John F. Sweet died May 24, 2020 from complication of Parkinson’s Disease.

In 1977, Sweet ran and won the District 2 seat on Atlanta city’s council. Though he held off held office only one term, he’d spend much of his remaining 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.

Sweet was born in a Detroit housing project and grew up in Cincinnati. His parentage is complicated. Fred Sweet, the man John grew up with and believed his father, was a union activist and leftist labor journalist who made a prominent appearance in Studs Terkel’s 1971 book, “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.” Sweet discovered late in life, and after his parents died, that his biological father was a progressive financier, academic and prominent labor and civil rights activist in the 1940s. His parents had never breathed a word of it to him. If it left Sweet with a dossier of unanswered questions, he at least knew he came by his activism honestly.

Much of Sweet’s career was dedicated to volunteer and pro-bono work. He chaired Atlanta’s Housing Authority and the Workers’ Compensation Section of the Georgia Bar Association. He was the pro-bono attorney for the Council on Battered Women for 10 years. He was active in representing injured workers’ denied benefits by their employer. In a recent interview, Kathy Wilde figures that in any one year he had over 250 workers comp cases open, often tackling those situations with the longest odds. “He would take cases no other lawyer would take and a lot of times he would get nothing, either for himself or his client,” said Carolyn Hall, a former trial judge and former chairman of the Workers’ Compensation Board. “But John would say it was worth it just to get (an injured worker) a venue where they could tell their personal story before a judge.” While volunteering for the American Civil Liberties Union, Sweet met Michael Hardwick, a gay bartender who’d been charged with violating the state’s 150-year-old sodomy law. Sweet and the ACLU used the case to challenge the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sweet recalled for the Washington Post in 1986, “We had a talk about the epic quality of the struggle. I told [Hardwick] 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 course 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.

In 2003, the Supreme Court heard a different challenge out of Texas and overruled the 1986 verdict, invalidating anti-sodomy laws in Georgia and 12 other states. A guitarist and singer most of his life, 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.” Pete Seeger, the songwriter and activist, would overnight with the Sweets when playing in Cincinnati in the 1950s. 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 ties 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 his Midge Sweet, his wife of 42 years, and their children Cassandra Eterovic (Dalibor) and Eli Sweet (Keke Ren), sister-in-law Christiane French, twin sister, Ann Brubaker (Larry), brother David Sweet (Elaine Kihara) and four grandchildren.

(Taken from Atlanta Journal Constitution)