Arc of Justice

Gladys Sweet has a much different background than Ossian. Born in Washington, D.C. to a teenage mother, Gladys moves to Detroit at age seven after her mother marries a concert pianist. Though a black woman, Gladys has lighter skin than Ossian and "might have been able to pass" (25) for white. Unlike Ossian, Gladys lives most of her life in an all-white neighborhood in Detroit. Her parents, Rosella and Benjamin, try to give her "every advantage they could" by joining St. Matthew's church, sending her to a good high school, and training Gladys in the proper "social graces" of a young woman. Compared to Ossian's abrasive overcompensation, Gladys is a "strikingly poised young woman" (125), seven years Ossian's junior. Gladys's social status and refinement make Ossian see her as the "sort of mate a young doctor of such obvious promise ought to have" (126).

Gladys, though, is not entirely demure. Though she appears slight, behind closed doors, she exercises "a powerful influence over her family" (33). She travels to Europe with Ossian shortly after losing their first child to a premature birth. While there, Gladys becomes pregnant and delivers the child after facing discriminatory denial at the American Hospital in Paris. During her interrogation at Wayne County Jail, Gladys is "tougher than Ossian and the other men" (176), not allowing the prosecutors to intimidate her at all. She admits to bringing the guns with them to Garland Avenue, but then becomes recalcitrant, refusing to recall "a single moment, not a word spoken, not a step taken" (177). Following her release from jail, Gladys becomes "the defendants' public face" (246), appearing at NAACP meetings, Sunday church rallies, and benefits. By the trial's end, though, her "iron will" softens and she receives the news of a mistrial by burying "her face in her mother's shoulder" (299) and weeping.

A large white man in his late sixties, Darrow joins Ossian's defense team as the NAACP's celebrity attorney. Raised in a small town in Ohio by an agnostic abolitionist father, Darrow becomes an "intellectual drunkard" (232) of the time's most avant-garde social ideas. He loves to fuse "the absolute and the ambiguous" and has a "dark-edged humor" (231). After defending Eugene Debs in a labor-centered case, Darrow becomes known as "the Great Defender, champion of the embattled working class" (233). He has a flair for the dramatic, and often takes on cases that will land him in the public eye, including Ossian's. Darrow isn't particularly concerned with race issues, rather he wants to "attack the status quo" (234), which, in America in 1925 is a white supremacist hegemony. During Ossian's trial, Darrow launches an attack on the KKK and its message of "One Hundred Percent Americanism" (235), which he mocks as the ‘Noble Nordic.’ However, Darrow also concedes publicly, both at trial and at an NAACP rally, that he doesn't see any way for racism to truly end. 

The New York branch of the NAACP's field secretary, James Weldon Johnson, is a true Harlem Renaissance man, working as a "poet, composer, journalist, lawyer, politician, and diplomat" (89). He launches a campaign for desegregation of housing in America, which he pushes all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Johnson agrees to take on Ossian's case to raise consciousness among both black and liberal white Americans of the proliferation of the color line throughout the country. Johnson also hopes that taking on Ossian's case will help establish the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, starting with a donation from young millionaire Charles Garland. 

Walter White is a "blond-haired, blue-eyed bantam" (120) of a young man who serves as James Weldon Johnson's assistant secretary at the NAACP. A novelist well-connected to New York's literary scene, White is a "public relations genius" with "boundless energy." Both of White's parents had been slaves, and he'd grown up "on the edge of the black neighborhood" in Atlanta, but White could have easily "spent his life passing" (207) as white. However, after a mob threatened to burn down his family home, White changes forever. "Gripped by the knowledge" of his identity, White comes to identify as a black man, though he never quite shakes the ideology of white supremacy, claiming that he "never met a pure Negro whom he really could trust" (208). White's public relations genius helps make Ossian's case into an overnight news sensation, as well as helps fill the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund coffers.

A Detroit "lawyer and Democratic Party activist" (138) in his early thirties, Frank Murphy runs for judgeship in the city's Recorders Court in February 1923. He hopes to upset the court's conservative majority. Murphy secures his victory by playing upon his natural charm and connection to Detroit's immigrant working class and black communities. After securing his seat on the court's bench, he demonstrates his commitment to justice during Ossian's trial by reminding the jury of its duty to carry out prejudice-free justice. 

Like Frank Murphy, politician Johnny Smith hopes to upset Detroit's political lean towards conservatism. As a local politician, Smith fights for labor rights, confronting the city's notoriously brutal cops, even promising during his mayoral campaign to see that the police department hires "more colored officers" (141). He beats out the KKK's candidate, Charles Bowles, twice, and begins to turn the tide of Detroit's lean towards full embrace of white supremacy.