Arc of Justice

During the period in time covered in Arc of Justice the Great Migration is in full swing. Myriads of blacks are leaving the South and Jim Crow in search of work and opportunity. The story begins in 1925 Detroit, when Dr. Ossian Sweet attempts to move his family out of the ghetto into a bungalow located in an all white, working-class neighborhood. Suspecting that his neighbors would not take kindly to his arrival Sweet brings nine men and arsenal of guns with him. When the mob does indeed form outside the bungalow, and the police do nothing to deter their violence, Sweet’s younger brother Henry fires into the crowd killing one man and injuring another. The eleven black adults in the home including Sweet's wife, were then taken to jail and charged with first-degree murder. After relaying this climactic event in chapter one Boyle seeks to explain what convinced Sweet to take such bold action. In order to achieve this end he looks into Sweet’s past for answers, shifting the narrative back a couple of generations to show not only how white oppression had affected his family, but also how they fought back against it. Remus DeVaughn, Sweet’s grandfather, was a young teenager when freedom came. With it came missionaries from the North preaching a message of racial uplift for freed slaves and he and his brothers “were swept up in the AME’s crusade (Boyle 52).” The African Methodist Episcopal Church’s message was indeed empowering to blacks. Through hard work, frugality, and virtuousness blacks could and would demonstrate their equality-- and maybe even their superiority-- to whites (Boyle 51) One can clearly see that Ossian Sweet’s AME background had an effect on him.
It certainly informed his decision to buy that particular bungalow. All throughout his childhood he heard the message of racial uplift, and he must have taken it to heart. According to Methodism’s founder John Wesley “religion must necessarily produce industry and frugality.... and these cannot but