by John Hersey
Mr. Gill, when he told me about that Sunday afternoon, played down the joy. “I was laying down,” he said. “It was about five thirty, I’d been down about twenty-five minutes, and I was just dozing. Someone unlatched the door; it was these kids with a whole lot of shit. I said, ‘Where’d you get that?’ Carl said, ‘Oh, they’re rioting, they’re rioting.’ So Carl and them got ready to go out, and I said, ‘Man, don’t go out,’ I said, ‘because somebody’s going to have to pay for this. They’re not going to let you just get away with it.’ I kept telling them, man. I don’t think they enjoyed it, because everybody was scared. Most of the people I met, they were just doing it, but they still had this fear.” There was undoubtedly a generational gap in the experiencing of pleasure in the uprising and, indeed, in the looting itself. Of the 7,231 persons arrested altogether in the riot, 4,683, or just about two out of three, were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight, and only 981, or 13.5 per cent, were over forty.
Several months after the riot the boys began to relax and open up. Sortor murmured to me one day, “Sure. We was doing a bit of looting.” Some days later he said that the friends had looted some clothing from a store on Grand River and they had also looted some food, “but Punkin and Melvin put it in their car and took it home.” Another day he said, “Me and Auburey got a couple radios, me and him went down, then he went on home. We sold them. Different people down the street, they’d buy them. You just be walking down the street, or you’d either be sitting up there, and somebody say, ‘You selling that radio, man?’ You say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m selling it.’ ‘I’ll pay you so-and-so for it.’ ‘Okay.’ We got fifteen dollars for them.”
“Auburey came back home, you know,” Thelma said to me, “he came back and he said he seen this box sitting in the street and he picked it up. My mother told him to don’t be picking up that stuff and be carrying it home. He was scared and he thought somebody might have seen him picking it up and he took it back down and he came on back home. And he sat home the rest of Sunday looking at television because he was scared to go out. You know, he’d get scared if he’d find out he was going to die or something like that, you know. My momma said they’d kill everybody, so he stayed home.”
5. The Suspense of the Whole Thing
Robert Faille—thirty-one years old; six feet two inches tall; two hundred pounds; two-year veteran of the police force; one commendation, numerous meritorious awards; veteran of the U.S. Air Force (clerical work, supply, Stateside); former Explorer Adviser, Boy Scouts of America; unmarried; Catholic; pronounced cleft in his big chin; apparently unable to encompass all he meant to say in his speech and so given to appending ragtags of inchoate continuation at the ends of clauses, “there,” “all that there,” “everything else there”—sat in his parents’ small home that burst with house plants and whatnottery (under a table a fire extinguisher he had purchased after an alarm that his house would be fire-bombed), and he told me this:
“I guess the main thing was the suspense of the whole thing, you know, you never knew how far it was going to go. It was confined to that area at the time there, and they were just burning it up, and we thought that it had to be stopped somewhere, but everybody felt that we could have done more. It seems that we had orders not to do anything, just block off the area. And these people, in the meantime, I could see them right from my post over there, I was blocking off the street, and it just seems that they were just running all over the place, wild and that, right down the street. There were some people carrying TV sets, and you could see them going right in the house. I saw more crime transpire that one day than I saw all two years I been on the force. And there was nothing I could do about it, because I didn’t have the orders. And right where we were stationed there, there was a—the Motor Traffic Bureau, these were the fellows, you’ve probably seen them in previous riots there, you know, motorcycle pants and all that there. These fellows here were standing by with their bayonets and everything else. These are the fellows that ride the motorcycles and drive alone in cars. These fellows, you know, were ready and everything else there. Standing by for orders. All this is transpiring and they’re just standing there. Nothing they could do.
“Well, there was a lot of rumors as to what was happening, but the main thing seems to be that the Mayor gave the order not to do anything. He’s the commander-in-chief, more or less, in the city here, and it seemed that the Reverend Hood”—Nicholas Hood, only Negro member of the seven-man Detroit Common Council—“who was his adviser at the time, and—who was that other figure here? Well, there were two figures mainly there, they told him that if we showed any force of arms, that these people would become real violent, and they would likewise respond. And so he says, ‘If you let us go out there and talk to these people, we’ll calm this thing down and it will be okay.’ In the meantime all these places were being robbed and everything else, and they went out and nothing happened. And this gave them enough time there, this was the time when they started burning.
“Well, I feel that we should have some kind of a status quo. Because in the past we haven’t had too many of these problems and that there. It just seems that the more you give these people the more they want, and they feel now that with these riots and everything else there, they can get everything they want free. And by just using a little bit of violence, they can get anything they want. And this is a wrong way of basing any type of thing.
“I think we should have more power. The policemen should have more power. And when these things do break out in the beginning, they should be handled in the beginning. They should give the police power to take care of these things.
“I feel that, you see, like B. and E., that’s Breaking and Entering, the law states—and we have been repeated this again and again in our squadrooms—that if you find a man breaking and entering, if you do not know his identity, and if you have reasonable doubt to believe that he’s coming out of the premises there, you know, having breaking-and-entered and so forth, that you can shoot him. I feel that these people should be treated likewise. If they’re breaking into these places here, they should be made examples of, if you shoot a few of them there, you know, the serious violators there.”
