by John Hersey
In the tense, racially charged atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the victims of the gruesome events at the Algiers Motel found little vindication in the courts. In August 1967, murder charges against Officer Robert Paille were dismissed because he had not been properly informed of his Miranda rights—a particularly ironic twist, since only a few years earlier, police officers had fiercely opposed the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision. Shortly after Hersey’s book came out, Officer Ronald August was charged with murder. Detroit Recorder’s Court Judge Thomas Poindexter (a former anti–civil rights activist) ruled that the publicity surrounding Hersey’s book made a fair trial in Detroit impossible and sent the case to a notoriously conservative suburban judge, William Beer, who promptly moved the trial to rural lily-white Mason, Michigan (the town in which Malcolm X’s father had been murdered in 1931). Beer allowed the defense to show televised footage of the riot that was unrelated to the events at the Algiers Motel. Although the prosecution asked that the charges include manslaughter, Beer instructed jurors to consider an “all or nothing” charge—either August had committed first degree murder or was not guilty. After a brief deliberation, the jury acquitted August.
After the murder charges had been dismissed, federal prosecutors filed charges against the three police officers and a security guard under an 1871 federal law for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three slain men and the other members of the infamous line-up. In the federal trial, held in Flint, Michigan, another all-white jury also acquitted the defendants, after days of inconsistent and contradictory testimony from prosecution witnesses. In the end, Officers August, Paille, and Senak were never convicted for their role in the sordid events at the Algiers Motel.14
Ultimately, the most important contribution of Hersey’s book was that it chronicled the enormous gap between blacks and whites regarding issues of law and order. For many black observers, the events at the Algiers Motel offered a particularly graphic example of the random, regular brutality that black people had been facing at the hands of the police for decades. That the deaths of three African American men and the torture of several others went unpunished fueled the black community’s conviction that the criminal justice system was deeply corrupt. White advocates of “law and order,” on the other hand, hailed the decisions. Carl Parsell, president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, discounted “charges of police brutality” as “part of a nefarious plot by those who would like our form of government overthrown. The blueprint for anarchy calls for the destruction of the effectiveness of the police. Certainly, it must be obvious that every incident is magnified and exploited with only one purpose.”15 The Algiers Motel incident was a graphic reminder of two versions of justice that had prevailed in the American past, separate and unequal.
From the infamous 1930s-era trials of the Scottsboro Boys to the hasty acquittal of the murderers of Emmett Till and civil rights activist Medgar Evers, African Americans have chafed against the injustices of the American judicial system. The profound distrust that many blacks continue to feel toward the police and toward the court system—reflected in the cases of Rodney King and O. J. Simpson and in the angry, antipolice lyrics of gangsta rap—is a legacy of the unresolved issues that John Hersey so powerfully documented. In the end, Hersey’s story of three white police officers and three dead black men is an American tragedy of power, inequality, and injustice, a tragedy whose consequences continue to poison race relations in America today.
NOTES
1. See below, 31–32.
2. For overviews of Hersey’s career, see David Sanders, John Hersey (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967); Sanders, John Hersey Revisited (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991); and Nancy L. Huse, The Survival Tales of John Hersey (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1983).
3. The material in this and the following two paragraphs draws from Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). See also Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) and Robert Conot, American Odyssey (New York: William Morrow, 1974).
4. Detroit Police Department, Office of Director of Personnel, “Tabulation of Non-White Personnel,” March 24, 1953, in the Donald S. Leonard Papers, Michigan Historical Collection, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Box 21. For 1967 figures, see Fine, Violence in the Model City, 104, 109.
5. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings Held in Detroit, Michigan, December 14–15, 1960 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 302–21. For examples of police brutality complaints, see Detroit Branch, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Part II, Box 31, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan.
6. Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker, Race in the City: Political Trust and Public Policy in the New Urban System (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), 49, 52.
7. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 37, 38–39, 206; see also Robert Fogelson, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettoes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 53–78.
8. Stephen Schlesinger, “Shoot-up in Detroit,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1968, 124; Robert Conot, “One Night in Detroit,” New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1968, 3.
9. The most comprehensive and persuasive account of the details of the case can be found in Fine, Violence in the Model City, 271–90.
10. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944), 60–61. For a superb discussion of Myrdal and the course of racial liberalism in mid-twentieth-century America, see Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). For a discussion of Hersey’s didactic approach, see Huse, Survival Tales, 153–60.
