by John Hersey
On page 17, that Monday morning, the News printed a transcript of Prosecutor Eggleton’s questioning of Greene, and it turned out, if one read far enough, that Greene had not in fact claimed to have seen a National Guardsman kill two of the boys; he had seen a warrant officer take a boy in a room and had heard a shot. “Then,” he said, “the guy next to me, they took him to A-4. The officer told him not to take him to A-4. He said, ‘Take him to another room.’ And he took him to A-5, I think it was A-5, that’s the back room there. We heard another shot fired, and he came out and said, ‘That nigger didn’t even kick.’ ”
Q. “Was that the warrant officer also?”
A. “Right.”
21. Joy
If Detective Schlachter, flying back to Detroit with Witness Greene, was delighted, as one can guess that he was, to have had the heat of the Algiers Motel case removed at last from the Police Department, his joy was to be short-lived.
II
THREE COPS AND THREE DAYS
4
THE FIRST DAY
Sunday, July 23
1. If We Had Started Firing Then
David Senak—twenty-four years old; five feet nine inches tall; three-year veteran of the Detroit police force; enthusiast of the clean-up, or vice, squad; winner of two citations; unmarried; Baptist; with a boyish pink complexion that flushed and paled markedly in response to the flow and ebb of emotion; with an attractive smile which pushed deep dimples into his cheeks; called by some Dave but also the bearer of two other nicknames, of which he told with a humorous sparkle in his eyes, the first an anagram of his name, Snake, and the other given him by an aunt, “Inda,” which, he said, means snake poison in Slovak—sat at his desk in his den at home, under the snarling fangs of the stuffed head of a wolf shot by an uncle of his, beside a carefully kept file of his exploits on the force (“I like to look back and see what I’ve done”), and he told me this:
“I was working plain-clothes on that Sunday morning—I was on clean-up, we were arresting prostitutes, well that particular month we were on numbers mainly, because we were working days—and I was scheduled to work at ten a.m. They called me about five thirty or so from the station and told me that there was a disturbance of some sort and we were to come in uniform that morning as soon as possible. So I called a partner of mine that lives around here, and him and I went in to the station together; we got there about six, a quarter after six, and the men were milling around, and I was put on a scout car at first, within the precinct. Just shortly after we got on the street they called us back, and they formed us into units to go over to Twelfth, Tenth Precinct, Twelfth Street.
“We went over there, and they put us out into a task force. I think the first time I saw Twelfth and Clairmount was around eleven o’clock, we drove by it, and the riots themselves, it seemed like they were contained within one block, and there were very few people in the street and a lot of police officers. Mainly people were looking out their windows at the time. Then around maybe an hour after that things started getting a little worse, where they’d be calling for us, ‘Police officers in trouble,’ and we’d be going from one police-officer-in-trouble to another. We’d just break up a crowd in one place and they’d be congregating in another. This brought us to about one o’clock—six or seven officers in trouble; we made one raid on a drug store that the window was smashed, and we got two or three prisoners from there and took them in to Number Ten and went back on the street.
“And then we got a run to Philadelphia and Twelfth. We proceeded east on Philadelphia toward Twelfth, and we were just getting to Twelfth Street—it was an officer-in-trouble run—and these two coloreds came running from between the houses, and they each had a brick in their hand. We had three scout cars, four men per scout car, and I was in the lead scout car with my sergeant, and they came running up point-blank range and one of them threw a brick through the front windshield of our car. It cut my sergeant, hurt the driver a little bit, but we jumped out and this other fellow threw a brick through the second scout car. Well, they got the one guy right away, and I chased the other man, and I thought my partners were behind me, and he ran two houses to the west on Philadelphia and then cut into the back yard. I was chasing him. All I had was my night stick. He had gone through the corridor between two houses and was starting into the alley and I was fairly close to him. As soon as I hit the back yard, two colored males attacked me from either side. I did a head dive. Luckily I was wearing gloves at the time, and I landed on cinders and tore the gloves up and my pants, ripped my shirt. One of the men had my night stick, or was picking it up, so I started to draw my gun, so he saw this, so they split. In the meantime the other guy had come back and he was just ready to kick me in the face. I grabbed him by the leg and had a little wrestling match with him, and then the women—people that had no business at all as far as rioting or anything just came out of their houses and they were starting to yell at me, so I saw the crowd was building back there, so I let him go and tried to get my men. I yelled for a couple officers, and by the time we got back, he was down the block. And the same thing generally happened all day.
“My sergeant was just inches away from being killed by a five-gallon jug that prior to being thrown at him contained gasoline.
