In July of 1925, a young doctor named Ossian Sweet bought a house in a middle-class Detroit neighborhood. Sweet had been living with his wife’s family and their toddler daughter in cramped quarters and craved a piece of the American homeownership dream. Instead they found themselves barricaded in their own house, armed with rifles, facing down a brutal mob.

The family should have been an ideal addition to the neighborhood, except for one fact: they were black and the neighborhood was white.

During World War I, industry was booming and thousands of black workers relocated to Detroit. As the black population swelled to nearly six times its pre-war size, housing that allowed black families was extremely scarce. The families that could afford to began cautiously moving into white neighborhoods. But the Ku Klux Klan was strong in Detroit, as it was in many parts of the country. Conjuring none of the stigma it does today, the Klan slipped seamlessly into the fabric of society, organizing under “improvement associations” and “neighborhood associations” propelled by a straightforward mission: keep black families out of white neighborhoods. If bureaucratic means didn’t work, they organized mobs to chase black families from their homes. A black banker in Chicago reportedly had his home bombed nine times. In Cleveland, Washington D.C., Staten Island, and Los Angeles, mobs had terrorized black families who dared to settle in white neighborhoods. If they wouldn’t leave, the house might be burned to the ground — or worse. Arrests for these crimes were virtually unheard of.

When the neighbors learned that the Sweets planned to move in, they formed their own “improvement association.” Nearly everyone in the neighborhood attended a meeting to discuss how to root the Sweets out. Speakers rose and delivered ominous, hate-filled invectives about exactly what would happen should the black family try to move in.

Dr. Sweet was aware that his family wouldn’t be welcome. He had heard of other black families being chased from their homes, but hoped that the anger would roll over. He knew what white mobs were capable of. As a child, he had witnessed a lynching. And he had been at Howard University during the 1919 Washington D.C. race riots. He told his brother of his decision to move in, “I have to die like a man, or live like a coward.” On September 8, he notified the police the he and his family would be moving in. They stationed themselves down the street, as the Sweets, a few friends, and two interior decorators unloaded their belongings from a moving truck — including a burlap sack of guns.

Their white neighbors gathered throughout the day and remained into the night. The interior decorators, too afraid to leave, stayed the night. No one slept. No one dared to turn the lights on. Each man took a gun, stood by the window, and waited.

In the morning, the two decorators left. But the next night, the crowd was larger — and angrier. By some accounts, there were between as many as 500 people gathered in front of the home. The air was thick with humidity. Ten of Dr. Sweet’s friends were in the house that night. They waited with their guns by the windows. Then the mob surged toward the house. To Sweet, “it looked like a human sea.”

Ossian Sweet would later say, “When I opened the door and saw that mob, I realized in a way that it was that same mob that had hounded my people through its entire history. I realized my back was against the wall and I was filled with a peculiar type of fear — the fear of one who knows the history of my race.”

The mob hurled rocks and bottles through the windows. Sweet’s brother, Henry, who was a junior at Wilberforce College in Ohio, fired his gun. The police broke the fracas up. A white man, Leon Brennier, had been killed. The eleven black men were taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder.