Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice for All Families
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Chapter 7: Social Justice Theatre: Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials
At the Groves Conference on Marriage and Family in Detroit, five actors presented a condensed version of Arthur J. Beer’s play Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials to an audience of family scholars from across the country as an illustration of the 2007 conference theme: Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice for All Communities. This historical drama is about a difficult period in Detroit history, the trials of Dr. Ossian Sweet.
In 1925, Detroit became the test site for a bombshell of equality in urban housing. The influx of huge numbers of poor workers from the South—both Black and White—created a volatile atmosphere compounded by job competition, racial enmity, lack of sufficient housing, prejudicial restrictions, and other urban pressures which was heated by an impending mayoral election between a liberal candidate and one supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Almost all neighborhoods were closed to Blacks, including new housing developments. In ten years, the 8,000 residents of the lower-east-side community called “Paradise Valley” swelled to more than 81,000. Every room in every tenement contained at least one whole family (Boyle, 2005).
Page 126Several Black professionals—mostly doctors and lawyers—attempted to buy homes in middle-class neighborhoods, but professional agitators had whipped up mobs who drove them out—with the cooperation of the police. Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African American physician, bought a home that he was determined to defend. A “Neighborhood Improvement Association” was formed to oust them. He, his wife and small child, two younger brothers, and six friends moved in and armed themselves to resist a mob (Boyle, 2005).
On September 9th, more than 500 people were gathered around the beleaguered home, throwing rocks through windows while police looked on, when warning shots were fired from the house over the crowd. One happened to hit a bystander across the street. Immediately the police rushed the house and took all the occupants into custody. They were held incommunicado at police headquarters and were forced to make statements without legal representation. Then all 11 (excluding only the 2-year-old child) were charged with premeditated murder (Linder, 2000).
The recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League rushed to defend the Sweets as a test case. Noted attorney Clarence Darrow, who had just finished the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, was hired at a fraction of his usual fee to head the defense, along with Arthur Hayes of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Frank Murphy was the young administrative judge of the circuit court who was determined to try the case himself. Reporters from around the country came to cover the event. Since there was no evidence of intent to kill, and the prosecution’s claim that there was no mob was disproved by the 60 witnesses they called, the first trial ended with a hung jury and a mistrial; but the prosecution insisted on retrials of each of the defendants (for an account of the legal proceedings see Haldeman-Julius, 1927).
Henry Sweet, who admitted to firing his rifle, was the first one tried. It was generally understood that if he could win an innocent verdict, the prosecution would not attempt to try the others. Over the course of the year, as the hostile intent of the crowd, the prejudice Page 127 of the police, the legality of the Sweets’ claim, and the sociological facts of the situation became part of the public record (partly due to the skill of the defense, but also to the enlightened impartiality of Murphy in allowing expert testimony) there was a perceptible shift in public attitude (see Linder, 2000).
The Klan candidate lost the election, a nationwide fundraising effort for the defense ensured the long-term survival of the NAACP and the Urban League, and Henry was finally freed: the first case in U.S. jurisprudence in which a Black man accused of killing a White man was exonerated. Clarence Darrow retired, several of the participants wrote books about the triumph of justice, and Murphy went on to become Mayor of Detroit and Governor of Michigan. As U.S. Attorney General from 1939-40, Murphy established the Justice Department’s civil rights unit. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Murphy strongly defended civil rights.
But it was not a victory for the defendants themselves. Ossian Sweet’s wife died of complications from her imprisonment, and Henry died of tuberculosis a few years later. Ossian refused to move into the house he had protected once he learned how rabidly his neighbors hated him. The legal advances in housing laws were countered by the machinations of realtors who pocketed large profits by scaring White homeowners into selling cheap, moving to the suburbs, and then selling the homes at an inflated price to Blacks determined to enter previously all-White neighborhoods (Boyle, 2005; Linder, 2000). While illegal today, the effect of such institutionalized practices left their mark on many of today’s still segregated neighborhoods.
