Ossian Sweet
| Ossian Sweet | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
October 30, 1895 Bartow, Florida, USA |
| Died | March 20, 1960 (aged 64) Detroit, Michigan, USA |
| Fields | Internal medicine |
| Institutions | Dunbar Hospital |
| Alma mater |
Howard University Wilberforce University |
Ossian Sweet (/ˈɒʃən/ OSH-ən; October 30, 1895 – March 20, 1960) was an American physician in Detroit, Michigan, noted for his armed self-defense in 1925 of his newly purchased home in a white neighborhood against a mob trying to force him out. He, his family and friends, who had helped defend his home, were acquitted by an all-white jury of murder charges in what came to be known as the Sweet Trials.
Sweet was born the second son to Henry Sweet and Dora Devaughn in Bartow, Florida, eight days before the death of his oldest brother Oscar. Henry Sweet was a former slave from Florida. He bought land in Bartow in 1898, and moved there with his entire family. They lived in a small farmhouse, and all the children helped with the farm animals and in the fields. The Sweets had a total of ten children; they lived in cramped quarters and on the little money they could earn through their farm. As Sweet later told in 1925 at his murder trial, when he was a five-year-old boy, he witnessed the lynching of a black male teenager Fred Rochelle. Rochelle, captured by black males and turned over to the sheriff, admitted to attacking and murdering a white female, 26-year-old Rena Smith Taggart, with a butcher knife in an apparent rape attempt. According to Sweet's account, he was out alone at night and a mile or more from his home, where he watched from the bushes as Rochelle was burned at the stake. “He’d recount it with frightening specificity: the smell of the kerosene, Rochelle’s screams as he was engulfed in flames, the crowd’s picking off pieces of charred flesh to take home as souvenirs”.
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