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Life in
The 1910
census reported that By 1920, African-Americans
owned 350 businesses in The community
was centered on the near east side of downtown in the area of St. Antoine,
It's not clear
how the area came to be known as " While life was often far from heavenly as the community struggled against discrimination and poverty, the neighborhood developed its own culture and attractions. Some of the popular clubs in the area included the Club Three Sixes, El Sino, Pendennies, 606 Horse Shoe, B&C Club, Congo Lounge, Gay 90's Club, Royal Blue Bar, and the Bluebird Inn. By 1936, the
name The 1940s brought
the end of the Great Depression and a booming job market in
In 1941, Orchestra Hall on Woodward and Parsons reopened as the Paradise Theater. It offered the best African-American musicians in the country. Duke Ellington opened Christmas Week with his big band. Admission was 50 cents, and patrons could stay all day. There were three shows a day with four on weekends. "B" movies were shown between acts. Those without the 50 cents were allowed in the back balcony door. The theater
thrived for ten years during the glory days of jazz. It featured top
entertainers: Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine,
Billie Holiday, the Inkspots, Cab Calloway,
Jimmy Witherspoon, Alberta Adams, Jitterbugs, Taylorettes,
Kim Weston, Trick and Slick,Teddy Harris Jr.,
Dinah Washington, Josephine Baker, Big Maybelle,
Little Willie John, Arthur Prysock, Illinois
Jacquet, Nat King Cole, Count Basie,
Duke Ellington, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Joe Williams, the Mills
Brothers, Charlie Gabriel, Dizzy Gillespie, Re Bop Orchestra, Louis
Armstrong, Sonny Woods, Ann Baker, Luis Russell, Jay C. Higginbottom,
Joe Garland, Two Zephyrs, Joyner and Foster, Maxine Sullivan, Bill Robinson,
Jimmie Lunceford's band, Fletcher Henderson,
Lionel Hampton, Erskine Hawkins and Charles
"Lanky" Bowmans sextet.
But the 1950s
brought more competition, higher performer fees, television and changing
tastes. Other places became more popular and took the crowds: The Graystone Ballroom, Music Hall and In 1952, the
Around the corner
from the Paradise Theater was the elegant Gotham
Hotel. The nine-story, 200-room inn was built in 1924 by Albert Hartz, who sold it to John J. White and Irving Roane in
1943. The entrepreneurs soon turned it into a social center for Suites featured solid mahogany furniture and were named to honor Duke Ellington, Sammy Davis, Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Lena Horne and Cab Calloway. After Roane sold out to White in 1945, the kitchen was renovated for $25,000. A small fortune kept fresh flowers in the Ebony dining room daily. Famous visitors at the Gotham Hotel included Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Adam Clayton Powell, Langston Hughes, Sammy Davis and Billie Holiday. But the hotel
fell on hard times and closed in September 1962. The following December,
100 federal, state and It was the largest
gambling raid in The Gotham later fell to the wrecker's ball -- the fate of most
of But the memories could not be demolished. The neighborhood has been celebrated in musicals like Bea Buck's "Paradise Valley Revisited" and "Masquerade Flashback," and recalled in Elaine Wood's book "Untold Tales, Unsung Heros." And the Valley lives on in the memories of the people who once lived there.
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The Paradise Theater on Woodward, later restored as Orchestra
Hall, featured all the top black entertainers of the era. 
Singer
Billie Holiday was one of the headliners who played the Paradise
Theater.
Workmen
clear the rubble of the stately old 
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Notable Events
"I have
to die a man or live a coward." With these words, a mild-mannered
black It began in the summer of 1925 when Dr. Ossian Sweet decided to move his wife and baby daughter from the crowded lower east side black ghetto into an all-white neighborhood at Garland and Charlevoix .
"He wasn't looking for trouble," Dr. Sweet's brother Otis, a dentist, recalled. "He just wanted to bring up his little girl in good surroundings." The surroundings
may have been good, but they were dangerous for blacks. Sweet knew the
risks. Just a few months earlier, another black physician, Dr. A.L.
Turner, had moved into an all-white west side neighborhood on "This made a profound impression on my brother," continued Otis. "It was then that he told me he was prepared to die like a man." By 1925, Dr. Sweet, and
his wife, Gladys, wanted something better.
