow to keep watch. The Sweets buy new furniture for their home, then go to Gladys’s parents' house to visit with Iva. Gladys stays there to do some shopping before returning home, while Dr. Sweet heads to Dunbar Memorial to do some work. There, he gets a call from Hewitt Watson, his representative from "black-owned Liberty Life Insurance." Watson's calling to straighten out a mistake on Dr. Sweet's home insurance paperwork, but, in desperation to defend his home, Dr. Sweet proceeds to tell Watson about his fears. Watson agrees to help Sweet protect his new home that night, along with "two fellow insurance agents, Leonard Morse and Charles Washington" (31).

After work, Mack brings Dr. Sweet back home. Garland Avenue looks quiet and unpopulated compared to the night before. Two police officers stand on the corner of Garland and Charlevoix Avenues, just as they had the night before. Inside, Gladys is cooking dinner. Dr. Sweet senses something isn't right. Gladys tells him that on her way home, Edna Butler had overheard a white woman on the streetcar tell the driver that the neighborhood planned to "get rid of" the Sweets tonight. This terrifies Dr. Sweet. He rushes out to the front porch where he finds his younger brother, Henry, and his friend, John Latting, smoking cigars and reading the paper. They tell Dr. Sweet that a patrolman had come by earlier to tell them that the crowd would be coming back "double force" (32) tonight. Dr. Sweet orders the young men to get into the house, and bolts the front door closed. He then sends Mack to Black Bottom to pick up Norris Murray, whom he promises to pay five dollars for helping defend the house.

By six o'clock, Mack, Murray, and the three insurance men have come to the Sweets' home. Dr. Sweet shows them to the gun stash upstairs, and the places they've "established as defensive positions" throughout the house. Suddenly, something hits the house's roof. Henry runs to the front window and sees "hundreds of white people" (35) gathered. Each of the men arm themselves. Dr. Sweet goes into the front bedroom upstairs, where he lays on the bed, trying to calm himself. After a while, the window above him shatters as a rock flies through it. Outside, he sees a taxi cab pull up to his house. From downstairs someone yells, "That's your brother!" (36). Dr. Sweet runs downstairs to make sure Gladys is safe and finds her at the foot of the stairs, drawn up by the noise. Dr. Sweet goes to the front door to let Otis and William Davis inside. The crowd scream racist slurs and throw rocks onto the front porch. After making it inside, Dr. Sweet repeats to himself, "What shall I do?" Davis tells him not to do a thing, but let the police handle it. From upstairs comes the sound of another window being shattered, followed by a gun shot, then another "volley, as fierce as the first" (37).

Across the street, Eric Houghberg is in his bathroom, shaving. His landlord's young son bursts into his house to tell Houghberg about the events outside. Excited, he rushes out and finds the mob throwing rocks, and gun shots coming from the Sweets’ house. Amidst the chaos of people running away or taking cover, Houghberg walks over to Leon Breiner, a foreman, smoking his pipe on the street. Houghberg lights a cigarette of his own and asks Breiner what's going on. Breiner says the "Negroes" are shooting, just as the gunfire starts up again. One of the shots hits Breiner in the back, exiting through his stomach. Houghberg gets hit in the leg, "just above the knee" (38). He feels an instinct to run, which he does. He collapses just before reaching the back of his house.

Inspector Norton Schuknecht, the officer in charge of the patrol, has been standing on the corner talking to his brother-in-law, Otto Lemhagen, and Lieutenant Schellenberger. None of the men had been paying attention to the Sweets’ house. Now, though, Schuknecht hears gunfire. He knows that if this escalates, "twelve cops weren't going to be able to handle it" (38). He tells the lieutenant to call in reserves, then heads towards the house. Despite being a large man, Schuknecht has trouble getting through the crowd. He eventually reaches the porch and rings the doorbell, telling Dr. Sweet it's "the police" (39) when he asks who it is.

Dr. Sweet, skeptical of opening the door to anyone, even someone claiming to be the police, lets Schuknecht inside. Schuknecht asks "what in the hell" the men are shooting at. Dr. Sweet replies that the mob outside is "ruining my property." Schuknecht disagrees, saying he's been standing on the corner all night and hasn't seen "anyone throw anything" (39). Stunned, Dr. Sweet asks to speak to Inspector McPherson. Schuknecht tells Dr. Sweet that he's in charge, with men all around the house, and that "there will be no more shooting" (40). Dr. Sweet doesn't argue.

