1 Lorraine Hansberry, letter to Kenneth Merryman, 27 April 1962, in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, adapt. Robert Nemiroff, intro. James Baldwin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 213–14.

2 W. E. B. DuBois, “The Challenge of Detroit,” The Crisis, November 1925, 7–10, at 8.

3 “House Stoned, Negro Quits It,” Detroit News, 24 June 1925; “Mob of 5,000 Forces Negro to Quit Home,” Detroit Free Press, 24 June 1925.

4 DuBois, “Challenge of Detroit,” 10.

5 Quoted in Boyle, Kevin, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 157Google Scholar.

6 DuBois, “Challenge of Detroit,” 10.

7 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37.

8 “Sweet Lawyer Opens Defense,” Detroit Free Press, 17 November 1925.

9 Arthur Garfield Hays, Let Freedom Ring (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928), 231.

10 Certeau, 36–7.

11 Ibid., 35–6.

12 Ibid., 37.

13 Ibid.

14 Schneider, Rebecca, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 175Google Scholar.

16 For more on the ways that the right of self-defense has been limited to white men, see Caroline E. Light, Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018).

17 Claire Colebrook argues that “strategy occurs only when the event of naming and ordering this space as a place is forgotten.” Colebrook, Claire, “Certeau and Foucault: Tactics and Strategic Essentialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.2 (2001): 543–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 558.

18 Darryl Paulson, “Florida's History of Suppressing Blacks’ Votes,” Tampa Bay Times, 11 October 2013, www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/floridas-history-of-suppressing-blacks-votes/2146546/, accessed 6 April 2020.

19 Boyle, 60–9.

20 Boyle, 66–8. For more on lynching as a post-Reconstruction strategy of anti-Black terrorism, see Berg, Manfred, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011)Google Scholar; Dollard, John, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937)Google Scholar; Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2002)Google Scholar; and Wood, Amy Louise, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For more on the tradition of Black self-defense prior to the Civil War, see Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014), 31–104.

22 Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 131–7. See also Cramer, Clayton E., “The Racist Roots of Gun Control,” Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy 4.2 (1995): 17–25Google Scholar. One of the primary reasons that Chief Justice Roger Taney gives for prohibiting citizenship to Black Americans in general in his opinion for the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford is that citizenship would confer the right for Black Americans “to keep and carry arms wherever they went”—a proposition that was, Taney argues, totally untenable. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), at 417.

23 U.S. Statutes at Large 14 (1866): 176–7.

24 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 84–127, 184–7.

25 Foremost among the legal moves that reentrenched white supremacy were the institution of Black Codes by southern states and the Supreme Court's decisions in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1898). In Cruikshank, the Supreme Court undermined the so-called Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by holding that states were not, in fact, bound to honor the individual rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. “The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed,” they wrote, “but this . . . means no more than it shall not be infringed by Congress.” With this decision, the Supreme Court made it legal for states to enact racially discriminatory laws. Winkler, 143–5, emphasis his.

26 Hartman, 12.

27 Goldberg, Jesse A., “James Baldwin and the Anti-Black Force of Law: On Excessive Violence and Exceeding Violence,” Public Culture 31.3 (2019): 521–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 523. In a different context, Joshua Chambers-Letson identifies this position of being culpable within, but unprotected by, the law because of racial identity as being in a “state of racial exception.” Joshua Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 5.

28 Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).

29 Certeau, 139.

30 Ibid.

31 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 89–102.

32 Certeau, 141.

33 Marcet Haldeman-Julius, Clarence Darrow's Two Great Trials: Reports of the Scopes Anti-Evolution Case and the Dr. Sweet Negro Trial (Girard, KS: Haldeman–Julius Publishing, 1927), 33.

34 “To the World,” Bartow Courier-Informant, 5 June 1901. For further local news coverage of Fred Rochelle's killing, see “Black Brute's Heinous Crime,” Bartow Courier-Informant, 29 May 1901; and “Burned at the Stake,” Bartow Courier-Informant, 5 June 1901.

35 Koritha Mitchell describes this white-authored violence toward Black achievement as “know-your-place aggression.” Mitchell, Koritha, “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care,” African American Review 51.4 (2018): 253–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Equal Justice Initiative, which has done extensive research into lynchings in the United States, likewise identifies social and economic success as primary motivators for many “racial terror lynchings” perpetrated by white people against Black victims. “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” 3d ed., Equal Justice Initiative, https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/, accessed 13 January 2021.

