Clarence Darrow: 'The life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy', Ossian Sweet trial - 1926

19 May 1926, Detroit, Michigan, USA

Dr. Ossian Sweet, his brother Henry, and nine other black men were charged with murder after a bystander was shot to death while the Sweets and their friends defended the doctor’s Detroit home from a violent white mob. The jury was all white. Darrow was hired by NAACP. Sweet was acquitted.

We come now to lay this man’s case in the hands of a jury of our peers.  The first defense and the last defense is the protection of home and life as provided by our law. We are willing to leave it here.

I feel, as I look at you, that we will be treated fairly and decently even understandingly and kindly. You know what this case is. You know why it is. You know that if white men had been lighting their way against colored men, nobody would ever have dreamed of a prosecution. And you know that from the beginning of this case to the end, up to the time you write your verdict, the prosecution is based on race prejudice and nothing else.

Gentlemen, I feel deeply on this subject; cannot help it. Let us take a little glance at the history of the Negro race.  It only needs a minute. It seems to me that the story would melt hearts of stone. I was born in America. I could have left it if I had wanted to go away. Some other men, reading about this land of freedom that we brag about on the Fourth of July, came voluntarily to America. These men, the defendants, are here because they could not help it. Their ancestors were captured in the jungles and on the plains of Africa, captured as you capture wild beasts, torn from their homes and their kindred; loaded into slave ships, packed like sardines in a box, half of them dying on the ocean passage; some jumping into the sea in their frenzy, when they had a chance to choose death in place of slavery. They were captured and brought here. They could not help it. They were bought and sold as slaves, to work without pay, because they were black. They were subject to all of this for generations, until finally they were given their liberty, so far as the law goes—and that is only a little way, because, after all, every human being’s life in this world is inevitably mixed with every other life and, no matter what laws we pass, no matter what precautions we take, unless the people we meet are kindly and decent and humane and liberty-loving, then there is no liberty. Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions

Now, that is their history, These people are the children of slavery. If the race that we belong to owes anything to any human being, or to any power in the universe they owe it to these black men. Above all other men, they owe an obligation and a duty to these black men that can never be repaid.  I never see one of them that I do not feel I ought to pay part of the debt of my race—and if you gentlemen feel as you should feel in this case, your emotions will be like mine.

Gentlemen, you are called into this case by chance. It took us a week to find you, a week of culling out prejudice and hatred. Probably we did not cull it all out at that; but we took the best and the fairest that we could find. It is up to you.

Your verdict means something in this ease. It means something more than the fate of this boy. It is not often that a case is submitted to twelve men where the decision may mean a milestone in the history of the human race. But this case does. And I hope and I 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.1.

Let me say just a parting word for Henry Sweet, who has well-nigh been forgotten. I am serious, but it seems almost like a reflection upon this jury to talk as if I doubted your verdict. What has this boy done? This one boy now that I am culling out from all of the rest, and whose fate is in your hands—can you tell me what he has done? Can I believe myself? Am I standing in a court of justice where twelve men on their oaths are asked to take away the liberty of a boy twenty-one years of age, who has done nothing more than what Henry Sweet has done?

Gentlemen, you may think he shot too quick; you may think he erred in judgment; you may think that Dr. Sweet should not have gone there prepared to defend his home. But, what of this case of Henry Sweet? What has he done? I want to put it up to you, each one of you, individually. Dr. Sweet was his elder brother. He had helped Henry through school. He loved him. He had taken him into his home. Henry had lived with him and his wife he had fondled his baby. The doctor had promised Henry the money to go through school. Henry was getting his education, to take his place in the world, gentlemen--and this is a hard job. With his brother’s help, he has worked his way through college up to the last year. The doctor had bought a home. He feared danger. He moved in with his wife and he asked this boy to go with him. And this boy went to defend his brother, and his brother’s wife, and his child, and his home.

Do you think more of him or less of him for that? I never saw twelve men in my life – and I have looked at a good many faces of a good many juries--I never saw twelve men in my life that, if you could get them to understand a human case, were not true and right.

Should this boy have gone along and helped his brother? Or, should he have stayed away? What would you have done? And yet, gentlemen. here is a boy, and the president of his college came all the way from Ohio to tell you what he thinks of him. His teachers have come here, from Ohio, to tell you what they think of him. The Methodist bishop has come here to tell you what he thinks of him.