Leon Breiner lays in a pool of blood on the neighbor's porch. Word reaches Schuknecht that two men have been shot, one dead, and the other wounded. Running through his options mentally, Schuknecht decides the best thing to do is sit tight until the reinforcements arrive. Otherwise, the white mob might rip the Sweets and their guests "limb from limb" (40). Though the mob stays away from the Sweets’ house, they harass and assault the black passengers in two cars driving by the house.

Reinforcements arrive five minutes later, and the officers "burst" into the Sweets’ house. They pull open the front shades and turn on the lights for the first time all day, "momentarily" (41) blinding Dr. Sweet. The officers round up everyone in the house and bring them into the living room. There, they confiscate all the visible firearms, then pat down each of the men. Dr. Sweet gets handcuffed to Davis, "like the prisoners on the chain gangs" Dr. Sweet had seen on the roads around his hometown in Florida. Humiliated, Dr. Sweet keeps his head down and begins pleading for the police to lower the shades and take them out through the alleyway. Mack steps forward and motions to one of the police officers, "a rail-thin white man dressed in street clothes." The white man is a lieutenant working with Inspector McPherson and the "Black Hand Squad." His job is to see to "the Negroes' safety" (42). He orders the shades to be lowered, Dr. Sweet's handcuffs removed, and the paddy wagon to pull up around back, in the alley.

The police officers escort the men through the backyard and into the paddy wagon. They will bring Gladys to the station later, after the crowd dissipates. Just on the other side of the fence, on Charlevoix Avenue, the mob stands, restless. For the brief moment that they see the officers and the men, the lieutenant raises his gun "above his head" for the white mob to see, telling them that he'll "shoot to kill" (43) if anyone tries anything. The officers shove the men into the paddy wagon and slowly make their way onto the street.

As Ossian sits in the paddy wagon, alongside his brothers and the other men, he thinks about what he'll tell the police when they arrive at the station. He has a pocketful of bullets, potentially damning evidence of his "intent to do bodily harm" (44). Instead of a cogent story of self-defense, all Ossian feels he can do is offer his family's fragmented history, fraught with violence, as explanation for his move into such a hostile neighborhood with an arsenal he was prepared to use.

In a flashback passage, Boyle recounts Ossian's family history. Ossian's maternal grandfather, Remus DeVaughn, was born a slave on a cotton plantation in Leon County, just north of Tallahassee, Florida. A white man Alexander Cromartie owned the land. Cromartie's father owned a successful plantation in North Carolina, but Cromartie chose to strike out on his own, buying "thirteen hundred acres of prime cotton land" (46). In 1840, slaves outnumbered whites in Leon County two to one; slave owners lived in constant fear of revolt. Hence, Florida lawmakers imposed stringent restrictions on slaves' daily lives, as well as gruesome corporal punishments for crimes.

Edmond and Gilla DeVaughn, Ossian's great-grandparents, slaves on Cromartie's plantation, had seven sons between 1840 and 1852, including Remus and his twin brother, Romulus. All of the children were born into bondage, becoming "another asset" on Cromartie's "ledger sheets." During Remus' early childhood, though, changes to the institution of slavery began to take place: the state of Kansas "plunged into guerrilla warfare" (47) as lawmakers debated whether to allow slavery in the state; the Republican party elected Abraham Lincoln as president; and, within the months before Lincoln's inauguration, the southern states seceded from the Union, sparking the Civil War.

As the Civil War raged, slaves in Tallahassee, so far south, didn't hear about emancipation until May 10, 1865, "a full month after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox courthouse" (48). Ossian's great-grandfather, Edmond, didn't live to see the end of slavery, but his great-grandmother and her sons did. The transition away from slavery, though, proved rocky. Union troops left Tallahassee after a few months of occupation, and the federal government returned "control of the state to the planters." The plantation owners used their power to continue the oppression of freed black slaves by pushing them "to the very edge of bondage" (49). Corporal punishment remained in place, and freed blacks were locked into land agreements that resembled conditions of slavery.