Social Justice Theatre
The tragic experiences of the Sweet family inspired Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials, a play in the tradition of social justice theater. Since Augusto Boal founded Theatre of the Oppressed in the 1970s, theatre has not been thought of as merely representation but rather as a provocation to dialogue, a form of reflection, an Page 128 instrument of legislative change, and a pedagogical tool (Taylor, 09). According to Reinelt (1998), “Theatre and performance, seen as an institution whose chief function is the production of the social imaginary, can play a potentially vital role in shaping social change (p. 289). Such performances are usually referred to as social theatre (Thompson & Schechter, 2004). An important goal of social theatre is to educate the audience about historical events and “acknowledge the need for the privileged learner to understand power structures and dynamics in societies, how the status quo is upheld by unexamined acceptance of power relations [and]… the need to transition out of individualism and toward greater collective concerns and a sense of interdependence” (Curry-Stevens, 2007, p. 41).
For contemporary audiences, Malice Aforethought dramatizes the injustices suffered by the Ossian Sweet family and fulfills the goal of social justice theater: The performance allows a safe space for diverse groups to reflect on the past and to discuss in post-performance “talk-backs” the state of current residential policies and practices in their communities. “Even when our experience in daily life falls short of democracy—the value of continuing to perform the rituals of democracy, act out its dramas on the stage, in the courtroom, and in the streets, in order to maintain and expand what democracy we have” (Winner, 2005, p. 149). Like dramaturgists (e.g., Winner, 2005) who acknowledge that the structure of a courtroom trial is much like a play (i.e., there are prescribed ways to enter and exit), Beer recognizes that the courtroom is a place for “performing” democracy.
Social justice theatre typically frames and performs local culture (Kuftinec, 1996). But despite the fact that the Ossian Sweet house is still standing (see Figures 1 & 2), many Detroiters do not know the story of the Sweet family.
A Brief History of the Production [1]
In the fall of 1986, I was invited to write a play as the University of Detroit Mercy’s contribution to the Michigan Sesquicentennial Celebration. As playwright-in-residence of a respected theatre program, I was conscious of the honor but far from sure of my ability to fulfill the obligation, since I had never written an historical play. I confessed to the then head of the history department that I had not found anything in Detroit’s past that inspired me. She said “What about the Sweet trials?” I admitted I had never heard of them. She gave me a brief summary of what is certainly one of the most dramatic moments in our local history, and I was off on a research journey that led me from the Burton Historical Collection, through the University Law Library to the basement of the police department, and through some 25 books by and about those who had participated in the original events.
This sprawling, many-faceted, and multi-themed story was what I decided to dramatize. By January of 1987, I amassed more than 2000 hours of commentary, testimony, depositions, and newspaper articles... and I hadn’t even started to write the play. In a work of fiction, the writer is always hoping the words will come. My problem was deciding how to eliminate most of them. The first draft was 160 pages and would have run four hours on stage. Darrow’s summation speech, reproduced in several books, is a good example of my quandary. In the first place, there are two summation speeches, since there were two trials. Each of them took about seven hours to deliver. Since I was going to be playing Darrow myself, I made sure that my first draft reduced them to four and seven minutes respectively. The director then eliminated the first and told me to cut the second to under four minutes. This kind of brutal editing was very painful but, for stage purposes, essential.
In the same way, the 9 attorneys, 11 defendants, and 80 witnesses had to be reduced to a number that would be manageable onstage. Page 130 Eighty witnesses became eight. Normally, a large University theatre production (of Shakespeare, for example) has difficulty casting 15 to 20 competent actors. Even with my Draconian chopping of characters, I had to ask the director to find 25 actors, most of whom would be playing characters too mature for college students to portray convincingly.
To his credit and my eternal gratitude, the artistic director of The Theatre Company not only announced the play for the 1987 season before there was a script but also agreed to direct this logistical nightmare and called on all his contacts among local actors to join the project. Twelve of our students, 12 guest artists working without salaries, and myself as the only Equity actor, eventually appeared on stage in the first production, supported by 14 students working on crew. A former student volunteered to assistant direct and stage manage the show, because he was so committed to the play’s message. Twenty years later, he would play Ossian Sweet in the revival.
On February 2, 1986, the production premiered to appreciative audiences and received good press. Two headlines suggest the tone of its reception: “’Trials’ captures landmark case in vivid detail” in The Detroit News (DeVine, 1987), and “‘Malice Aforethought’: Prime history and good theatre” in the Detroit Free Press (Kohn, 1987). I received the Gesu National Prize for Playwriting, submitted the play to a film studio (where it disappeared without a trace), put the clippings in my scrapbook, consigned the event to history, and went on to other projects.
