The Michigan Humanities Council has announced the next Great Michigan Read, tapping Detroit native Kevin Boyle's National Book Award winning Arc of Justice as the new selection. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The story delves into the fascinating 1920s civil rights case of the Sweet family, a black family represented by attorney Clarence Darrow in one of the biggest murder trials to come out of Detroit. In 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family into a white neighborhood and was greeted by an angry white mob. The family barricaded themselves in the house with friends and when shots left a white man dead the entire group was charged with first-degree murder. Boyle's book covers all aspects of the trial including the political climate of Detroit at the time. REVUE recently caught up with Boyle, here's what he had to say about the book.

Why did you choose this story?
Back in the late '90s I spent a year teaching in Ireland at University College Dublin and they had asked me to teach a course about civil rights history. I loved that course and it when it was finished I thought I should write a book about civil rights, but you know, I'm from the north and I didn't want to write a book about the south. There are a lot of really great books about civil rights in the south and it just kind of hit me that there was very little at the point written about civil rights in the north. In many ways the most enduring form of segregation in the United States is neighborhood segregation and I thought of the Sweets as a great way of talking about that side of the civil rights story that people don't really talk about. So the book started out as a way of talking about civil rights but not in the place and the time that we normally think of as civil rights.

One of the things I found most striking about this particular story is that it happened so long before the big civil rights movement, so while the Sweet family won their case it didn't really help the cause at the time.
In many ways it didn't stop the spread of segregation either. One of the things that was really hard for me in writing this book is when you set out to write a civil rights history you basically want to write about the triumphs of civil rights and for a long time I was trying to do that. But the sad truth of it is that here were the Sweets who had risked literally everything, for a whole bunch of reasons, to challenge the idea of segregation in American cities. In the end they won the case, they didn't end up in prison for the rest of their lives, but segregation marched relentlessly forward and the Sweets paid this enormous personal cost for what had happened. It took me a long time to realize that really what I was doing was writing about the tragic side of civil rights.

What is one of the important aspects of the book you hope people won't overlook?
With the Sweet family, I really wanted to work as hard as I could to get at their motives for moving into that neighborhood and it's not all about the civil rights struggle. It's really about ordinary things. They move into that neighborhood because it's a nice house, it has a backyard, and they have a little girl who's a toddler and it's kitty corner to a school. They bought the house for really ordinary reasons and that's really important to me, because what historians have a tendency to do is to judge people in the past as somehow purer than we know we are ourselves. So I liked that in this book a lot of people act in lots of ways for lots of different reasons - it's an important theme to me. There are the immediate facts of the case, which I tried to represent fairly, but there's also a sense I wanted to deal with as a historian to say, ‘Yeah, people in the past were just as confusing and interesting as we are in the present.'