In 1866, the Republican Congress dissolved the former Confederate states' governments, and put "the entire region back under military control" (49). Congress hoped to revitalize the South's economy, not just for the white landowners, but for all its citizens. Congress called this plan Reconstruction. It included railroad construction to foster economic relationships between the North and South, the opening of public schools for white and black children, and "federal agents" intended to implement the changes. Among them were white "soldiers, teachers, and preachers," and a small number of black "missionaries" (50) of various Christian denominations, including the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

The AME's doctrine of strict moral discipline and emphasis on "industry and frugality" (50) mirrored the Republican Reconstruction's prioritization of the same. AME preachers, ministering to predominately black congregations, used their message to address "racial consciousness." They argued that working hard, getting an education, and living a religious life would allow blacks to prove they were worthy of equality.Not all freed people received this message well, though;many chose instead to join the Baptist Church. However, two of Remus's brothers, drawn to the church by Elder Charles Pearce, "a missionary zealot" (51) ministering to the Tallahassee area, became missionaries.

Gilla DeVaughn and her children settled as sharecroppers on Solomon Sill's plantation, near the Cromarties. As sharecroppers, the DeVaughns lived on and worked Sill's land, keeping one-third "of the crop they grew" (52) and giving the other two-thirds to Sill. Their expanding family, though, created pressure to find a more suitable home. Plantation owners in the Reconstruction-era South made it difficult for freed people to work, let alone own, the land.

Despite these hostilities and outright violence committed by terrorist organizations such as the Regulators and the KKK, Republicans managed to take control of Florida's state government. Among them, eight AME "ministers or prominent laymen," including Elder Pearce. In 1872, frustrated by the establishment Republicans, who seemed more interested in economic opportunities for themselves, black voters in Florida put the governorship into Ossian Hart's hands. A white man of "unquestioning paternalism" (53), who held slaves until the last days of the Civil War, Hart nevertheless made good on what he considered paying his debts to the freed blacks who elected him to office. Hart advocated for civil rights laws, prohibited discrimination in "most public facilities," named a black man to head the state's public schools, and appointed AME members to "dozens of minor political posts" (54). In 1873, Hart also appointed Hubbert DeVaughn, Remus's brother, justice of the peace in Leon County, a position formerly held by Alexander Cromartie Jr., the DeVaughns' former masters.

These victories for freed blacks were short lived, though. After Governor Hart's sudden death in 1874, the Florida government fell back into Democratic hands. Like the Republicans, the Democrats continued pushing their economic agenda, giving "huge sections of public land to northern railroad companies." Democrats also began "undoing the racial policies" the Civil War had made possible. Limited by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution, which granted full citizenship to all freed blacks, and enfranchised all men, regardless of race, Florida's Democratic leaders devised "a social system premised on cruelty" (55). To limit black men's access to voting, Democrats imposed a poll tax, which decreasedthe number of black voters by 50 percent in its first year. Democrats also made interracial sex and marriage illegal, extended the definition of "Negro" to include those with "just one" (56) black great-grandparent, restricted the kinds of jobs available to blacks, and strictly enforced the segregation of all public spaces. Remus DeVaughn's brother, Hubbert, was removed from his position as justice of the peace.

Faced with the tightened restrictions of Jim Crow, Remus DeVaughn moved his family south to Orlando, Florida, a frontier town, which had been transformed to a railroad boomtown. Remus hoped to find work in the rail yards, but, at fifty-two found that he was "too old for the backbreaking labor" (58) done by most blacks. His oldest children supported him by working as a teacher and a washerwoman.

While Remus DeVaughn found more of the same in Orlando, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Dora, found a husband. His name was Henry Sweet, a man eight years her senior, whose parents had been slaves in East Texas. They'd come to Florida from Alabama fifteen years after the war. Henry was a tall man with fair skin. Like Dora's family, Henry had a "businessman's drive, an entrepreneurial spirit…a strong sense of pride, and…a dedication to fair dealing" (59). Henry and Dora married in 1890, and had their first son, Oscar in 1893. Two years later, Dora gave birth to a second son, whom she named Ossian after the Republican governor who had bestowed a government office on her Uncle Hubbert. Tragically, Oscar died within eight days of Ossian's birth.