“We made a stand on the corner of Philadelphia and Twelfth. We had one occasion during the day where a man actually—you see, the mob was coming up the street at us, and we had twelve men there. We cordoned off an area around a fire apparatus of some sort, and we had orders to just hold this area, so they were coming up the street, and there were a good thousand of them—I think that’s a small estimate, really—and they were throwing rocks, rocks and bottles, anything they had, and it looked like rain they were coming down so heavy. And as they were coming they were breaking the windows on the stores on either side of them, and just looting, just open looting. And so this one fellow ran in front of them, and he had a chair and ran about three stores ahead of the mob, threw this chair through a window, went inside. It was a beer and wine store, and liquor, I guess. He emerged a short time later with a wooden box of fifths—whiskey; and this guy took one of the fifths out, we were standing there, and this one officer was to one side, and he took one of the fifths and threw it at him. And the officer didn’t see it until it was just about at him. And so this was an outright Breaking and Entering, Felonious Assault, and Inciting to Riot. And so the officer told him to halt. And the man picked up this whiskey and was going back into the midst of the crowd, so the officer had some sort of rifle on him, raised it, and the rifle was jerked out of his hands! The sergeant said we didn’t want to agitate these people. And this was the general trend of the situation.
“The riot laws are very lenient toward mobs. Twelve people armed or thirty people unarmed constitute a riotous mob, and you can tell them to disperse, take the force necessary to protect yourself, and to protect the community from them. No one took the initiative to do this. We had cars with PA systems. I believe that if we had acted before they started looting, and before these people saw the instigators go and actually in front of us burn places down, arson, which they all know is an offense punishable by imprisonment, you know, a felony, they saw this, they saw the people carrying gasoline cans into stores and actually burning them in our presence and nothing done. And after that it was ridiculous. If we had started firing then, we would have just agitated them more. We couldn’t have controlled them. But I think that had that officer shot that man—he was so blatant that he walked up to the store, threw the chair through the store window, went inside there, stayed there for a matter of a few minutes, came out with a wooden box, fifths of whiskey, and threw one of them at us. If he had shot him there, the crowd was such that they were more scared and apprehensive, they didn’t know what to expect. They were feeling us out, see. Now this was an outward act of violence, and he committed three different felonies within a matter of minutes, and had the police officer acted and told the man to stop and if he hadn’t have stopped, shot
him, I think the first instinct of the crowd wouldn’t have been to rush us, as it might have been later, but to have dispersed, because they would have been fearful. Now this in itself wouldn’t have solved things, you know, this one shooting. But I think maybe had they shot at the beginning, we may have saved those forty-some lives that were killed, and a lot of innocent people that were killed, by shooting the people that were at fault.”
2. I Don’t Remember Exactly
Under cross-examination in the conspiracy hearing by Attorney Konrad D. Kohl for the defense, Michael Clark was asked about his activities on the first day of the riot. The following exchange took place:
Q. All right. Where were you then?
A. I don’t remember.
Q. Well, so far you told us you were at your mother’s house sometime during that night.
A. That’s right, but I don’t remember what time I arrived.
Q. Well, did you stay there after you got there until dawn?
A. I fell asleep, yeah.
Q. Were you there Sunday morning, Mr. Clark, if you know?
A. Yes, I was there Sunday morning.
Q. All right. Now that takes us to Sunday. What did you do during the day Sunday?
A. You mean while the riot was going on?
Q. Yes, sir.
A. I went over to my cousin’s house.
Q. Will you tell us, please, where your cousin lives and what your cousin’s name is?
A. What is my cousin’s name?
Q. Yes.
A. Rodney Norman.
Q. Rodney Norman?
A. Uh-huh.
Q. And where does Mr. Norman live?
A. The address where he lives now, I don’t know where he lives now because he moved.
Q. Did there come a time, Mr. Clark, when you eventually returned to the Algiers Motel?
A. Yes.
Q. When was that?
A. It was the same day, that Sunday.
Q. It was on Sunday?
A. Uh-huh.
Q. All right. What time did you arrive at the Motel?
A. I don’t remember exactly. It was light outside.
Q. What is your best recollection?
A. I don’t remember.
Q. Was it during the day?
A. I said it was light outside. . . .
Q. Was it before noon?
A. I don’t know.
Q. You have no recollection?
A. No.
Q. Sunday night were you at the Algiers Motel?
A. I am going to tell you now I don’t remember where I was back then. I don’t write it down in a diary where I go.
3. What a Hell It Was
Ronald August—twenty-eight years old; five feet ten inches tall; five-year police veteran; clarinetist in the police band; one commendation; slender, dark, and straight; with a gentle voice; with the slightly enlarged jaw muscles of a man who clenches his teeth; devoted husband of Genevieve, father of Doreene Linda, two and one half, and Denise Jean, one; parishioner of St. Raymond’s Roman Catholic Church; member of the Home Owner’s Club—sat in the spotless dining alcove in his house, over his shoulder a commemorative China plate, bursting with China flowers, given to him and his wife on their wedding day, and told me this:
“They called me up seven o’clock Sunday morning, got me out of bed in fact. I planned on getting up about eight and going to church and going to see my folks. It was my day off, naturally. And they told me to report as soon as I could possibly get down there, that they were having trouble. I says, ‘What do you mean, trouble?’ He says, ‘I don’t know, they’re just having trouble in the Tenth Precinct, and they’re calling everybody in.’ So, naturally, I says, ‘I’ll be in.’ No choice in the matter, see. So I called my folks and told them I wasn’t coming out that day, and I got dressed and went down there and stood around for about an hour, and then they put us on a DSR bus and shipped us over to the Tenth Precinct, where I stood around about four more hours. And then they brought a crew in that’s been on the street quite a few hours, all—I won’t say bruised up, I won’t say bloodied up—they just looked beat. And I hear them complaining about what a hell it was out there on Twelfth Street, but I didn’t have the opportunity to ask any of them personally just what was going on. But as I visualized of what I saw then, I would think it was the heat from the fires that made them look so rugged.
“They put us in a paddy wagon and took us out there. Gee, it looked like everything was burning. They took us down Twelfth Street as far as they could go, and there was people swarming everywhere. All they taught us about riot control with horses and different riot formations they teach us, V formations, and so on and so forth—I didn’t see any of that used. Maybe they used it and it didn’t work, I don’t know.
“Anyway, they put me over on Fourteenth Street, and I believe it was Lawrence, maybe it was Collingwood, maybe it was Seward, I don’t know, it was in that locality, and they put me there with another fellow that I went through high school with—by the way, he played clarinet also, we knew each other quite a while—and they told us to seal off the area. And there was police officers all up and down the block. We were to let nobody in, but let them out. And I don’t care what they’re carrying out, bushel baskets full of whiskey, tape recorders, cameras, televisions, they were to be let out. But don’t let nobody in. Little six-year-olds with wagons full of brand-new underwear, socks, and shoes. Carrying everything out.”
4. Trying to Get Something Free
At first Lee and Sortor denied that they or their friends had done any looting. I was a more or less official-looking white person, and they had too long a habit of awareness that anything they said might be used to punish them to talk openly about the first phase of the riot. Like Michael toying with the lawyer in court, they put me on.
There apparently was, on that first day, a feeling of unwonted elation among those who ran in the streets. An articulate young black nationalist whom I met, a student at Wayne State University with a bright, fluid mind, told me, poking at the nosepiece of his horn-rimmed glasses to push them into place, fingering the tuft of beard under his lip: “There was a new thing, a new feeling, out there on Twelfth Street. I was out there Sunday. It was between noon and two o’clock that the feeling changed. After all those years of having the man in control—Detroit’s an affluent town, Detroit’s black people are well off—not middle-class, not even lower-middle, but upper-proletariat, I mean a cat can finish high school and get a job at a factory and buy a Pontiac and ride around and all, but the man has his finger on you every minute of every day. I mean, ‘Show up at this time,’ and, ‘Do this on the assembly line,’ and every minute of the day it’s been what he’s said. And you get home, and the man is your landlord, and so on and so on. But out there, there was suddenly a realization. Man, the whole thing was reversed.”
Another young militant at Wayne State, a girl with a carefully groomed natural hairdo, who talked with what seemed to be great honesty about black revolutionary ideology, hopes, and difficulties (“One trouble is—let’s face it—we’re all middle-class, and the hardest thing for us is to make contact with the folk—the real poor”), and about that first day: “On Twelfth Street everybody was out, the whole family, Mama, Papa, the kids, it was like an outing. . . . The rebellion—it was all caused by the commercials. I mean you saw all those things you’d never been able to get—go out and get ’em. Men’s clothing, furniture, appliances, color TV. All that crummy TV glamour just hanging out there.” She was not the only one I talked with in Detroit who regarded television as the opiate of the white masses and the agent provocateur of the black masses. Some years before, watching TV along with most of the eleven children of the black farmer I was visiting in Holmes County, Mississippi, I had seen how, to the poorer blacks, the lily-white commercials act as an ironic affront and, even more, an ironic encouragement to violence. On the shows gunfire is commonplace, and what is more, it is necessary; it sells products. Virtue triumphs but the outlaw is
mighty attractive—every day, every hour, he is sanctioned by the pretty white girl in the commercial lighting up and taking a deep puff as a preliminary to romance, or caring about her soft hands even when washing the dishes, or naked in the shower behind the ripple glass, arms raised to the white, white lather in her blond, blond hair.
“I thought it was real ridiculous,” Thelma Pollard, Auburey’s sixteen-year-old sister, said to me. “I wouldn’t call it a riot. When it first started off I’d just call it everybody trying to get something for nothing, you know, because everybody was just breaking in and stealing things, trying to get something free. That’s the way I thought it was.”
Trans-Action quoted an unnamed youth, who was in the main part of the Algiers on the night of the shootings, on Sunday’s looting: “I heard a friend of mine say, ‘Hey, they rioting up on Twelfth!’ I said what are they doing and he said looting. That’s all it took me to get out of the house. He said the police was letting them take it; they wasn’t stopping it; so I said it was time for me to get some of these diamonds and watches and rings. . . . People . . . were trying to get all they could get. They got diamonds here, they got money here, they got clothes here and TV’s and whatnot. What could they do with it when they bring it out except sell it to each other? That’s all. They’re just getting something they haven’t got. I mean, I bought me some clothes from somebody. I have exchanged whiskey and different things for different things. You know, something I wanted that I didn’t have. This was a good way to get it. I really enjoyed myself.”