This non-fiction book reads, as they say, like a novel. But this one really does. In 1925, an African-American doctor purchased a house in a white neighborhood. His African-American wife had grown up in a mixed neighborhood in Detroit, but times were changing there; the African-American population was growing and the Ku Klux Klan was holding marches and rallies and running a member for mayor. A mob formed when Dr. Sweet and his wife moved in, a man was shot, the doctor, his wife, and the friends and relatives who tried to defend the couple from the mob were tried for murder. I don’t know if my father was still in Detroit when this trial took place, but he must at least have followed it in the newspapers, if only because one of his heroes, Clarence Darrow, was attorney for the defense.

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