11. If Senak was indeed involved in the three murders at the Algiers Motel, he was present at a total of five violent deaths during the week of the riot (one considered to be a non-riot-related death). Sidney Fine suggests—drawing from a close reading of evidence presented in the three court cases and other accounts—that one of the dead men at the Algiers Motel, Carl Cooper, had died before police arrived, possibly murdered by an intruder. See Fine, Violence in the Model City, 273–77.
12. Nat Hentoff, “Waking Up the White Folks Again,” New Republic, July 20, 1968, 37–39.
13. Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’ ” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 243–68; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 551–78.
14. Yale Kasimar, “Was Justice Done in the Algiers Motel Incident?” New York Times, March 1, 1970; Fine, Violence in the Model City, 285–90. On Poindexter’s earlier career, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 209–10, 227–28.
15. Quoted in Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 191.
The Algiers Motel Incident
PERSONS INVOLVED IN THE INCIDENT
THE DEAD
Carl Cooper
Auburey Pollard
Fred Temple
POLICEMEN
Ronald August
Robert Paille
David Senak
WITNESSES
Carl’s and Auburey’s friends
Michael Clark
Lee Forsythe
James Sortor
Fred’s friends, “the Dramatics”
Roderick Davis
Cleveland Larry Reed and three others
STATE POLICEMEN
Corporal Hubert C. Rosema
Trooper John M. Fonger
Trooper P. A. Martin
Trooper Robert Michelson and several others
NATIONAL GUARDSMEN
Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas
Sergeant Paul Gerard
Specialist Five Thomas Kelly
Private First Class Wayne Henson
Private First Class Robert Seaglan and others
FAMILIES
Carl Cooper’s
Margaret Gill (mother)
Omar Gill (stepfather)
six surviving children
Fred Temple’s
Mr. and Mrs. John Temple
Eddie Temple (brother)
five other children
OFFICIALS
Congressman John Conyers, Jr.
Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh
Police Commissioner Ray Girardin
Wayne County Prosecutor William L. Cahalan
Assistant Prosecutor Avery Weiswasser
Assistant Prosecutor James Garber
OTHERS
Leon Atchison, Administrative Assistant to Congressman Conyers
S. Allen Early, Jr., attorney who took the girls to the authorities
Clara Gilmore, night clerk at the Algiers Motel
The veteran
Robert Greene
The girls
Juli Hysell
Karen Malloy
The older man
Charles Moore
PRIVATE GUARDS
Melvin Dismukes
Charles Hendrix
Fletcher Williams and two others
Auburey Pollard’s
Rebecca Pollard (mother)
Auburey Pollard, Sr.
Lance Corporal Chaney Pollard
Tanner Pollard
Mrs. Lucy Pollard
Robert Pollard
Thelma Pollard
Judges of Recorder’s Court
Robert E. DeMascio
Frank G. Schemanske
Geraldine Bledsoe Ford
Gerald W. Groat
Robert J. Colombo
Defense Attorneys
Norman L. Lippitt
Konrad D. Kohl
Nicholas Smith
Glenda Tucker, Larry Reed’s girl
Lawanda J. Schettler, a volunteer witness
Dr. Clara Raven, Deputy Medical Examiner, Wayne County Morgue
Eli (“Bubba”) Carter, resident of the Algiers Motel
Diagram of ground floor of the Algiers Motel Annex used in court.
I
THE ODOR OF A CASE
1
DO YOU HATE THE POLICE?
1. We’ll Be Following You All the Way
The ordeal seemed to be drawing to a close.
One of the officers went into room A-4 and told Michael Clark and Roderick Davis to get off the floor and go out in the hall.
There were still seven people, five black men and two white girls, spread-eagled against the wall of the hallway. One of the girls had nothing on but her panties; the other was half undressed.
The big officer had come in from outside, and he stood behind one of the young men in the line and asked, “Do you hate the police?”
“No.”
“What have you seen here?”
“Nothing.”
The police said the blacks should go out the back way and go on home. One of the officers said, “Start walking in the direction you’re going with your hands above your heads. If you look back, we’ll kill you, because we’ll be following you all the way home.”
Roderick started out on stockinged feet, and he was sharply surprised when, passing into room A-2 on his way to a back door, he came on the body of Carl Cooper prone in a stain of blood on the carpet; he had not seen the body earlier, as most of the others had, and he had not believed, even after all the shooting he had heard, that the uniformed men were actually killing people. He had to step over the body, for it blocked the passage through the room between one of the beds and the dresser.
Seven men moved, in relays of twos and threes, past Cooper’s body and through the connecting door to room A-5 and out through its French doors onto the back porch and down the steps to the parking lot. The girls stayed behind. The older black man and the black paratrooper just back from Vietnam doubled around into the main part of the motel; the others walked across the parking lot and through the alley by the carwash out to Euclid and Woodward.
