Arc of Justice

Tracing the story of Ossian Sweet’s past, the narrative follows him to Xenia, Ohio, where he arrives by train in September of 1909. In the early years of the 20th century, many Black Southerners like Ossian go north hoping for better treatment, better jobs, or the promise of education. Xenia boasts Wilberforce University, the nation’s first Black college.

Wilberforce is not the best Black college: many educated Black elites, including W. E. B. Du Bois,—who taught there for a year—consider it a backwater. But it offers a four-year preparatory curriculum for students who, like Ossian, didn’t attend high school. The AME owns and operates the school, and a scholarship promises Ossian a free education.

The school has a long history. In the mid-1850s, Ohio abolitionists bought the grounds of a former resort patronized by the wives and daughters of Southern planters. They established Wilberforce, the first college for free Black students. It was controlled by white people until the AME purchased it in 1863. By the time Ossian arrives, segregation and chronic underfunding mean that the buildings are slowly crumbling, the lab equipment is outdated, and the scholarship fund is empty. To pay for school, Ossian works on campus, performing the kind of manual labor from which his education was supposed to free him.

Wilberforce University, like other Black colleges and universities, was founded on ideas promulgated by men like W. E. B. Du Bois, who believed that the race will only advance on the efforts of “exceptional men and women,” a “talented tenth” capable of great things. A rigorous education will mold these people into racial standard bearers. Early in Reconstruction, Northern abolitionists embraced these ideas, but their interest faded in the economic, political, and social upheaval that followed the Civil War. By the early decades of the 20th century, many Northern white people seem to tacitly agree with their Southern peers that Black people were inferior. As a result, trade schools were replacing Black colleges. Even Wilberforce had to institute “industrial arts” programs to attract state financing.

But the university’s president, William Sanders Scarborough, refused to compromise the talented tenth ideal when it came to the college’s academic students. Scarborough was born into slavery in 1850. But determined to join professional society, after Emancipation he studied at Atlanta University and Oberlin College, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classics.

Ossian thus receives a rigorous education in the preparatory program, with classes in literature, history, philosophy, math, science, Latin, French, music, and drawing. The college program, which he begins in 1913 with his eye on a science degree, combines academic rigor with moral training. The college strictly separates men and women, forbids swearing, and prohibits alcohol and tobacco. And Ossian participates in the military cadet corps.

Scarborough supplements the school’s efforts to shape its students with “racial politics.” In 1905, Scarborough becomes a charter member of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Niagara Movement for racial equity. At this time,  integrationists face steep challenges. Scientists and philosophers are increasingly promoting theories of racial purity that directly claim that white people are superior to so-called “colored” people (including Black people, Native American people, and members of other marginalized immigrant groups). These theories are becoming popular among working-class white people, too. The white women of Xenia shun Scarborough’s white wife because they are horrified by her interracial marriage.

Race riots in the North punctuate Ossian’s years at Wilberforce. They break out in Springfield, Ohio (close to Wilberforce) in March 1904 and February 1906. A particularly violent 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois galvanizes white support for Black political action. In 1909, shortly before Ossian arrives at Wilberforce, Scarborough, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other prominent Black and white activists form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

It this atmosphere of racial tensions and expectations, Ossian studies. Perched precariously between the world of the college students and the second-class industrial arts students by virtue of his campus job, he has a relatively undistinguished undergraduate career. Only one event—nearly being expelled for being caught off campus with two drunk compatriots—stands out. Between academic years, Ossian works service jobs in Detroit. There, he makes friends who tell him that Detroit respects ambition, making it a place where a Black man’s efforts can be rewarded.

But for Ossian, college mostly means financial struggle. This strengthens his resolve to become a doctor and “amass a substantial fortune.” But medicine is a very competitive field when he graduates. Raised standards and regulations have closed all but two Black medical schools, and these accept just a handful of students yearly. Ossian needs more than a second-rate college degree to ensure his admittance. But then the United States joins the Great War (later called World War I). Poor eyesight prevents Ossian from serving, and the talent drain of the war renders medical schools much less competitive. Howard medical school admits Ossian.

The Great War changes America. Patriotic fervor revitalizes racism and nativist sentiments. Jim Crow segregation seeps into Washington D.C. under President Wilson. For example,  the War Department organizes Black soldiers into a single, white-commanded company to prevent racial mixing in the ranks. Industry—from the great Detroit motor plants to the smallest sweat shops—turns to creating war materials. With European immigration all but cut off by the war and factories drained of workers by the draft, Southern Black men move north in record numbers to fill labor shortages. In response, racist violence increases in the North. A race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois in the summer of 1917 leaves dozens of Black residents dead, hundreds injured, and thousands homeless. The president refuses to condemn the violence, and the NAACP leads a silent protest march down New York’s Fifth Avenue.

Ossian arrives in Washington D.C. in this atmosphere of heightened racial tensions. Howard University is everything Wilberforce is not: the federal government subsidizes the college and its graceful campus borders not only the impoverished Black neighborhood of the capitol but the graceful neighborhoods where the successful Black elite—the talented tenth—live. And its medical school is its crown jewel. The curriculum easily meets the new standards; its Freedman’s Hospital is nearly brand-new. Despite the University’s insistence that medical students focus on their studies exclusively, Ossian still works to cover his tuition and expenses. Perhaps because of this added pressure, his academic career at Howard is good but undistinguished. 

But even an undistinguished Howard medical student has the kind of status and gravitas that Ossian craves. He begins to dress sharply and adopts a doctor’s professional detachment. Sometimes, he indulges in arrogance, like when he openly criticizes Meharry Medical College, where his brother Otis studies dentistry. Determined to make good on his education, Ossian looks sets wealth and status as his life goals. But he knows that racism will always limit him: his patients will be Black, his wealth and status dependent on their economic and social circumstances.

While Ossian studies medicine at Howard, the war exacerbates political and racial tensions. Fear about the influence of communist ideology leads to a campaign against left-wing activists and feeds narratives of nativist white superiority. A white mob even lynches a Black soldier for wearing his uniform in public in early 1919. Then, in the summer, a race riot breaks out in Washington D.C. The army houses thousands of soldiers on the outskirts of town. After a rumor circulates that a Black man raped a white soldier’s wife, a mob of soldiers descends on Black neighborhoods, terrorizing them for three days and nights.

But Black residents near Howard gather weapons and meet the mob’s violence with their own force. Although the president calls the National Guard and a rainstorm quells some of the violence, the NAACP forcefully claims that Black self-defense ended the white violence. Ossian may not participate in the stand, but he doubtlessly knows about it.

Less than a week later, a similar race riot breaks out in Chicago, and smaller ones follow in Tennessee, Nebraska, and Arkansas through the summer and fall. Although the riots subside in 1920, the nativist sentiment revitalized by the war and the communist scare continues to grow. White supremacist ideas promoted by intellectuals and politicians merge with the direct political actions of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Congress moves closer to limiting foreign immigration, and racial segregation becomes entrenched in northern cities like Chicago.

Ossian completes his medical education caring for patients at the Freedman’s Hospital, many of whom suffer from the preventable diseases linked to poverty and poor sanitation like malnutrition, gangrene, diphtheria, and typhoid. He graduates in 1921. His Floridian hometown beckons with a life of comfort and security. But not content with comfortable obscurity, he heads to Detroit.