The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John F. Sweet, attorney for the little guy, dies at 77
In 1971, Emory University law student John Sweet bought four dilapidated houses on Elizabeth Street in Inman Park. He only wanted one, but the slumlord-owner insisted that it was the quartet or nothing.
Known for his congenial persuasiveness, Sweet kept one and found other in-town pioneer types to take three houses off his hands.
Much of Sweet’s ensuing life, with all its colorful variety, activism, politics and idiosyncrasies, was rooted in Inman Park.
John F. Sweet, 77, died on May 24 from complication of Parkinson’s Disease. His wife, Midge Sweet, is planning a service in the spring of 2021, around the time of his birthday on March 20.
The once stately Atlanta suburb of Inman Park had been in social and physical erosion for years when Sweet moved in — mansions were sliced into apartments rented by the week. Violence and drugs were common.
“I’m not quite sure how we did it, or why,” said Gene Griffith, then a fellow Emory law student who also bought a house on Elizabeth. “You’re talking about a certain age group and mindset, where you weren’t scared of either taking a risk financially or of a gun fight up at Little Five Points.”
Sweet helped start a neighborhood credit union in 1972, because banks were loathe to lend to homebuyers in debilitated neighborhoods, and he and Griffin formed a company to buy houses from slumlords, rehab and sell them.
“The down payments were like $500 apiece . ... We wanted to get them out of the slumlords’ hands and find someone stupid like us to invest in the neighborhood,” Griffin said.
They had trouble getting local government’s attention for Inman Park.
“It wasn’t John’s personal desire to be a politician. But we needed representation, political muscle,” Griffin said.
So Sweet won the District 2 seat on Atlanta’s City Council in 1977. Though he held office only one term, he’d spend much of his life scouting, identifying and coaching a litany of progressive candidates, particularly women and minorities. A partial list of his protégés include John Lewis, whom he helped get elected to city council. Later would come the likes of state Sen. Mary Margaret Oliver, and state representatives Stephanie Stuckey and Stacey Abrams.
“He took me door to door on a cold January morning in Inman Park, introducing me to the neighborhood,” said Nan Orrock, a Georgia House member from 1987-2006 and currently a Democratic state senator. “He was not doing it for his self-aggrandizement, he was doing it to advance the cause.
“He must’ve been one of the first to use numbers-based analysis. He taught you how to target your outreach towards those voters who consistently showed up to vote. He taught you how to believe in yourself, how to shape your message, how to tell your life story and how to raise money.”
Sweet was born in 1943 in Detroit in a housing project. He had a complicated family history and never knew who his father was until after the man was dead.
“I can tell you this, John absolutely raised himself,” said Nancy Felson, friends with Sweet since the ninth grade. “He always had to fend for himself, and I think he often went hungry.
“His passion, and mine, was social justice,” she said. “As a teenager he went to a communist summer camp. It taught him respect for tools, which he was very skilled with, and it taught him community living and community work.”
Sweet spent much of his career on volunteer and probono projects. He chaired of Atlanta’s Housing Authority and the Workers’ Compensation Section of the Georgia Bar Association. For 10 years he was the pro-bono attorney for the Council on Battered Women. Sweet spent a lot of time representing injured workers denied benefits by their employer.
Working for the American Civil Liberties union, he found a case he could use to overturn Georgia’s 150-year-old old sodomy laws when he met Michael Hardwick, a gay bartender who’d been charged.
Sweet recalled for The Washington Post in 1986, that he talked to Hardwick about the epic nature of the case. “I told him that if he chose to, he could be part of it.”
Sweet remained with Hardwick through the initial criminal trial in Fulton County, after which his associate, Kathy Wilde, took the case to Georgia’s federal district court, where it was dismissed. In 1984 she secured a victory in Georgia’s federal court of appeals, but lost again in the U.S. Supreme Court in a dramatic 5-4 decision. Georgia’s sodomy law was overturned when the court heard a similar challenge in 2003.
A guitarist and singer, Sweet spent decades compiling music ranging from civil rights songs, to Appalachian music, union tunes, protest songs or, as his wife Midge said, “the more radical the song the better.”
Beginning in the late 1990s a group of musicians gathered in Sweet’s basement on Wednesday nights. Sweet offered them a single implacable edict: You don’t have to be any good, but you have to play and sing.
“I think those Wednesday nights tied his life together,” Gene Griffith said. “The sense of community and cohesiveness, the idea that we are in charge of our destiny and we are not ruled by banks, slumlords or city councilmen who don’t give a hoot. Most important, everybody participates. John Sweet was never about sitting back and letting things run their course.”
Sweet is survived by Midge Sweet, his wife of 42 years; and their children, Cassandra Eterovic (Dalibor) and Eli Sweet (Keke Ren); sister-inlaw Christiane French; twin sister, Ann Brubaker (Larry); brother David Sweet (Elaine Kihara); and four grandchildren.