Honors course combines experience and education to connect with Detroit’s past

College of Arts, Sciences and Letters first-year student Natalie Vitale looks out a second-floor window of a 1919 Arts and Crafts home in Detroit during a class field trip. Today there’s a nice-sized yard and a few trees. However, the home’s previous residents had a view from that same window that was far less peaceful: They saw an angry mob.

The East Village home is where a landmark trial in U.S. civil rights history originated — and it’s less than 20 miles from UM-Dearborn. Ossian Sweet, an African American doctor,  defended his Detroit home from a violent white crowd in 1925. The court case that followed set a legal precedent that citizens, regardless of skin color, have the right to protect their home from danger.

“It was hard to fathom what Dr. Sweet and his family experienced,” says Vitale, who visited the Ossian Sweet House museum during an elective field trip offered through a Fall 2025 Honors course called Four Trials. Featuring stained-glass windows and a distinctive red-brick front porch,  the Ossian Sweet home opened for tours by appointment starting in fall 2025. Professor of Composition and Rhetoric Liz Rohan, who teaches the Four Trials course and highlights Dr. Sweet’s case, took a group of her students during Thanksgiving break to visit the site.

To organize the tour, Rohan worked with Daniel Baxter, founder and CEO of the Ossian H. Sweet Foundation. Baxter’s parents bought the home from Dr. Sweet in 1958 and Baxter owns it today. “It’s an honor to share the story of Dr. Sweet in the very home where history was made. The lessons of courage, justice and community still speak loudly today,” says Baxter, explaining why it was important for him to open the home to the community. “It’s inspiring to see people connect with Dr. Sweet’s story in such a meaningful way. ” Baxter and Rohan are exploring course partnership opportunities for the future.

In Four Trials, which is a required Honors Program course that runs each fall semester, students learn and write about landmark legal cases to help them connect past legal arguments and decisions to today. There are multiple sections of the course and Rohan is one of the professors who teach it. “To learn from our country’s history, it’s important for us to explore the events of the past and to bring them to life in a profound way when we can,” says Rohan, whose research explores America’s Progressive Era with a focus on 1920s Detroit. In addition to Sweet’s case, Rohan and her Fall 2025 class examined the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and subsequent workplace reforms, the 1965 murder of Civil Rights Viola Liuzzo and the first Civil Rights Movement-era conviction of Ku Klux Klan members, and the 1901 acquittal of Margaret Hossack and the country’s shifting views on women’s rights.

Vitale, a Saline resident, first heard about Dr. Sweet through Rohan’s class. She says she didn’t realize that violent mob behavior happened in the yards of Detroit families — she thought actions like that only occurred in the American South. “The class opened my eyes to the injustices that Americans experienced across the country, including near where I live,” Vitale says. “These cases didn’t happen all that long ago, either. We need to know about what people endured to get the rights we, as Americans, have today.” When learning about the Sweet case, Vitale read about how hundreds of people gathered outside the family’s Detroit home, angry that a Black couple and their infant moved into the middle-class white neighborhood. While Dr. Sweet and his wife hosted a small family gathering, the mob threw rocks at the home, shattering windows, and threatened violence. In an effort to get the crowd to disperse, Sweet’s brother shot a .38 caliber Winchester, killing one member of the mob. 

When visiting the home, Vitale says overlooking the yard from a large second-floor window — just like Dr. Sweet did in 1925 —gave her some insight into the fear the Sweet family felt. “I imagined looking out and seeing all of these people who wanted to hurt or kill me. It was terrifying,” Vitale says. “I will never fully understand their experience, but it gave me an idea.”

Sweet, his wife Gladys, and all guests in the home were initially arrested, charged with murder and held in jail for nearly three months. NAACP leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, hired legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow to defend them. After two years, all were acquitted based on the “castle doctrine,” which allows for people to use reasonable force to defend themselves within their homes against intruders. It was the first time this legal principle was applied when a Black person used force. 

Rohan, who has taught UM-Dearborn students about the Sweet trial in a variety of courses over the past two decades, emphasizes the university’s close proximity to the Sweet home as a reason to raise student awareness of this landmark civil rights case — especially when many UM-Dearborn students are local. She wants students to be familiar with important events in southeast Michigan’s history that helped shape today’s society.

Rohan says being able to visit the Ossian Sweet House adds a new dimension to the Four Trials course — offering a tangible connection to a historic event.  

Looking forward to the Fall 2026 course, Rohan and Baxter are hoping to work together on a class project that will help educate future generations about Sweet. “I do not want people to forget what happened here. When we remember, it sobers us to think about the actions of the past and remember to not commit the same mistakes," Baxter says. “I grew up in this home and had a very happy childhood. I am a direct beneficiary of what Dr. Sweet did. I stand on his shoulders every time I share his story.”

For more information about the Ossian Sweet House or to schedule a tour, reach out to Baxter at [email protected]. Admission is free, but donations are appreciated.

Story by Sarah Tuxbury, photos courtesy Daniel Baxter