So, gentlemen, lam justified in saying that this boy is as kindly, as well disposed, as decent a man as one of you twelve. Do you think he ought to be taken out of his school and sent to the penitentiary? All right, gentlemen, if you think so, do it. It is your job, not mine. If you think so, do it. But if you do, gentlemen, if you should ever look into the face of your own boy, or your own brother, or look into your own heart, you will regret it in sackcloth and ashes. You know, if he committed any offense, it was being loyal and true to his brother whom he loved. I know where you will send him, and it will not be to a penitentiary.

Now, gentlemen, just one more word, and I am through with this case. I do not live in Detroit. But I have no feeling against this city. In fact, I shall always have the kindest remembrance of it, especially if this case results as I think and feel it will. I am the last one to come here to stir up race hatred, or any other hatred. do not believe in the law of hate. I may not be true to my ideals always, but I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred. I would like to see a time when man loves his fellow man and forgets his color or his creed. We will never be civilized until that time comes.

I know the Negro race has a long road to go. I believe that the life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. The law has made him equal, but man has not. And, after all, the last analysis is: What has man done’?--and not what has the law done? I know there is a long road ahead of him before he can take the place which I believe he should take. I know that before him there is sorrow, tribulation and death among the blacks, and perhaps the whites. lam sorry. would do what I could to avert it. I would advise patience; I would advise tolerance; I would advise understanding; I would advise all those things which are necessary for men who live together.

Gentlemen, what do you think of your duty in this case? I have watched day after day these black, tense faces that have crowded this court. These black faces that now are looking to you twelve whites, feeling that the hopes and fears of a race are in your keeping.

This case is about to end, gentlemen. To them, it is Life. Not one of their color sits on this jury. Their fate is in the hands of twelve whites. Their eyes are fixed on you, their hearts go out to you, and their hopes hang on your verdict.

This is all I ask you. On behalf of this defendant, on behalf of these helpless ones who turn to you, and more than that—on behalf of this great state, and this great city, which must face this problem and face it fairly—I ask you, in the name of progress and of the human race, to return a verdict of not guilty in this case.

Brian Williams: 'I understand the anger and the frustration and the distrust of law enforcement', hospital presser post Dallas ambush - 2016

11 July 2016, Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Texas, USA

Hello my name’s Brian Williams.

I want to state first and foremost I stand with the Dallas police department. I stand with law enforcement all over this country.

This experience has been very personal for me, and a turning point in my life.

There was the added dynamic of officers being shot. We routinely care for multiple gunshot victims. But the preceding days of more black men dying at the hands of police officers affected me. I think the reasons are obvious. I fit that demographic of individuals. But I abhor what has been done to these officers and I grieve with their families.

I understand the anger and the frustration and the distrust of law enforcement, but they are not the problem. The problem is the lack of open discussions about the impact of race relations in this country. I think about it everyday that I was unable to save those cops when they came here that night. It weighs on my mind constantly. This killing, it has to stop.

Black men dying and being forgotten. People retaliating against the people who are sworn to defend us. We have to come together. And end all this.

…

When I see police officers eating at a restaurant I pick up their tab. I even one time a year ago bought one of the Dallas PD officers some ice cream, when I was out with my daughter to get ice cream. I want my daughter seeing me interacting with police that way, so she doesn’t grow up with the same burden that I carry, when it comes to interaction with law enforcement.

I want those officers also to see me, a black man, and understand, I support you, I will defend me, and I will care for you. That doesn’t mean, that I do not fear you.

That does not mean, that if you approach me, I will not immediately have a visceral reaction to start worrying for my personal safety.

But I’ll control that the best I can, and not let that impact how I deal with law enforcement.

Bryan Stevenson: "We don't want anybody talking about race", Carnegie Medal acceptance - 2015

27 June 2015, American Library Association conference, San Francisco, USA

Thank you. I'm pretty overwhelmed by this...I really want to thank all of you for creating a space where something like this could happen to somebody like me. I'm really, really grateful to the selection committee, to all of you.

I had a very close relationship with my grandmother. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. Her parents were born into slavery in Virginia in the 1840s. She was born in the 1880s, and the only thing that my grandmother insisted that I know about her enslaved father is that he learned to read before emancipation, and that reading is a pathway to survival and success. So I learned to read. I put books and words in my head and in my heart, so that I could get to the places that she needed me to go.

I'm thinking about my grandmother tonight, because she had these qualities about her. She was like lots of African American matriarchs. She was the real force in our family. She was the end of every argument. She was also the beginning of a lot of arguments! She was tough, and she was strong but she was also kind and loving. When I was a little boy, she'd give me these hugs, she'd squeeze me so tightly I could barely breathe. And then she'd see me an hour later and she'd say, "Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?" And if I said no, she would assault me again!

