Arc of Justice

Ossian Sweet's family are mostly slaves and former slaves who worked on plantations in North Carolina and, later, Florida. After gaining freedom following the Civil War, Ossian's relatives have few resources with which to begin their new lives. As Florida falls back into the hands of Democrats, following the death of Republican governor Ossian Hart, Ossian Sweet's namesake, in 1874, things get worse for blacks in the South. The Democrats do everything to ensure that "the New South would be for whites only" (55) and set about undoing any progress toward racial equality Hart and other Republicans have made. The laws and extra-legal practices the Democrats enact constitute Jim Crow, creating two worlds within the South: one white and one black. Under the guise of “separate but equal” facilities, white Southern Democrats subject black Southerners to numerous humiliations and torment, including disenfranchisement and lynching. The South's Jim Crow laws spur the Great Migration, as black Southerners hope to escape the violence and oppression in the northern states.

Boyle's book presents two strains of thought within the nascent civil rights movement in America. On one hand is W.E.B. Du Bois, whose activism depends on the one in ten exceptional black men and women who emerge as leaders of the race and constitute the Talented Tenth. For Du Bois and his adherents, which includes Ossian, progress for black Americans depends on the actions of the Talented Tenth. For this reason, black colleges, like Wilberforce and Howard, are the training grounds for the Tenth and should be "every bit as demanding as outstanding white colleges" (74). On the other hand, is Booker T. Washington, who believes that the way to progress for black Americans is through "manual training" (75) for blacks in order to be useful, productive members of society. Washington runs his Tuskegee Institute as a technical learning center. Ossian encounters the differences in thought while at Wilberforce, which houses both an academic university and a technical college. At Wilberforce, Ossian straddles the line between the two, as he studies science by day and works as a janitor or waiter during nights and school breaks. Ultimately, though, Ossian hopes to see himself among Detroit's Talented Tenth.

The NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is another crucial element of the early civil rights movement. It's formed in 1909 as an organization for "fair-minded whites and intelligent blacks" (81). This qualification of 'intelligent' reveals both Du Bois's and white progressives' involvement in the organization's creation. As the first black secretary of the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson takes on the nation's racist laws, including a case for desegregation of housing that lands in the nation's Supreme Court.Outside the NAACP's brand of integrationist activism, Marcus Garvey and his followers take up a new kind of resistance: black nationalism, which preaches "the power of armed resistance" (118).