Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (71 page)

No one could have seen it coming, Schuknecht assured the jury; the crowd on the corner numbered no more than a dozen. No one was shouting, no rocks were thrown; all was quiet when suddenly, without provocation, the blacks opened fire.

Darrow began his cross-examination before lunch and continued until court adjourned that evening. As Darrow fired questions, the inspector conceded that within a block of the Sweet house “a couple hundred people” had gathered on the night of September 8, and that “quite a number of automobiles” were cruising by and unloading passengers at dusk on September 9, prompting him to blockade the street. And, toward the end, as Schuknecht sagged under the strain of his long day on the stand, he admitted that he found a half a dozen or more stones on the porch and roof of the house. Darrow asked him to describe the front bedroom. What besides the furniture was there?

“A small stone,” Schuknecht acknowledged.

“Did you find any broken glass?”

“Yes …,” the inspector testified. “We found the stone on the inside, and I believe it was thrown from the outside.”

Toms was aggrieved. “You cannot ask for anything better than that, can you?” he muttered.

T
OMS CALLED OTHER
police officers and residents of the neighborhood to buttress Schuknecht’s claim that the blacks were not in danger. But the testimony seemed contrived—too good to be true. And one witness let slip why.

When Toms questioned him about the size of the crowd,
Dwight Hubbard stumbled. “There was a great number … I won’t say a great number—there were a large … there were a few people there,” he testified.

“When you first started to answer the question … you started to say you saw a great crowd there, didn’t you?” Darrow asked him when his turn came to cross-examine.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you modified to say a large crowd, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you said a few people …”

“Yes, sir.”

Hubbard had been coached by the police, Darrow said, and instructed to testify that only a few people had gathered. Wasn’t that so?

“Yes, sir,” the man, now thoroughly miserable, admitted.

Afterward, Toms conceded that his witnesses were inferior—in terms of education, intellect, aplomb, and appearance—to the Negro defendants. Steadily, the estimates of the size of the crowd given by the prosecution witnesses inched upward—toward and beyond one hundred. Two youngsters admitted that they heard glass breaking as boys threw stones at the Sweet residence.

“I heard some noise … it may have been stones, or mud … hard dirt, you know, striking something … maybe it was against this house,” one witness conceded.

“You knew sounds of something striking a building came from that direction …,” Darrow said.

“Well, it seemed like it, yes,” said the witness.

“And you knew the sounds of breaking glass came from that direction?”

“Yes.”

“And they came about the same time?”

“Yes.”

“And after that—the shooting?”

“Yes.”

It was grueling, and at times depressing, work exposing the prejudices of human beings. One night, in a discussion about the defendants, a tired Darrow asked Hays, “What difference does it make whether or not these people go to jail?”

Hays was surprised. If Darrow felt like that, Hays asked him, why was he defending them? “I dunno,” said Darrow. “I suppose I’d be uncomfortable if I didn’t.”