She left Virginia at the turn of the century, like millions of African Americans who were fleeing terrorism and lynching and racial violence, and she moved to Philadelphia. Because I still lived in the country and grew up in the country, she worried about me when I would come and spend time with her, because there were so many people she didn't know. I would go outside and make new friends, and every now and then she'd be really critical about some of the people I was hanging out with. She'd say, "Now Bryan, be careful about the people you hang out with. Be careful of who you spend time with because people will judge you by the company you keep."

Being here, among these amazing writers, extraordinary writers, being here with my childhood idol, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, being here in a room full of librarians who do such great work, I hope my grandmother is watching. I can say to her, "Mama, please, I hope they judge me by the company that I keep."

I think there's a phenomenon that's really changed this country, such that I couldn't help but be compelled to write about it. It's been my life's work. The United States is a very different country today than it was 40 years ago. In 1972, we had 300,000 people in jails and prisons. Today we have 2.3 million. The U.S. now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. There are six million people on probation and parole. There are 70 million people with criminal arrest records, which means when they apply for a job or try to get a loan, they're going to be disfavored.

The percentage of women going to prison has increased 640% in the last 20 years. 70% of these women are single parents with minor children. When they go to jails and prisons, their kids are scattered. And you are much more likely to go to prison if you're a child of an incarcerated parent.

And we've done some horrific things in poor and minority communities through a misguided war on drugs and our criminal justice policies. Today, the Bureau of Justice reports that 1 in 3 black male babies born in this country is expected to go to jail or prison. That was not true when we were born in the 20th Century. It was not true in the 19th century. It became true in the 21st Century. Children have been condemned to die in prison. There are15 states with no minimum age for trying children as adults. We’ve created a world where there is despair, where people are living on the margins of our society.

I wrote this book because I was persuaded that if people saw what I see, they would insist on something different. And that's what's powerful about books. That's what great about the library. Getting people closer to worlds and situations that they can't otherwise know and understand. I think there's real power in that. And that's what books can do.

I'm a product of the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up in a community where black children couldn't go to the public school system. I started my education in a colored school. And then lawyers came into our community and made them open up the public schools and because of that, I got to go to high school and I got to go to college. There were no high schools for black kids in my county when my dad was a teenager. So proximity means something to me. I want to get people closer to this world, where there is a lot of suffering. Where there's a lot of despair.

The other thing that books do is that they change the narrative. And for me that's what's great about writing, that I have an opportunity to change some of these narratives. I want to change the narrative in this country about mass incarceration as excessive punishment. I'm persuaded that a just society, a healthy society, a good society, can't be judged by how it treats the rich and the powerful and the privileged. I think we have to judge ourselves by how we treat the poor, the incarcerated. And I think literature has the ability to accomplish that narrative shift.

Our system has been corrupted by the politics of fear and anger. We've had politicians competing with each other over who can be toughest on the crime for 40 years and the consequences of that have been absolutely devastating.

I go into communities and talk with 13 and 14 year old kids who tell me that they don't believe that they're going to be free or alive by the time they're 29. And that's not because of something they've seen on TV, but because of what they see that happening every day in their lives and their families and their communities. That despair has to be changed.

We need to change the narrative in this country about race, and poverty. We're a country that has a difficult time dealing with our shame, our mistakes. We don't do shame very well in America, and because of that we allow a lot of horrific things to go unaddressed.

I don't think we actually understand what the legacy of slavery did to this country. The great evil of American slavery for me was not involuntary servitude. It was not forced labor. The great evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference we created to justify that institution—the ideology of white supremacy.

We made up these things about people of color, and we use them to legitimate an institution. The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment did not deal with that narrative. And that's why slavery didn't end in 1865. It just evolved. It turned into decades where we had terrorism, and lynching, and that lynching and terrorism has had a huge impact on this country.

The demographic geography of America was shaped by lynching and terror. You've got African Americans in the Bay Area of Oakland and Los Angeles, and Cleveland, and Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, and they did not come to these communities as immigrants looking for new opportunities. They came to these communities as refugees and exiles from terror. If you know anything about the needs of refugees, you know there are issues you have to address if you're going to create opportunity, and hopefulness. And we're not doing that . Because the narrative hasn't evolved.

Even when we talk about Civil Rights—I'll be honest—I'm critical of the way we're dealing with it. We're celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement. And we're too celebratory. I think we're too superficial. I hear people talking about the Civil Rights Movement, and it sounds like a three-day carnival. On Day one, Rosa Parks didn't give up her seat on the bus. On Day two, Dr. King led the march on Washington. And on Day three, we just changed all these laws.