36 Paulson, “Florida's History.”

37 I use the term “pogrom” carefully, reflecting recent scholarship advocating for the use of more concise language to describe these events of white violence against Black Americans. Charles Lumpkins in particular has argued persuasively for the use of this term to describe certain types of coordinated, communal white racist violence. He defines a “pogrom” as “an assault, condoned by officials, to destroy a community defined by ethnicity, race, or some other social identity.” Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), xi. See also Chauncey DeVega, “White America's Racial Amnesia: The Sobering Truth about Our Country's ‘Race Riots,’” Salon.com, 1 May 2015, www.salon.com/2015/05/01/white_americas_racial_amnesia_the_sobering_truth_about_our_countrys_race_riots_partner/, accessed 6 February 2019.

38 “Une Monstre Lynchage,” Le Petit Journal, 24 September 1906; “Rioting Goes On, Despite Troops,” New York Times, 24 September 1906; “The Atlanta Riots,” New York Times, 25 September 1906; Boyle, 80.

39 W. E. B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of Today, ed. Booker T. Washington (New York: James Pott & Co., 1903), 31–76. Although DuBois later changed his mind on the value and efficacy of “uplift suasion,” or the kind of respectability politics represented by his opinion in “The Talented Tenth,” this term is still helpful in understanding Sweet, who saw himself as an example of the “best of this race” (DuBois, 33). Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 313–14.

40 Boyle, 77. Wilberforce was the only Black college authorized to conduct such a program.

41 Hays, 226.

42 “Race Riots Renewed,” Washington Post, 21 July 1919, 1; Boyle, 95–7.

43 Boyle, 96.

44 “One Riot Victim Dies; Troops Quiet Capital; Crowds Quit Streets,” Washington Post, 24 July 1919, 1.

45 “2 Police Officers and 3 Negroes Killed; Scores Hurt as Races Battle in Streets of Washington,” Washington Post, 22 July 1919, 1.

46 “Rain, Riots, and St. Swithun,” Washington Post, 24 July 1919, 6; “Race Clashes Ended,” Washington Post, 25 July 1919, 1; Boyle, 96.

47 James Weldon Johnson, “The Riots: An N.A.A.C.P. Investigation,” The Crisis 18.5 (September 1919): 241–3, at 242.

48 Ibid., 243.

49 “Riots Elsewhere, Forecast by Negro,” Washington Post, 25 July 1919, 4.

50 “For Action on Race Riot Peril,” New York Times, 5 October 1919, 112. For more on the Red Summer of 1919, see Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011); David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

51 “For Action on Race Riot Peril.”

52 W. E. B. DuBois, “Let Us Reason Together,” The Crisis 18.5 (September 1919), 231. For a summary of contemporary Black leaders’ thoughts on the right to self-defense, see “Mob Rule as a National Menace,” Literary Digest 63.3 (18 October 1919): 9–11.

53 Boyle, 32.

54 Boyle, 140–3.

55 Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan and the American Political Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).

56 Boyle, 134, 153–4. For more on how civic and homeowners associations prevented Black homeownership in Detroit throughout the twentieth century, see Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, new ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 211–18.

57 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 28, 54.

58 Sir Edward Coke, Semayne's Case (1604); quoted in Light, 20.

59 Ibid.

60 Pond v. People, 8 Michigan 150 (1860).

61 Ibid.

62 Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 1–2.

63 Ibid., 4.

64 Ibid., 10.

65 The NAACP's early activism included nationwide protests against the release of The Birth of a Nation, yet another example of how Black leaders understood the powerful influence of performed depictions of Black Americans. Weinberger, Stephen, “The Birth of a Nation and the Making of the NAACP,” Journal of American Studies 45.1 (2011): 77–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Mitchell, Living with Lynching, 3. Mitchell demonstrates that the majority of lynching plays were not intended for white audiences, but instead were created and circulated in publications like The Crisis for Black families to read and share in small, intimate settings, thus reaffirming to one another the value of Black life, family, and community. Ibid., 13.

67 “Residential Segregation,” Public Journal, clipping in file 001521-002-0962, NAACP Papers.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

70 Haldeman-Julius, 52.

71 James Weldon Johnson, “In Defense of Negro Rights,” The Republican, 18 November 1925, clipping in file 001521-004-0001, NAACP Papers.

72 “Other Race Troubles Figure in Sweet Trial,” Detroit Free Press, 18 November 1925.

73 Quoted in Cash E. Asher, “Race Psychology Told in Sweet's Testimony,” Detroit Free Press, 19 November 1925, clipping in file 001521-004-0001, NAACP Papers.

74 “Sweet Says He Provided Guns,” Detroit Free Press, 8 May 1926, clipping in file 001521-003-0817, NAACP Papers; Haldeman-Julius, 56; Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), 305.

