Again, Darrow

NEGROES.

Again, Darrow

In Detroit a pallid, tense, exhausted attorney for the defense finished his plea with a recountal of the evolution of the Negro. Step by step, he dramatically retraced the Blackman's faltering trail from the reaches of the sombre Zambezi, through the confusing and indiscernible vagaries of his enslavement, through the darknesses of his neo-liberty with its mob-slaughter, lynching and stake-burnings, and finally into the hope and comprehensions of a new day. This graphic recitation was to show that Henry Sweet, Negro accused of murder, was the unconscious victim of ancient racial inheritances, that when he knelt before a window in his brother's house and fired he had done it in utterance of primitive antipathies. A bullet had pierced fatally one Leon E. Breiner, a citizen seated in his rocking chair at his home across the street, chatting and smoking his pine, peacefully white.

A crowd of white men -- that evening last September -- had collected around the Sweet domicile. The Sweets had just moved to a "white" neighborhood, had furnished their new home with a garrison of eleven men, shotguns, revolvers, ammunition. Henry, fearing a too fiery house-warming from the approaching whites, opened the belligerencies.

"The first instinct a man has," argued famed Clarence Darrow, pallid attorney for the defense, "is to save his life." He spoke painstakingly of the fact that this was no ordinary murder trial but rather a trial of racial prejudices vs. impartial justice. Said he, "We are born into this world with a brain of putty, with no knowledge of color, no antipathies against black men, but as soon as we are born, people around us begin planting prejudices in our minds. . . . I haven't any doubt but that everyone of you jurymen is prejudiced. We are all prejudiced."

The jury deliberated, returned a verdict of not guilty. Lawyer Darrow had again gilded his unique reputation by securing an acquittal against heavy odds, emphasizing by repetition his statement that "courts are cockpits in which lawyers may fight." There is a peculiar consistency in his defense of the hopelessly lost, of the rich and poor alike, of the underdog who is under because of inexorable gyrations of fate, which indicates that his motives are of noble origin. Or perhaps the grey and stooped veteran laughs behind his ugly face when he sees the jury succumbing to his harangue.