There, on the far corner, in front of the Great Lakes Mutual Life Insurance Building, National Guardsmen, seeing them coming, cocked their rifles and halted them and made them lie down in a row on the plot of grass in front of the building.
The Guardsmen stood the boys up one at a time. They searched each one. “What you been doing?” “Why you walking home?” The boys tried to answer, and the Guardsmen let them go at intervals with instructions to walk with their hands on their heads. One said to Roderick, when Roderick blurted out some of what had been happening, “Too bad. Keep walking. You niggers are always starting some kind of trouble.”
Roderick was next to last to be let go. His friend Larry Reed was about a block and a half ahead of him. After a couple of blocks Roderick peeked around behind to see if another friend was following them. He ran and caught up with Larry.
“Did you see Fred?”
“No,” Larry said. “Fred’s still in there.”
——
Lee Forsythe and James Sortor, two others who had been in the line, joined up and ran together toward Carl Cooper’s house, a mile and a half away. Carl’s stepfather, Omar Gill, told me later of Lee’s account of the flight. “He said he run and he crawled. He say he went down Clairmount, he say he come down cutting through yards and things down to Clairmount. They was stopped at Twelfth and Clairmount and beat again. They were hit again.” Sortor told me later that somewhere during the evening, probably here on the street, his wrist watch was pulled off over his hand and twenty dollars were taken from his pocket. They were sent on with hands up. “He said he was so weak,” Mr. Gill told me, “he say he started to kick a porch out, you know, with them slats in it, he say he started to kick a porch out and crawl up under there. He’d have probably laid there and bled to death. He said, ‘Something just kept telling me I had to get to you and Miss Margaret.’ ” Lee and Sortor kept running.
——
Michael Clark went to the Mount Royal, a transients’ hotel a half-dozen blocks north of the Algiers, with a soot-streaked façade of stone arches supporting three dark-brick upper stories, in its lobby a load of the past—potted palms, antiques, a weighing machine, an open-cage elevator with a folding iron gate. Michael checked in, and as soon as he was alone in a room he got on the phone.
——
“Michael called me,” Carl’s mother, Mrs. Margaret Gill, told me, “and I thought it was Carl calling me back, because I had laid down, and when he called me—this must have been about two o’clock when he called me and told me—I thought he was kidding, you know. I said, ‘Look, you all quit playing with me, it’s too late at night, I’m in the bed sleeping, or trying to go to sleep. Where’s Carl at?’ He said, ‘Miss Margaret, I’m not at the hotel, I’m down at another hotel.’ Said, ‘They killed Carl.’ He kept telling me that, you know. I said, ‘Aw, Michael, don’t play with me.’ He said, ‘I’m not kidding.’ He said, ‘They made Lee and them run and told them don’t quit running.’ He said, ‘They said they’d kill them out there running,’ you know.”
——
“After my wife woke me up and told me that Clark had called and said that Carl was dead,” Omar Gill told me, “I got up, and I went to the phone. His call was right after they turned Clark and them loose; it must have been like three o’clock in the morning, something like that. I didn’t notice the time, I wasn’t thinking about no time. Because I got mad with her, I told her, ‘I won’t play this, now don’t tell me this has happened.’ But then I looked at the expression on her face, and I could tell that this had happened, after I looked up at her, you
know. So that’s when I went to the phone and called the hotel, and so when I called, a policeman answered the phone, the switchboard operator didn’t answer, a police answered. So I told him, I said, ‘Look, a guy just called me and told me that my son was dead, and I’d like to come over there and see if he’s dead, you know?’ I said that, and so he told me, he said, ‘You know you can’t come over here.’ I said, ‘What do you mean I can’t come over there? My son is dead, and I can’t come over?’ He said, ‘If you bring your goddam ass over here you’ll be dead just like him.’ And then I asked him, I said, ‘Well, why are you talking to me like this, and you killed my son?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ And he hung up the phone. Didn’t ask my name, or who I was, or anything.”
——
“Lee got back here about a quarter after three,” Mr. Gill told me. “He didn’t ring the bell or anything, him and Sortor just came in, and when he came he fell and crawled and he was crying and he said, ‘Miss Margaret, they killed Carl.’ That’s all he was saying, ‘They killed him, they killed him, they killed Carl.’ And I said, ‘What did they kill him for?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘I think they killed Auburey, too,’ he said, ‘they took Auburey in a room and I heard them shoot and Auburey didn’t come out.’ I said, ‘Well, how do you know Auburey’s dead?’ He said, ‘Because everybody that was living left there, because they made them get out and run.’