From the prosecution witnesses Darrow drew the story of the Waterworks Park Improvement Association, an all-white group that lured hundreds of people to a protest meeting at the elementary school across the street from the Sweet house a few weeks before the shooting, at which speakers urged them to drive the black residents out. “I don’t believe
in mixing people together that way, colored and white,” one neighbor explained.
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Darrow and Hays meshed well, White said: “Hays the logician, relentless, keen, incontrovertible; Darrow the great humanist, pleading with fervor for decency and justice and tolerance, breathing into the law romance and beauty and drama.” One of Hays’s central missions was to keep them from being snagged by a legal trick or an obscure precedent. One day Toms asked Darrow if he wasn’t going to join them in the judge’s chambers, where Hays was arguing a point of law. “Nooo, I guess not,” Darrow said. “I can’t be bothered with the books. Let Arthur take care of that.”
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D
ARROW HAD NO
trouble filling his time in Detroit. Watching Darrow had become an event for the smart set. He would meet Hays and White and others to wind down and plot strategy at his quarters in the Book Cadillac Hotel, and then join journalists, vivacious young actresses, and other celebrities at a large round table. The girls were “young, attractive, on their toes with the gait of the world,” Ruby wrote. Darrow held court, “beaming with his own happiness.”
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On one evening he made the trip to Ann Arbor, where, after dining at a fraternity house on campus, he addressed more then four thousand students at his alma mater. He spoke to some 1,500 black people who gathered at a YMCA in Detroit and addressed the Detroit Federation of Labor. A young theologian,
Reinhold Niebuhr, was in the audience, and came away impressed. Darrow made the crowd “writhe as he pictured the injustices and immoralities of our present industrial system,” Niebuhr wrote, though “the tremendous effect of his powerful address was partially offset by the bitterness … I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have the eyes to see and the heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice.”
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Darrow also joined Hays and White at gatherings of the city’s Penguin Club, a hangout for silk-stocking liberals. It was there he spotted
Josephine Gomon. The thirty-three-year-old “Jo” was the daughter of a college professor. By the time she met Darrow she had worked her way through the University of Michigan as a switchboard operator, graduated with a degree in engineering, taken a job teaching physics at City College
in Detroit, married, and had five children. After seeing two friends die in childbirth, Gomon became a champion of family planning and got into politics. She was an adviser to progressive leaders like
Harriet McGraw and Judge Murphy and attended the Sweet trial as often as she could.

Darrow nurtured the relationship by chatting with Gomon during breaks in the trial and by walking her to her car after court ended for the day. Her diary offers a glimpse of Darrow’s seductive advances. “Women fall into two classes for him—those he is interested in and those he isn’t,” she wrote. “He treats all the former with the same flattering attention as if they were the only woman—each of them—that he had ever found worthy of notice. And he is quite sincere. He enjoys women—especially young ones.”
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T
HE DEFENSE BEGAN
to present its case on Monday, November 16, when Hays gave the opening statement.

“Our defense is based upon a sacred ancient right, that of protection of home and life,” Hays said. The prosecution had told the story of what happened outside 2905 Garland Avenue, Hays told the jurors, now the defense would let them see what happened inside the house. At one point he had
Ossian Sweet rise in the dock so the jurors could look at him as Hays described the doctor’s long journey, in the teeth of prejudice, to the day he proudly bought a home for his wife and daughter.

Darrow and Hays called African American witnesses to describe the other instances in which black families had been driven by mobs from their homes, and friends who told the jury about the mounting fear in the Sweet home those two days in September.
Philip Adler, a white reporter for the
Detroit News
, told how he was driving by early on the night of the shooting and saw a crowd of four or five hundred people gathered at the corner. Thinking they were drawn by a newsworthy fire or traffic accident, he stopped, and some in the mob told him they were there to get the Negroes out. Before the gunfire, he said, he heard a continuous pelting sound, like hail on a roof. And though they did not base their entire defense on the theory, Hays and Darrow suggested that Breiner may have been hit by a stray round fired by police.
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On November 18, Ossian Sweet took the stand and gave what the
Nation
called “a vivid picture of the fear-ridden mind of a black man, terrified
by a hostile crowd of whites.” When Toms objected to Sweet’s account of the racial violence he had witnessed in his life, Darrow responded: “This is the question of the psychology of the race … of how everything known to a race affects its actions.” The judge allowed the testimony.

“A car had pulled up to the curb,” Sweet said, recounting the events of September 9. “My brother and Mr. Davis got out. The mob yelled, ‘Here’s niggers! Get them! Get them!’ As they rushed in, the mob surged forward.…

“It looked like a human sea. Stones kept coming faster. I was downstairs. Another window was smashed. Then one shot—then eight or ten from upstairs.…

“When I opened the door and saw the mob,” Sweet told the jury, “I realized I was facing the same mob that had hounded my people through its entire history.”
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T
HE CLOSING ARGUMENTS
began on November 24, the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. Darrow began in the afternoon session. Extra police were called to handle the crowd. “A deep silence fell over the crowded noisy courtroom,” wrote Lilienthal. “The old man with the unutterably sad face and the great stooped shoulders seemed no mere lawyer pleading for hire. He seemed, instead, a patriarch out of another age, counseling his children, sorrowing because of their cruelty and hatred.”

