Community Book Program

Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, will visit Oakland University on Thursday, Sept. 27 at noon to discuss his book on the infamous murder trial of Ossian Sweet. As part of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Celebrating Liberal Arts Revolution theme, OU faculty members selected Arc of Justice as this year’s community book, making it required reading in freshman rhetoric classes, as well as a number of classes in other disciplines. The discussion will be held in Oakland Center Gold Rooms B and C.

Arc of Justice won the National Book Award for non-fiction, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Tolerance Book Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Arc of Justice also was named a New York Times notable book for 2004, a State of Michigan notable book for 2005, and the 2007 selection for the Detroit metropolitan area's community-wide reading program.

The book centers on the African American physician Ossian Sweet’s decision to move his family into a white neighborhood in Detroit during the fall of 1925. Sweet had no intention of being driven out of his home by white mobs, as had happened to others trying to break Detroit’s color line. On the first night in his new home, he was encountered by a crowd of 5,000 hostile whites. Shots rang out and a white neighbor was killed. The next day, Sweet and the ten other friends and family members who had come to help on the move-in day were charged with first-degree murder. The case attracted the support of the NAACP and the famous attorney Clarence Darrow. As it wound its way through the court system, the Sweet trial transformed the American civil rights movement. In many respects, it constituted a revolution that still affects Detroit today. Boyle received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He currently teaches twentieth-century American history at Ohio State University and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He serves on the advisory board for the Walter P. Reuther Library, and on the editorial boards of Labor History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. He is also a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and a member of the PEN American Center.

Boyle’s visit to Oakland is hosted by the Honors College and the Department of Rhetoric, Communication and Journalism.