Malice Aforethought, however, refused to die. Over the years, several scholars asked me for copies of the play and for the source materials I found in the Detroit police archives which had not been available to authors writing in the years after the trials. Among them was UDM graduate Kevin Boyle, whose book on the Sweet Trials, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Boyle, 2004), won the National Book Award for nonfiction.
In 2006, a faculty member in the UDM history department asked me when we were going to revive Malice Aforethought. I explained Page 131 that it is very uncommon for university theatre departments to do revivals; we had only done one (Wizard of Oz) in our 35-year history. He persisted, mentioned Kevin’s book which was to be an “Everybody Reads” selection for Michigan libraries in the following year, pointed out it would be a 20-year anniversary, and that I was now the right age to play Darrow.
I consulted with the Dean of Liberal Arts, who was committed to promoting the theatre program. Under his enthusiastic direction, a steering committee was formed which included representatives from University departments, city organizations, and even four State of Michigan departments, led by the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA). Among the ideas floated by the Steering Committee were a state-wide tour, a visual exhibit that would travel to libraries, a video record of the production, a grant program that would pair law organizations with high school students to allow them to attend for free, and several lectures and workshops featuring Kevin Boyle, myself, and others with a special interest in the Sweet Trials. We received grants from the MCACA and the Michigan Humanities Council that permitted us to present student matinees, establish a website, purchase advertising, build the traveling exhibit, and fund a touring version of the play (see Sweet Trials Project, 2007).
In February of 2007, in connection with the Martin Luther King holiday and National Black History month, the revival opened at the Marygrove College theatre, this time with five Equity actors. In 1987, we had no resources for publicity. Word about the production spread gradually, so that we had small houses the first weekend, but the closing weekend so many people wanted tickets that we could not accommodate them. This time, we were not going to ignore our logical target audiences. For the first time in many years, we played to sold-out houses nearly every performance. The play was seen by more than a thousand Detroit area high school students.
But a serious problem loomed. We had committed to a state-wide tour in May, with production dates in three locales; but it became obvious that the grant for touring was not nearly large enough to accommodate the company, and that schools wanted a version short Page 132 enough to fit an assembly period. The original pruning of characters and lines for the two-hour-plus stage version was merely the prelude to the slashing that was now needed: a 50-minute version for five actors. During March of 2007 I completed the hatchet job, just in time to rehearse it in April and tour it in May.
We presented the touring version in Michigan venues as diverse as a middle school cafeteria in Baldwin, a small cultural center in Idlewild, a gymnasium and a concert hall in Flint. The library exhibit, fortunately designed to be portable, traveled with the five of us in a University van as we criss-crossed the state, eventually reaching more than a thousand students, from 6th grade to the university level, as well as many adults.
But we were not quite through yet. As soon as Libby Blume heard that we were reviving the play, she asked me to present Darrow’s summation speech for the 2007 Groves Conference. Once we had proven that the touring version worked with audiences, I asked if she would like to have that, as well. She agreed. And so our final performance took place at the Groves Conference site in Detroit just across Gratiot Avenue from the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, named for the judge in the Sweet trials and very near where the original trials were held. The opportunity to present the work to senior scholars in many disciplines from across the nation and to hear their opinions afterwards validated, for me, all the work that had gone into the project.
Arthur J. Beer, 2010
Detroit, Michigan
Conclusion
In the tradition of social justice theater, the production of Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials raised awareness and changed the hearts and minds of audiences. University theatre productions often are public forums in which to understand complex issues of democracy from multiple perspectives (Dolan, 2001). For example, audience comments from the 2007 touring production provide evidence that this sort of social justice activism “works”:
Page 133“My husband, a law professor, told all his classes about the play and suggested they go see it. It is such an important play to see...very compelling and moving.”
“It was just phenomenal. I wish everyone in the area could see it. I knew that the family never recovered, so to speak, but I had forgotten the details and hearing their fates recited at the end of the play...is just overwhelming. It’s like stones being thrown back at all of us, isn’t it?”
