In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz, speakeasies and assembly lines. Tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and the soon-to-be-legendary violence of a terrible era rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor and grandson of a slave, had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own. Shortly after his arrival a mob gathered outside his house: shots rang out. Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the white men threatening their lives and home. And so it began - a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly recreates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the American middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured, is an epic tale of one man trapped by his own life and times - and a landmark episode in the history of modern civil rights.