Who Was Dr. Ossian Sweet?
By any measure, Ossian Sweet’s life was a success story. Born in Bartow, Florida, in 1895, he was a grandson of slaves, and the oldest of 10 children of a share cropper and his wife.
His supportive parents sent young Ossian, at age 13, to Xenia, Ohio, to complete his education. This was an ambitious undertaking for the Sweet family as the typical schooling for blacks in Barstow, Florida was four months a year, to the eighth grade only, in an inferior school. Eventually, Ossian graduated from Wilberforce University in 1917. It is worth noting that this was an exceptional accomplishment, since, out of some 10 million blacks in the United States, fewer than 2,000 were enrolled in college.
Poor eyesight kept him out of World War I, so he was able to continue his education in medical school at Howard University in Washington, DC, receiving his MD degree in 1921. During his years at Howard, he was caught in the middle of the Washington race riots of 1919.
Upon graduation, no white hospital would take him as an intern, no white patients would seek him out, and, like all blacks, he could not join the American Medial Association. Since he had once spent a summer in Detroit as a bellhop at a hotel, he moved to that city, where a large black population provided a pool of patients. Over half a million blacks had migrated North in 1917 alone; Detroit’s black population had increased by 600% in the decade between 1910 and 1920. Opportunity, then, for a new medical school graduate, seemed to exist in cities like Detroit. Read more….
As his practice flourished, Dr. Sweet sought to move his family to a nicer home in a good neighborhood, as was being done by other prosperous blacks in Detroit. In the 1920’s there was no real integration in cities like Detroit, so it was difficult just to find a realtor who would help him find a home, not to mention a homeowner who was willing to sell to a black family. (more…)