In 1898, Henry Sweet bought a plot of land in Bartow, Florida—halfway between Orlando and Tampa. The former owner, a white man from the North, sold it to Henry for $250. Like Orlando, the arrival of the railroad transformed Bartow from a "tiny trading post of seventy-seven souls" (60) to a bustling town of nearly three thousand. However, the town itself was divided, physically, legally, and mentally, in half: white and black. The Sweet's plot was on the corner of Eighth and Bay streets, "as far from white Bartow as could be" (61). Bartow's black neighborhood had no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. Undeterred by these conditions, Henry and Dora set up their house and a commercial farm for themselves. Henry sold the crops locally and sometimes hauled it by mule to Tampa, some forty-five miles away. The Sweet's ten children helped with the house and farm work, with Ossian and his younger brother Otis taking over the plowing from Henry eventually. With his kids’ labor providing extra time, Henry started a lumberyard on his land to bring the family a few more "precious dollars" (62).

Henry and Dora wanted each of their children to get an education, which the AME doctrine taught was the way to success for blacks. Until the year before the Sweets’ arrival in Bartow, there was no school for black children. In 1898, though, the elders of St. James AME struck a deal with the town to pay for the construction of a school on church-bought property; the Bartow town officials would operate it. Under Jim Crow, public facilities for blacks were to be separate but equal to those for whites. This was seldom the case in the post-Reconstruction South. In Bartow, the AME-built Union Academy received half the money given to white grade schools and "far less" (64) than the high school. In its first year, Union Academy had one teacher and was only open for twenty-seven days of instruction. By the time Ossian started school, though, Union had multiple teachers and four months of instruction. The students learned to read and write, skills which many of their parents didn't have, and rudimentary math, history, and literature lessons.

In the 1890s, a Populist movement emerged to face down the economic order built by post-Reconstruction Democrats. Though composed largely of whites, the Populists acknowledged that the support of freed blacks would boost the power of their cause. Reacting to this attempt at solidarity, Democrats began to "redirect whites' anger" from their economic frustrations to their "erstwhile colored allies." Democrats did this by playing on the whites' "deepest fears of moral decay, economic impotence, and sexual inadequacy," framing blacks as aggressive usurpers, who would stop at nothing to "steal honest white men's hard-won gains" (65). This rhetoric, as espoused by South Carolina's governor Ben Tillman, effectively broke down Populism's momentum and drove whites to act on their fears, often in violent ways.

In Bartow, the "descent into barbarism" took place in the local phosphate mines. Mining was one of the few jobs available to "young, single black men desperate…for a dollar a day." The men lived in squalid shacks near the mine and developed their own "rough, often brutal world" for themselves near the mine camps, built around "'lobbies'" (65), or juke joints, speakeasies, and brothels. These lobbies both fascinated and horrified local whites. A local newspaper reported that the violence against whites in South Carolina would no doubt spread to South Florida, due largely to "the presence of large numbers of Negroes, lawless, unbridled" (66) who wasted their wages away in the lobbies.

Whites in Bartow preempted this perceived threat with violence. A white foreman shot a black worker dead, turned himself into the sheriff, but paid no consequence. This incident effectively galvanized violence against blacks in the mine camps, including the lynching of a black worker who killed a white man, and of the owner of a lobby and his two bodyguards after another white man's murder. The blacks who lived in East Bartow, like the Sweets, made efforts to distance themselves from association with the "violence of the mining camps" (66). They launched campaigns against "drinking, gambling, and fornicating" (67), but this distancing didn't seem to matter to Bartow's whites.

Violence against blacks escalated between 1901 and 1909, beginning with the immolation of Fred Rochelle. Rochelle, a sixteen-year-old black man, raped and murdered Rena Taggert while she was fishing by herself off the Peace River bridge. Whites organized themselves into posses to begin a manhunt. The political leaders of East Bartow condemned Rochelle's crime and advised solidarity with the white citizens to show that they would not "uphold such conduct as this" (67). Meanwhile, blacks, like the Sweets, braced themselves for the brewing violence. When the posses found Rochelle, they dragged him to a "hogshead" (68) and burned him alivewith the sheriff's sanction. Later in his life, Ossian will claim that he witnessed the entire thing, hidden in some nearby bushes. Before a decade had passed, whites had lynched or immolated half a dozen more men.

Dora and Henry Sweet decided that the best option for their oldest son, who, in 1909, had just completed the eighth grade, was to send him somewhere safer. Though only thirteen-years-old, Ossian complied. The night before he left East Bartow and his family, Ossian went to St. James AME to give "his heart to the Lord" (69). The next morning, he boarded a northbound train.

