Last spring, the Celtics led 3-2 before dropping Game 6 at home, forcing them to clinch in Miami to earn their Finals shot against Golden State.įor the permanent record, then, this is the rubber match. In the Orlando bubble playoffs in 2020, the Heat won in six games, taking advantage of the neutral court setting to advance. This marks the third time in four years that Boston and Miami will battle for a berth in the NBA Finals, and many of the fundamentals about each team remain. Then again, there’s a familiarity between these rivals that transcends the current calendar. That’s an eternity in an NBA season, the equivalent of nearly four months for both teams to morph, shift, stiffen and ideally improve. One hundred and thirteen days will have passed since the Boston Celtics’ and Miami Heat’s last clash back in January to when they tip off Wednesday in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.Īrc of Justice is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction.Jayson Tatum and Jimmy Butler headline a very familiar Eastern Conference finals matchup between Boston and Miami. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes.Īnd so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood.

The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights.

An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle

Arc of Justice by Kevin G. Boyle