6. Loot Being Sold
From Detroit Police Department Disorder Log:
“3:50 p.m. Radio Run. Loot being sold at Algiers to ‘man named James.’ Cars pulling in.”
7. A Production Line
“On the next corner,” David Senak told me, “south of where we were, there was a dry cleaner’s. We saw these people coming up with five-gallon cans of gasoline, they busted this big window and had a production line set up, where they were passing out this clothing—and it was funny, probably they were stealing their own clothing, because this was all secondhand stuff, you know, these were items that they’d brought in to be cleaned. Well, they were passing this stuff out by the handfuls, and then they took these five-gallon cans of gasoline, took them in there, and put the place afire. And this was all in the presence of uniformed police officers. And this was the general trend of the whole situation.”
8. Pure Chance
When they were in tenth grade at Pershing High School, Roderick Davis and Larry Reed, who had been singing in choir together, and four other boys, school friends, formed a rock-and-roll group, to play in school talent shows; they called the group the Dramatics. As they improved they began to want to go into business, and they played wherever anyone would have them, free, for publicity. One Friday night in 1964 they were singing at a place called Mr. Kelly’s Barroom, and, as Roderick said to me, “people were hollering for more. A lady came up after and asked did we want to become a recording group. Did we! So we came down to the Golden World Recording Company the next Sunday and auditioned—sang ten or twelve things plus some we’d wrote ourselves. A month later we cut our first record.
“One time in 1965 we were watching a group called the Contours do a show, and we saw the M.C. call out the names of the guys in the group, and each one came o
ut sliding and jumped up on the opposite side wall and came back doing splits. This gave us the idea for our routine, we used it ever since. Each one, see, takes a lead, we’ll take a fast number, break the band except for the drums, and then go into a dance, one at a time, every man for himself; after that the band’s back in. Other groups have begun copying our routine now, makes us sort of mad.”
Now with five members—Roderick, Larry, Ronald Banks, Larry Demps, and Michael Calhoun—the group began to get bookings and would make, for most engagements, $350 a night.
Each year at the Fox Theater—an extraordinarily gaudy cavern on Woodward near the downtown area, one of those gilt-encrusted extravaganzas from the roaring twenties, tumultuous with sexy multicolored plastic sculpture, a heavy old dream palace, a haven in recent years for skin flicks and horror movies—a week-long show of music and entertainment is staged, called Swinging Time Revue. The Dramatics got a spot, along with the Parliaments, J. J. Barnes, and other more or less known artists, in the ’67 revue, and they had been doing two shows a day, complete with their wild solo dances, on weekdays, and three on the weekend days. They sang “Groovin’,” which they had adapted from a number by a white group, the Young Rascals; “I Want a Love I Can See,” from the Temptations; a number called “Inky Dinky Whang Dang Do”; and some numbers of their own, “Bingo,” “Somewhere,” and “All Because of You,” which Supersonic had recorded four months before.
Early that Sunday morning Larry called Fred Temple to see if he wanted to come and help out as valet at the Fox that day—“help keep our clothes up,” Roderick said to me, “and hand us towels to wipe away—we’d get pretty hot—fasten cuff links, stuff like that.” The boys wore red pants, white shirts, black vests, and greenish-bluish iridescent jackets. Fred told Larry he didn’t think he should go, because he was laying bricks for his uncle seven days a week, and he was supposed to work; but he decided at the last minute to go to the Fox.
“I used to mess around with Herbert, Fred’s brother,” Larry told me, “then we sort of drifted apart, and I got to be friends with Fred in Noland Junior High. We took graduation pictures together. Then we went on to Pershing. At first he didn’t like to talk to girls that much, didn’t like to be bothered with them. I used to introduce him to girls, we met quite a few girls together. When we dropped out of school Fred got a job with Lee’s Nursery, and then he worked with Ron, Ronnie Banks from the group, at Chrysler last year.”
“Fred was a nice quiet guy,” Roderick said to me, “friendly and popular with girls or anybody else. He liked to give rather than receive. Every time someone would come and ask for a dollar, he’d give it. Or if not, if he didn’t have one just then, he’d promise to do something another time.”
On that Sunday afternoon, just after the Dramatics had finished their second show, “A man came out on stage,” Roderick told me, “saying a riot had started, everyone should go home or to the nearest hotel or someplace safe like that. So we left out.”
It was midafternoon. It was muggy outside, the temperature was about eighty-five degrees, the sky was overcast, and there had been a trace of rain a little earlier. A hot fresh wind was blowing out of the southwest, and on the wind, above the city, the boys saw dark smoke rising from many quarters.
“We got on the Woodward Avenue bus,” Roderick said, “going north to get home quick as we could. A few blocks after we passed Grand Boulevard, the bus stopped, and there was this whole line of people wanting to get on, when this policeman got on and shouted, ‘Everybody get out and get someplace out of the way because there’s liable to be shooting right around here.”
The six boys walked a block north, and there, right across the street, on its twin pedestals, was the inviting neon palm tree, the inviting name: Algiers Motel.