Born in a small
inland Rumblings of trouble began well before Ossian Sweet took occupancy of the house. An organization called the "Water Works Improvement Association" vowed to keep blacks out of the neighborhood. The woman who sold Dr. Sweet the house told him that she had been warned by a phone caller that if he moved in, she would be killed along with the doctor and the house would be blown up. Ironically, she and her light-skinned black husband had lived in the house undisturbed, the neighbors apparently unaware of her husband's heritage. On Tuesday,
Sept. 8, Dr. Sweet arrived at his new home with two small vans of furniture.
He also brought along guns and ammunition and had arranged for friends
and relatives to stay with him for the first few days. They included
brothers Otis and Henry, 21, a student at Throughout the day tensions rose in the neighborhood. The Detroit Police Department regarded the situation as grave enough to post officers there day and night.
On the following day, Dr. Sweet attended to his practice downtown and most of the others in his home also went to their jobs. When he returned that night, Dr. Sweet had recruited more friends to join those in the house, bringing the total to 11 including Mrs. Sweet. "The street was a sea of humanity," Otis recalled. "The crowd was so thick you couldn't see the street or the sidewalk. Just getting to the front door was like running the gantlet. I was hit by a rock before I got inside." The prosecution later produced a series of witnesses who swore that there never were more than 25 or 30 persons in front of the Sweet home. About 10 p.m. a series of shots rang out from the Sweet home. Leon Breiner, who lived across the street, fell dead and another man was wounded. Police rushed in and arrested everyone in the Sweet house, charging them all -- including Mrs. Sweet -- charged with murder. The NAACP promised to defend Dr. Sweet, his wife and friends and brought in Clarence Darrow, a titan of the American bar for more than three decades, as chief counsel. His assistants included Arthur Garfield Hays, one of the nation's leading liberal lawyers, and Walter M. Nelson, a Detroiter. Presiding over
the trial would be a young redheaded judge named Frank Murphy, who would
go on to become mayor of Afterward Murphy said, "This was the greatest experience of my life. This was Clarence Darrow at his best. I will never see anything like it again. He is the most Christ-like man I have ever known." The facts in
the case were relatively simple: Someone in Dr. Sweet's house fired
a shot that killed Leon Breiner. Another neighborhood
resident, Erik Hofberg, received a bullet
in the leg.
But the issue was far more complicated: Had there been justification for firing that shot? In his book "Let Freedom Ring," defense attorney Hays left a graphic memoir of the case. "Colored people regarded the case as one which raised the definite question of race segregation. The claim was made that the shots were fired in defense of the home. It was pointed out that in Detroit, the Negro population had vastly increased in numbers; that Negro districts had become congested and were centers of filth and squalor; that it was almost impossible for a Negro to obtain a decent home except in a white neighborhood; that the whites were always hostile and the colored man was ordinarily either compelled to move or to use force to protect himself." Hays, however, conceded in his account of the trial, "On the face of it, our case was not strong. It seemed clear that Breiner had been killed by a fusillade from the house. Ten men had gathered there with provisions to withstand a possible siege, with guns and ammunition. And there had been police protection." The defense, as Hays saw it, depended on the attitude of the defendants at the time of the shooting. Did they think they were in danger? Were they actually scared? Not all of the defendants cared to admit they were scared. They had become heroes to the black community. The prosecution, meanwhile, had formed its own theory of the case. Lester Moll, chief assistant to Prosecutor Robert M. Toms, recalls "The case had come to the attention of our office 24 hours before the actual shooting. Phone threats to the Sweets had been reported and a police guard had been posted. The following night shots were fired simultaneously from the Sweet home. Mr. Breiner was hit while on the porch of a house across the street. The shooting appeared to follow a pre-arranged signal from within the Sweet home." "We interviewed police who were in agreement that the crowd out in front was not numerous and that there was no threat of violence. Based on these conversations we issued a warrant on the theory that the shots were fired without provocation." A Detroit News reporter, Philip A. Adler, testified for the defense. He was at the scene of the shooting and told of a "considerable mob" of between "400 and 500," and stones hitting the house "like hail." "I heard someone say, 'A Negro family has moved in here and we're going to get them out'," Adler testified. "I asked a policeman what the trouble was and he told me it was none of my business." The defense