75 Asher. For in-depth narrative histories of Sweet's life and the self-defense trials of Ossian Sweet, Gladys Sweet, Henry Sweet, and the eight other codefendants, see Boyle; Phyllis Vine, One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream, 1st ed. (New York: Amistad, 2004); and Haldeman-Julius.

76 Hays, 215–16; “Sweet Lawyer Opens Defense.”

77 Martha Merrill Umphrey, Austin Sarat, and Lawrence Douglas, “Law and/as Performance,” in Law and Performance, ed. Sarat, Douglas, and Umphrey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 1–17, at 4.

78 Asher.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Walter White to James Weldon Johnson, telegram, 20 November 1925, file 001521-003-0127, NAACP Papers.

82 “Persecution of Negro Race Bared at Sweet Trial,” NAACP Press Release, 28 November 1925, file 001521-003-0127, NAACP Papers.

83 Walter White to James Weldon Johnson, telegram, 19 November 1925, file 001521-003-0127, NAACP Papers; White to Johnson, telegram, 20 November 1925, file 001521-003-0127, NAACP Papers.

84 “Sweet Lawyer Opens Defense.”

85 Koritha Mitchell, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 13.

86 Hartman, 177.

87 Umphrey et al., 4–5; Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

88 Malcolm, 3.

89 David E. Lilienthal, “Has the Negro the Right of Self-Defense?,” The Nation 121 (23 December 1925): 724–5, at 724.

90 For more on how the discourses of white supremacy emplace Blackness, and especially the Black body, as outside the law and even outside of humanity, see Hartman; Spillers, Hortense J., “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wynter, Sylvia, “‘No Humans Involved’: A Letter to my Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1.1 (1994): 42–73Google Scholar; and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

91 Lilienthal, 725.

92 “The Sweet Mistrial,” Baltimore Herald, 3 December 1925, clipping in file 001521-004-0154, NAACP Papers.

93 “Is Justice Really Blind?” Pacific Defender, 3 December 1925, clipping in file 001521-004-0154, NAACP Papers.

94 “Dr. O. H. Sweet Thrills Big Audience,” Detroit Independent, 11 December 1925, clipping in file 001521-004-0154, NAACP Papers.

95 “Sweet, Wife Will Tell of Detroit Case,” Chicago Defender, 9 January 1926, clipping in file 001521-004-0209, NAACP Papers.

96 Boyle, 307.

97 Elaine Latzman Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit's African American Community, 1918–1967 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 82–3. M. Kelley Fritz, who told the story of Ossian Sweet brandishing a gun at the cemetery gates, gets some of the chronology of the Sweets's larger story wrong. He was, however, the funeral director who handled the Sweet family's funeral and thus a firsthand witness to Ossian Sweet's act of brandishment at the cemetery.

98 As I was writing this essay, the latest wave of white people and police officers killing Black people hit the news: video emerged of the shooting death of jogger Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed by three white men who chased him through a subdivision, trapped him between their trucks, and shot him; Breonna Taylor was asleep in her bed when police shot her eight times while executing a no-knock warrant for a man who didn't even live in the home; and George Floyd was killed when white police officer Derek Chauvin, ignoring Floyd's pleas that he couldn't breathe, continued to kneel on his neck, suffocating him to death. On 20 April 2021, Chauvin was convicted on all charges brought against him, including second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He has yet to be sentenced, and his case is currently on appeal. See “Ahmaud Arbery Shooting: A Timeline of the Case,” New York Times, 21 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-timeline.html, accessed 28 May 2020; Tessa Duvall and Darcy Costello, “Louisville Police Pursued ‘No-Knock’ Search Warrant in Fatal Shooting of ER Tech in Her Home,” Courier Journal, 12 May 2020, www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2020/05/12/breonna-taylor-louisville-emt-not-main-target-drug-investigation/3115928001/, accessed 28 May 2020; Brian Dakss, “Video Shows Minneapolis Cop with Knee on Neck of Motionless, Moaning Man Who Later Died,” CBSNews.com, 27 May 2020, www.cbsnews.com/news/minneapolis-police-george-floyd-died-officer-kneeling-neck-arrest/, accessed 28 May 2020; and Chao Xiong, Paul Walsh, and Rochelle Olson, “Derek Chauvin Cuffed after Murder, Manslaughter Convictions in Death of George Floyd,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 21 April 2021, www.startribune.com/derek-chauvin-cuffed-after-murder-manslaughter-convictions-in-death-of-george-floyd/600047825/, accessed 29 October 2021.

99 Sharpe, 21.

100 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), xvii.