“It was pure chance,” Rod said. “I’d never been there before in my life. We thought we’d try it, had the money from the show, you see, they’d paid us two hundred and fifty, we each had fifty dollars, so we thought we’d see what it would be like to stay there. Mainly we wanted to get off the streets. I was the oldest one, so I purchased the room. It cost eleven dollars a night.”
The Dramatics, all six of them, were checked into room A-5 in the big building in the back. As soon as they were installed there, Fred Temple called home to tell his mother where he was.
9. Everybody’s Taking Everything
Charles Moore, a forty-one-year-old shear operator at Rockwell Standard who told me that he earned $15,000 last year and that his wife earned $10,000, lived in a predominantly white middle-class neighborhood in northwest Detroit, near Oak Park. He had been suffering from a coronary insufficiency and had arranged to enter Ford Hospital the following Saturday for some tests. (The day I first met him, some time after the riots, Moore was an indignant father, shaking his head over “today’s kids.” He said he had entered his two daughters, Jane, who was in ninth grade, and Barbara, in fourth, in a private school, mostly for white children, called Lutheran West, and was paying $600 a year tuition “to help them get something better than I’ve had.” Moore, a quick-tongued man, had experienced among other difficulties in two decades no less than thirty-three arrests, sixteen of them for traffic violations and most of the rest for quarrels of one kind or another. Just the day before, he had been telephoned by a store called Allington’s in the neighborhood and had been told that Jane was being held by the store; she had pilfered some hair curlers. He went and got her—charges were not pressed—and asked her why, why. She had said, “I just want to be like the other kids, Daddy. They said I was trying to be elite”—she pronounced it ee-light—“because I wouldn’t steal, and because I go to school with white kids.” During the riot, he said, one of the girls had said to him, “Everybody’s taking everything. What did you get, Daddy?” “They seem to think,” he said, “that there’s some kind of prestige in it, or something—take because everybody else is taking!”)
That Sunday Charlie Moore drove in his ’66 Cadillac across the river to Canada with two friends, James and Norah Adams, who were staying in room 14 in the main part of the Algiers Motel. During the day they had heard about the riot on the radio, and coming back they were searched at the bridge. Driving up Woodward Avenue, Moore stopped at a red light and was waiting for the light to change. Two police scout cars were directly in front of him. The driver of the one nearest him, a policeman, jumped out, apparently to chase a looter. The car started backing up, and it ran right into Moore’s car. Moore had vainly blown his horn. Immediately after hitting the Cadillac the scout car shot forward and plowed into the other scout car; then it backed up again and came back at a higher speed and hit Moore’s car again.
“See, what had happened,” Moore explained to me, “when the driver jumped out he reached up to the gearshift lever to put his car in neutral but he put it in reverse instead and ran off and didn’t notice. Then a state trooper sitting in the back, see—they were working mixed teams, city police and state police—he reached forward to put it in neutral, but just then they hit me and it jogged him so he put it in forward, see. And then the very same thing happened at the other end of the line, only the other way around, so wham! I got it again. We had quite some discussion. They had to tow away the rammer there—a City of Detroit car. James and Norah took a cab on to the Algiers. The disturbance was going on all around us, and while we were arguing there, the man heard a brick go through some glass and just jumped in his car and took off with my license! Man! I had to report for a lost license at the First Precinct, see. I didn’t want to get caught without a license in the middle of a riot. By the time I finally got to the Algiers, James and Norah weren’t there, they had went to her sister’s.”
10. The Least of My Problems
“So there I stood,” Ronald August told me, “without a comfort relief, without a cup of coffee or a drink of water, and it started getting dark, and you could see the sky lit up from the fires. There’d be a fire here, then a half hour later there’d be one over here. When it got da
rk enough, we urinated in the alley, which was against a city ordinance, but that’s the least of my problems, urinating in the alley.
“Finally this colored lady came out, and she had a bottle of orange pop, and I was so damn happy to see that bottle of pop! It was around ten o’clock at night. I got off at about four o’clock the next morning. It was about twelve hours right there, plus the time I was in the station before I was posted there. That’s all it actually was that first day.”
11. How Auburey Was
“Auburey stayed home Sunday night,” Mrs. Pollard told me. “I’ll tell you how Auburey was, as long as my husband was at home nights, with me, he’d just go on and stay out. But Pollard was working that night, you know, and Auburey stayed, because he didn’t want me and my daughter to be at home by ourselves.”
12. Kind of Hard Sleeping
“Sunday night,” David Senak told me, “I got through work about two thirty, three o’clock. I came home, and I was black with soot, my uniform was torn, my pants were shredded on one side, shirt was torn, and I was just covered with soot because we were in the middle of fire for six or eight hours straight. So I came home and took a bath and went to sleep and got up about ten o’clock in the morning. It was kind of hard sleeping that night, because I was still a little shaken. People on the outside just had no idea what happened down there and still have no idea. It’s like somebody coming back from Korea and trying to tell me what happened there, I just can’t comprehend. I imagine anybody out there had trouble sleeping that night.”
5
SNAKE