In September 1909, Ossian arrives in Xenia, Ohio. With the help of the Florida chapter of the AME, he has received a scholarship to attend Wilberforce University, America's first college "dedicated to providing Negroes with the blessings of higher education" (71). At just thirteen, Ossian will first attend four years of preparatory courses before beginning his university studies. Formerly a resort where plantation owners took their black mistresses, then a school for couples' mulatto children, Wilberforce was purchased by Ohio's white Methodists in the mid-1850s. The Methodists turned it into a college for free blacks, renaming it after "British abolitionist Bishop William Wilberforce." In 1863, the white Methodists sold Wilberforce to the AME for "the princely sum of $10,000" (73). Like other black institutions in post-Civil War America, Wilberforce suffers from severe underfunding and the place falls into disrepair. By the time Ossian arrives in 1909, the scholarship he's been promised has no funds to back it. Rather than leaving, discouraged, Ossian stays at Wilberforce, "stoking the college's furnaces and shoveling snow" (74) to pay his tuition.

Wilberforce's president, William Sanders Scarborough, adheres to black activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois's idea of the "Talented Tenth" (72) among free blacks. The 'Tenth' refers to Du Bois's proposition that one in ten black citizens will become "scholars and scientists, professionals and poets" (74) and become the race's leaders. Scarborough, spurred by "the finest AME tradition," overcame his lot in life by pursuing an education at Ohio's Oberlin College, the first American college to admit black students.There, Scarborough received bachelor's and master's degrees in the classics. Scarborough ensures rigor in Wilberforce's academics, but also in helping students develop the "strength of their characters" (76). This includes adherence to a strict schedule of frequent church services and prayer meetings, and restriction of fraternization between male and female students. Any student caught smoking or drinking faces expulsion. The only time students can let loose is during "week-long revivals," during which students experience "moments of religious ecstasy that appalled more secular members of the Talented Tenth" (77).

In contrast to its demanding academic and religious education, Wilberforce also has a technical training school subsidized by the state of Ohio, following the tradition of Booker T. Washington, a black intellectual and politician, who believes that the way to opportunity for blacks is through industrial training. Washington heads a "manual training school, Tuskegee Institute," starting in 1885, and Scarborough models Wilberforce's technical school after it. Students there learn manual arts, such as "shoemaking and carpentry" (75). Additionally, Wilberforce students have the option to join the cadet corps where they receive military training from "an exemplary string of officers" (77). Wilberforce is the only black school in the nation to have this program.

As the racial tensions and violence begin to spill over into the northern states, Scarborough amplifies his commitment to "radical Republicanism." He advocates against "any form of segregation" (77), including repealing state laws "prohibiting intermarriage" (78). Scarborough also joins Du Bois's "Niagara Movement" (80), a black civil rights organization founded in 1905. For their part, Northern whites respond to increased migration by Southern blacks by enforcing segregation and barring blacks from jobs, housing, and businesses. Because it's not legally sanctioned, though, these racist practices vary in severity from "place to place, even street to street" (79). However, a race riot in Springfield, Illinois that leaves six blacks dead and "two thousand driven from town" (80), alerts white Progressives to the severity of racial violence, even in the North.

In 1908, following the Springfield pogrom, "indefatigable reformer William English Walling" calls for citizens to revive "the spirit of the abolitionists" (80). In 1909, a group of progressives in New York announce the formation of a new organization of blacks and whites that will "fight for the rights of Negroes across the land" (81). Scarborough receives an invitation to the organization's first meeting and attends the meeting in Manhattan in May 1909, a few months before Ossian's arrival at Wilberforce. Comprising mostly white progressives and a smaller number of black activists, Du Bois included, this group comes to be called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP.

It's amidst this growing racial tension and activism that Ossian attends Wilberforce. Ossian, however, doesn't have time to take part in activism. In addition to his duties as a student and campus corps cadet, Ossian must work for his tuition. During the summers between each school year, he travels to Detroit, seeking work. Though he hopes for a higher paying factory job, like most blacks in the city, he can only find service work. He spends his first summer "washing dishes and selling sodas" (84) to vacationers on "Bob-Lo Island," an amusement park. Each summer Ossian returns, he gets a slightly better job, ending as a waiter at the Fairfax Hotel. There, he meets Vollington Bristol, a young Caribbean-born man who insists that white people in the North "respected ambition" (84). Bristol shares with Ossian his dream of one day owning a funeral home.