If that were true, it would be a great story. But it's not true. The truth is, for decades we have humiliated people of color in this country. For decades we excluded people from voting. We denied people the opportunity to get an education. We belittled them. We burdened them. My parents were humiliated every single day of their lives. Every time they saw "colored" signs. And we have to talk about that. I don't think we'll get where we're trying to go until we change that narrative.

Truth, and reconciliation. If you go to South Africa, you can't go very far without hearing somebody talk about the process of truth and reconciliation. Go to Rwanda, and they will tell you that genocide will not be overcome without truth and reconciliation. Go to Germany, and in Berlin, you can't go 100 meters without seeing the stones that mark the places where Jewish families were abducted and taken to the concentration camps. They want you to reflect solely on the history of the Holocaust.

In this country, we want the opposite. We don't want anybody talking about race. We don't want anybody talking about inequality. We don't want anybody talking about poverty. And that legacy has created a world of mass incarceration and excessive punishment.

Another thing for me, is that the books I've written have made me be hopeful. They've made me believe things that I could not otherwise see. And that's the great gift that I think all of you give people by opening up libraries and spaces where children can dream. I'm absolutely persuaded that you have to believe in things that you can't see. I never met a lawyer until I got to law school. I never imagined I would be an author. But it's happened because there is something fundamentally compelling about believing in things that we know to be decent and true.

I believe in really simple things. I believe that each person is more than the worst thing that they've ever done. I think that for you. I think that for my clients. I think that for everybody. Even the people jailed and in prison. I think if you tell a lie, you're not just a liar. I think if you take something that doesn't belong to you, you're not just a thief. I think even if you kill somebody, you're not just a killer. And the other things you are have to be recognized, and addressed, and discussed.

I also don't believe that the opposite of poverty is wealth. I think we talk too much about money in America. I believe that the opposite of poverty is justice. And until we learn more about what justice requires, we won't actually do the things we need to do.

I'm excited and really gratified to accept this award. I'm humbled to be in this space. I'm actually encouraged that there's a metric system out there for people like me where somebody like me, who does what I do, can be encouraged and affirmed. It's been incredibly moving. I can't tell you what you've done for me tonight.

I'll end with this story. I actually have been thinking a lot about the metric systems we use to reward the things that we care most about. I was nurtured by a community of people who were activists, and who believed in things, even though they didn't have very much. And they taught me that if I stay true to that metric system, good things will happen. At times, I have doubted that. But tonight I feel it.

Someone who taught me this lesson more than anybody else was an older man at a church where I was giving this talk. He was in a wheelchair. And he came to the back of the church, and he was just staring at me while I spoke. I didn't know him. But he was staring at me with this very harsh look on his face. He just kept glaring at me. I couldn't figure out why he was looking at me so sternly.

I got through the talk and when I was finished, people were very nice, very polite. But that man kept staring at me. Finally, after everybody left, he got a little kid to wheel him up to me. And this older man, in his wheelchair, got right in my face and put his hand up and he said, "Do you know what you're doing?"

I didn't know how to respond. He asked me again. "Do you know what you're doing?" I stepped back and started mumbling something. One last time, he said: "Do you know what you're doing?" I just stood there. And then he said, "I'm going to tell you what you're doing. You're beating the drum for justice."

I was so moved. I was also really relieved!

And then he said: "You keep beating the drum for justice." And he grabbed me by the jacket and pulled me into his wheelchair. “I want to show you something," he said.

He turned his head. “You see this scar behind my right ear? I got that scar in Green County, Alabama, in 1963, trying to register people to vote."

He turned his head again. “You see this cut down here at the bottom of my neck? I got that in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1964, trying to register people to vote."

He turned his head one more time. "You see this dark spot? That's my bruise. I got my bruise in Birmingham, Alabama, 1965, trying to register people to vote."

Then he looked at me and said, "Let me tell you something, young man. People look at me, they think I'm some old man sitting in a wheelchair covered with cuts and bruises and scars. I'm going to tell you something. These aren't my cuts. These aren't my bruises. These aren't my scars. These are my Medals of Honor."

I never, ever, ever imagined that going to Death Row, spending time with the condemned, representing children who had been crushed and broken by suffering and trauma, going into poor communities, day in, day out, that the cuts and scars and bruises that I was getting would turn into a medal of honor. But tonight you've made that real. And I'm very grateful. Thank you

Buy Bryan Stevenson's amazing book here.