The looming trial garnered national attention as well as the attention of the NAACP who saw the trial as an opportunity to fight against racial segregation in American cities. Ossian and the others in the home were arrested and charged with murder. Someone in the home, possibly Henry, opened fire into the mob injuring one white man and killing another. The mob, quickly becoming several hundred people large that night, became violent and began throwing stones at the home shattering windows and causing damage. Ossian had his brothers Otis and Henry, Gladys and some friends were in the home at the time along with a large cache of weapons as they had planned to defend the home against a possible racist mob. The Detroit Police Department did have officers posted outside the Sweets' home for protection that night but the officers did not attempt to disperse the mob. On the night of Septema large mob gathered outside the Sweets' new home in an attempt to intimidate the family into moving out. In the preceding months there were also instances of white Detroiters forcing out black homeowners who had newly moved into their homes in white neighborhoods. Racial tensions were high in the city at the time with the Ku Klux Klan holding many rallies and also having a candidate in the city's mayoral election. The book tells the account of Ossian Sweet, a young physician, who with his wife Gladys, move into their new home in an all white neighborhood of Detroit in 1925.
The book won the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for History. Sweet and his family are persecuted by the legal system. When racist whites attack the Sweets' home, a white man is killed. While living in Detroit he eventually moves out of the ghetto and he and his wife move into an all-white middle-class neighborhood. The book chronicles racism in Detroit during the 1920s Jazz Age through the lens of Ossian Sweet, an African American doctor who moves to Detroit during the great migration. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age is a 2004 book by historian Kevin Boyle, published by Henry Holt.
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