These conversations with Bristol and frustrations with the occupational limitations for most blacks push Ossian to decide to study medicine. His journey to becoming a physician seems, at first, difficult. In the 1910s, "stricter standards and tighter regulations" (85) around medicine make the profession harder to attain, especially for a person of color. However, these restrictions also make the profession more exclusive, which means more lucrative—a factor that excites Ossian. By the time he graduates, in 1917, there are "fewer than twenty-five hundred Negro doctors in the United States." Proliferation of racism in the North means white medical schools have stopped admitting black students, and there are only two black medical schools in the country: Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Each school only admits forty to fifty students each year, and all of those students come from Lincoln, Howard, or Fisk—not a provincial school like Wilberforce. In April 1917, though, President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress for "a declaration of war against Germany." Congress issues the declaration and the U.S. enters World War I to fight not for "territorial gain" but for "democracy" (86).

With the US army's permission, the NAACP establishes a training camp for black soldiers in Des Moines, Iowa. Du Bois, writing in the NAACP's magazine, Crisis, pleads for members to volunteer for service. By fighting for "democratic principles abroad," Du Bois argues, blacks will force white Americans to "recognize the rights of black people at home" (87). This hope never comes to fruition. As native-born American men head off to fight in Europe and factories expand their production for the war effort, black migration from the South increases to half a million in 1917. The influx of black laborers heightens racial tensions in the Northern cities. In July 1917, a pogrom breaks out in East St. Louis, Illinois after union members blame the defeat of their strikes on black workers who crossed the picket lines. The violence leaves forty blacks dead, hundreds injured, and thousands displaced by destruction of their neighborhoods. In New York City's predominantly black neighborhood, Harlem, black activist James Weldon Johnson organizes a protest march of over ten thousand. They march down Fifth Avenue in complete silence, holding an American flag and a banner that reads "Blood Is On Your Hands" (89).

Though Ossian volunteers for the war effort, he fails the army's eye exam and is disqualified for service. This rejection, and the recruitment of any other able-bodied black men for service,makes Ossian available to accept his admittance to Howard University's medical school. Ossian arrives in Washington, D.C. in fall of 1917. Howard, built by an act of Congress in 1867 and continuously funded by the federal government, doesn't struggle financially like Wilberforce. Ossian finds its campus elegant, situated between "a struggling neighborhood of row houses" and "the Black 400," a neighborhood populated by America's "most elite Negroes" (90). Half of Ossian's classmates come from elite Northern black families, and many of them attended prestigious universities like Howard, Northwestern, and Williams College.

In the past, Howard had required its medical students to work during the day to support themselves, attending classes at night;it has reversed the policy by the time Ossian arrives. Howard expects students to be able to pay their $300 annual tuition without holding a job, as the medical curriculum is "too demanding" (92). Ossian can't afford to pay rent and his tuition without working, so he takes a job as a waiter at social events.

The end of World War I, in 1918, brings with it more racial violence in the United States. In Washington, D.C. in July 1919, southern black migrants "continue to pour into the city" despite the end of wartime job opportunities. On the city's outskirts, "thousands of white soldiers," returned home from war, wait for their next order. A series of sexual assaults on women, "all attributed to black men" (95), occur, and when word reaches the white soldiers' encampments, a mob forms. Black residents take up arms and barricade themselves in their homes. After three days of intense assault on D.C.'s three black neighborhoods, President Wilson finally calls in federal troops to stop the mob violence.

Ossian spends 1920 and 1921 finishing his medical degree and "sharpening his skills at Freedmen's Hospital." With funding cut during WWI, the hospital's conditions deteriorate, but, as the only hospital in D.C. open to blacks, it continues to serve the public. Because Freedmen's never turns away patients based on their ability to pay, Ossian treats patients with a wide variety of ailments, getting "the kind of experience most medical students would have envied" (99). When he graduates in 1921, Ossian hopes to be accepted to a post-degree internship at Freedmen's. However, the positions are so coveted and few that students call in any favor they can to get them, including having senators and local politicians write letters on their behalf. Without these resources, Ossian can't compete. He receives a two-month internship, then decides to head back to Detroit where his ambitious dreams of medical school began.