The Sweet defense team’s duty in the trial was to show that the shooting was justified. And they had been successful; it now seemed clear that a threatening mob had surrounded the doctor’s house that night. The witnesses who claimed that all was calm were lying, Darrow told the jurors, and any thinking man knew it.

“Every one of them … perjured themselves over and over and over again to send twelve black people to prison for life,” Darrow said. “The almost instinctive hatred of the white for anything that approaches social equality is so deep and so abiding in the hearts of most white people that they are willing to perjure themselves on behalf of what they think is their noble, Nordic race.…

“I don’t need to take any pains to prove to you what was the cause of this trouble down at Charlevoix and Garland, do I?” he asked. It was racism, pure and simple. “If you don’t know it, you are stupider than any
people I have ever seen in the jury box yet, and I have seen some daisies in my time.…

“Is there anything criminal about Dr. Sweet?” he asked them. “Would you be afraid to meet him in an alley? Not a minute. You know there is not the first element of criminality in him.” The real criminals, Darrow said, were out on the street that night. But the jurors had to get past their own racism to see it.

“How many of you have close friends who have African blood in their veins? How many of you have visited their homes? How many of you have invited them into your home to dine with you? If no, why not? Is it anything except a long feeling of race distinction that has come to us? We know not where it came from or how deep it is. Is there anything else? You know there is not.”

Hands thrust into his pockets, or thumbs stuck in the armholes of his vest, speaking conversationally, he reminded the jury of witnesses like Hubbard, who admitted during cross-examination how they had been coached. Darrow’s voice was “a low rumble; in it resounded all the misery his tired eyes had seen,” Lilienthal recalled, except when “suddenly the voice … rang out like a brass gong” and “every muscle of the huge body was tense and strained.”

The mob on Garland Avenue was “gathered together just the same as the Roman Colosseum used to be filled with a great throng of people with their eyes cast on the door where the lions would come out,” Darrow said. “They were gathered together just as in the old days a mob would assemble to see an outdoor hanging, waiting for the victim with their eyes set on the gallows.

“You gentlemen know the danger. One man might not bother about driving a Negro out of his home, but get 100, 500, 1,000—one man gathers from another, and mob psychology is the most dreadful psychology that man has to contend with,” Darrow told the jurors. “It is like starting a prairie fire, this gathering of a mob. Somebody comes along and throws a match into the dry stubble, and it spreads and spreads and spreads and the wind fans it and the flames make the wind and finally the two together, spreading and spreading, will pass all obstacles and devour everything in its way.

“Before you know it, if it is not quenched, if the power of the state is not placed upon it, it has spread from neighbor to neighbor, it draws into
its grasp the wicked and even the innocent, it draws into its grasp the evil and the good, until by mob psychology it sweeps all before it and destroys life and property and liberty, because each gathers force for the other until the power is irresistible.”

At that, Darrow stopped, and court was adjourned for the day. “It was wonderful. Eloquent. Logical. People wept and jurors were moved,” Jo Gomon told her diary.

That evening, after another Penguin Club event, Darrow tried to lure Gomon to his room. “Do you mind if I walked to the street car with you?” he asked, taking hold of her arm and drawing her through the lobby of the Wolverine Hotel.

“I’d be delighted but I’m driving,” she said.

“Then you’ll drive me home?” he said. “Come up to my room. I’m expecting a couple of interesting fellows over and we’ll read poetry.”

But then
Harriet McGraw and another friend who had accompanied Gomon that night joined them at the car. “You seem to be well protected,” Darrow said regretfully. “I was looking forward to having a nice long talk with you.”
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