The Michigan Humanities Council evaluator (Nolan, 2007) also found that the performance encouraged and stimulated audience members to think critically:
“History through drama was the focus of the experience; however, universal truths traditionally queried by the humanities emerged from the play and from the post-play discussion: What are the limits to and obstacles that subvert human justice? What constitutes freedom, human rights, equity, and inclusion?”
“Regarding [high-school] student reactions, the performance captured the attention and imagination of the young audience. During the performance, several students were overheard commenting on the action onstage, saying things like ‘That’s not fair.’ ‘What a jerk!’ ‘Hey, this is good.’”
“The students reacted visibly to the humor and irony of the play and were obviously moved by the speeches about racial prejudice and the story of the protagonist overcoming hardship to achieve his goal of a college education and medical degree.”
“It was apparent that the students wanted an opportunity to talk about the play and the session was cut off by the necessity of moving on with the school’s daily schedule. A number of students came up to the moderator after the Q&A session to ask their particular questions and seemed genuinely interested in knowing more.”
In addition to the touring production, the mobile exhibit presented the artifacts and photos from the trials and the events that led up to Page 134 it. According to the evaluation report, the high school students at the performance looked it over very carefully. The website funded by the Michigan Council for the Arts and Humanities continues to provide educational materials and a lesson plan that teachers can draw on to prepare students for viewing the performance (Sweet Trials Project, 2007). The site also provides background information on the play, a description of the historical event the play deals with, and full-text access to selected texts, both primary sources and historical commentary, for further reading (Nolan, 2007).
The legacy of the Sweet family story for Detroit is not just the fact that the case was Clarence Darrow’s last important trial or that an African American family was acquitted of murder by an all-White judge and jury, but that for the first time justice prevailed over bigotry in an American courtroom. The historic importance of this event was the interaction of those who participated. This one event had wide-sweeping consequences that affected the city of Detroit and the people who lived there long after the trial itself. Reason broke through the color barrier in a public arena and its aftermath spread throughout a city chained to its own social restrictions and limitations. The play calls attention to the realization that we are all human beings trying to live a quality life (Beer, 2007).
References
Beer, A. J. (2007). Author’s note. Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials. Retrieved from http://sweettrials.udmercy.edu/sweet_trial_play.htm
Boyle, K. (2004). Arc of justice: A saga of race, civil rights, and murder in the Jazz Age. New York, NY: Henry Holt.
Curry-Stevens, A. (2007). New forms of transformative education: Pedagogy for the privileged. Journal of Transformative Education, 5, 33-58.
DeVine, L. (1987, October 4). Malice gets its drama right from the pages of Detroit history. Detroit Free Press. Retrieved from http://sweettrials.udmercy.edu/newspaper_review-1.jpg
Page 135Dolan, J. (2001). Rehearsing democracy: Advocacy, public intellectuals, and civic engagement in theatre and performance studies. Theatre Topics, 11, 1-17.
Haldeman-Julius, M. (1927). Clarence Darrow’s two greatest trials: Reports of the Scopes anti-evolution case and the Dr. Sweet negro trial. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius.
Kohn, M. (1987, November 22). ‘Malice Aforethought’: Prime history and good theater. Detroit Free Press, 5F. Retrieved from http://sweettrials.udmercy.edu/reviews2.html
Kuftinec, S. (1996). A cornerstone for rethinking community theatre. Theatre Topics 6, 91-104.
Linder, D. (2000). The Sweet trials: An account. Retrieved from http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/sweet/sweetaccount.HTM
Nolan, E. (2007). Evaluator’s report on the Malice Aforethought touring program. Michigan Humanities Council, 119 Pere Marquette, Suite 3B, Lansing, MI 48912.
Reinelt, J. (1998). Notes for a radical democratic theater: Productive crises and the challenge of indeterminacy. In J. Colleran & J. S. Spencer (Eds.), Staging resistance: Essays on political theatre (pp. 283-300). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Sweet Trials Project. (2007). Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials. Retrieved from http://sweettrials.udmercy.edu
Taylor, D. (2002). Augusto Boal: 1931-2009. The Drama Review, 53, 10-11.
Thompson, J., & Schechner, R. (2004). Why social theatre? The Drama Review, 48, 11-16.
Winner, L. (2005). Democratic acts: Theatre of public trials. Theatre Topics, 15, 149-169.
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