He is known for being charged with murder in 1925 after he and his friends used armed self-defense against a hostile white mob protesting after Sweet moved into their neighborhood.

The court accepted the defense motion to sever the defendants, and the prosecutor decided to first try Henry Sweet, Ossian's youngest brother.

After the all-white jury acquitted Henry Sweet, the prosecutor declined to prosecute the rest of the defendants and dismissed the charges against them.

In the years after the trial in Detroit, his daughter Iva, wife Gladys, and brother Henry all died of tuberculosis, and he committed suicide in 1960 after a series of unsuccessful professional and business decisions that left him destitute.

The Sweets had a total of ten children, including his brother Henry; they lived in cramped quarters on what little money they could earn through their farm.

At age five, Ossian Sweet witnessed the lynching of a black male teenager, Fred Rochelle, who was burned to death by a white mob.

Sweet later could "recount it with frightening specificity: the smell of the kerosene, Rochelle's screams as he was engulfed in flames, the crowd's picking off pieces of charred flesh to take home as souvenirs".

During the first four years, he studied in its prep school, learning Latin, history, mathematics, English, music, drawing, philosophy, social and introductory science, and foreign language (probably French) to prepare for college.

After Wilberforce, Sweet attended Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., where he earned his medical accreditation.

As a youth, Sweet had demonstrated dedication to his schoolwork, and he strove to succeed as a Southern black man in the Jim Crow era.

Du Bois later wrote about Sweet's legal case and held the physician up as an example of achievement to inspire young African-American men.

[5] For the next three days, the riot flared up in different areas of the city, with white men, including many in military uniform, pulling black people from streetcars or attacking them on the street.

President Woodrow Wilson called up the National Guard to suppress the violence, but a fierce rainstorm helped end the mob's enthusiasm as well.

Earlier while walking down the street, he had seen a white gang stop a passing streetcar, pull a black passenger to the sidewalk, and "beat him mercilessly".

Sweet gained a position as a medical examiner for Liberty Life Insurance, "an appointment that assured him a steady stream of patients he might not have otherwise have acquired".

Most African Americans in Detroit still lived in Black Bottom, but those who prospered moved to better neighborhoods, which Sweet wanted for his own family.

[8] By creating covenants that applied to low-income families, ethnic immigrants and racial minorities were also targeted, since they were frequently restricted to lower paying, blue-collar jobs.

In the case of Ossian Sweet, restrictive covenants aimed at low-income families would not prevent him from buying a house because he earned a doctor's salary.

If restrictive covenants did not prevent minorities from buying properties, white residents found other ways to block such people from moving in.

The Waterworks Park Improvement Association was formed by whites who opposed blacks moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods, as they feared social disruption and a loss of value in their homes.

It was even more challenging for non-whites because most black buyers had to take out multiple mortgages in order to purchase a home and assumed more debt than whites of similar income did.

[citation needed] Because of a confrontation with these neighbors on the night of September 9, 1925, police inspector Norton Schuknecht and a detail of officers were assigned outside the Sweet house to keep the peace.

[citation needed] As the crowd grew restless, they threw stones at the house, eventually breaking an upstairs window.

Although Gladys Sweet was released in early October on bail, the men were held at the Wayne County Jail until the trial was over.

When word of the mass arrest reached James Weldon Johnson, general secretary of the NAACP, he correctly predicted that the case could affect the civil rights struggle for African Americans.

They based their decision on the potential media visibility of the cases, as well as which trials would help further African Americans as a race and inspire social change, should the NAACP win.

[citation needed] The NAACP hired Charles H. Mahoney, a renowned African American lawyer from Detroit, Michigan, to represent the defendants.

[citation needed] In early October, the NAACP invited Clarence Darrow to join the Sweets' defense team, alongside Mahoney.

[9] They expected that Darrow's national reputation as one of the most brilliant defense attorneys in the US would attract desired publicity to the trial and its issues.

As he began to approach the age of fifty, Sweet started to buy land in East Bartow, Florida, as his father had.