hammered hard at the purpose of the Water Works Improvement Association
and its goal to keep blacks out. In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan claimed 100,000
members in
Darrow stressed the state of mind of those huddled inside the Sweet home that night. The emotional climax of the trial came when Darrow called Ossian Sweet to the stand in his own defense. Sweet told of seeing a menacing crowd outside his home: "Frightened, after getting a gun I ran upstairs. Stones were hitting the house intermittently. I threw myself on the bed and lay there awhile, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes- when a stone came through the window. Part of the glass hit me." "What happened next?" asked Darrow. "Pandemonium -- I guess that's the best way to describe it--broke loose inside my house," replied Sweet. "Everyone was running from room to room. There was a general uproar." "Somebody yelled, 'There's someone coming.' A car had pulled up to the curb. My brother Otis, and Mr. Davis got out. The mob yelled, 'Here's niggers, get them! Get them!' As my brother and Davis rushed inside my house, a 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 10 from upstairs, Then it was all over." Then came Darrow's key question: "What was your state of mind at the time of the shooting?" Sweet replied, "When I opened the door and saw the mob, I realized I was facing the same mob that had hounded my people throughout its entire history. In my mind I was pretty confident of what I was up against. I had my back against the wall. I was filled with a peculiar fear, the fear of one who knows the history of my race. I knew what mobs had done to my people before." Under Darrow's skillful sympathetic question, Dr Sweet told of the terrible legacy of fear that mob violence had left with his race. Over the protests of the prosecution, his testimony was admitted as having a bearing on the psychology of the occupants of the Sweet home.
In his closing arguments to the jury, Darrow questioned whether it was possible for 12 white men (however hard they tried) to give a fair trial to a Negro. He argued, "The Sweets spent their first night in their new home afraid to go to bed. The next night they spent in jail. Now the state wants them to spend the rest of their lives in the penitentiary....There are persons in the North and South who say a black man is inferior to the white and should be controlled by whites. There are also those who recognize his rights and say he should enjoy them. To me this case is a cross-section of human history. It involves the future and the hope of some of us that the future will be better than the past." In his charge to the jury Judge Murphy indicated clearly his belief that a man's home is his castle and that no one has a right to invade it. He left no question of the right to shoot when one has reasonable grounds to fear that his life or property is in danger. And he made it clear that these rights belong to blacks as well as to whites. The jury deliberated
for 46 hours, then announced that it had been unable to reach a verdict.
The prosecution was not ready to give up, and elected to press charges
against a single defendent, Henry Sweet, the
21-year-old brother of Ossian. The state believed he fired the shot
that killed Leon Breiner. The second trial
in many ways paralled the first. The testimony remained almost unchanged
and Darrow again gave a moving summation.
After reviewing
the horrors of the slave ships and the two centuries in bondage in the
He went on: "Your verdict means something in this case. It means something more than the fate of this boy. It is not often that a case is submitted to 12 men where the decision may mean a milestone in the history of the human race. But this case does. And I hope and trust that you have a feeling of responsibility that will make you take it and do your duty as citizens of a great nation, and as members of the human family, which is better still." The jury found Henry Sweet innocent after less than four hours deliberation. No further effort was made to prosecute any of the defendents. After all charges
were dropped against him, Ossian Sweet moved back into his home on However, tragedy
plagued his later life. Not long after his brother's trial, Dr. Sweet
lost the family he had purchased the house for in the first place. His
daughter, Iva, died of tuberculosis in 1926,
at the age of 2. His wife, Gladys, succumbed to the same disease soon
after. The widow of Leon Breiner, shot on
In 1944, he
sold the house on
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Famed attorney Clarence 
Judge Frank Murphy presided over the trial and, in his charge
to the jury, made it clear that the right to defend one's home
applied to blacks as well as whites. 
Detroit News reporter Philip A. Adler testified he saw a mob
of about 400 to 500 outside the Sweet home and that rocks were
hitting the house "like hail." 
The second jury took only four hours to find Henry Sweet,
brother of Dr. Sweet, not guilty.
Prosecutor Robert M. Toms