The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

  “Well, I attended St. Ambrose, first grade, and afterwards went to Carstens, and I attended that up to the fourth grade, and then went to Servite High School, and I graduated from there. My main interest in school was science. That’s the reason why, you know, I was interested in high school and all. I went to the University of Detroit for a while, studied chemistry, I decided to change over to chemical engineering, but I soon lost interest in that, so, later on, I attended part-time in Wayne State University, and then I went to the service—my father died ’57.

  “I was in the service there for four years, ’57 to ’61, I was doing supply, I was in clerical work, over at San Francisco, Hamilton Air Force Base, it’s about twenty-five miles west of San Francisco. I was Airman Second Class when I was discharged.

  “When I got out of there I went to Michigan Tech, and I took up geological engineering. I attended that for about two years, and kind of lost interest in that, too, you know.

  “So eventually I came back here to the city. I’ve had lots of jobs. Prior to going into the police force, I was with the city here as an operating engineer, heavy equipment operator. I enjoyed it over there, I enjoyed the work, but I felt that I would be more interested in law work and that there, you know, and I joined the police force. I felt it was a better job and all. So I looked into it there, and I went through the Academy and all, became a policeman. I graduated out of the Class of May 10th, 1965.”

  2. Different Sports and That There

  “My main interests and so forth are the out-of-doors. Like hunting, different sports and that there.

  “I’ve belonged to the Scouts, and I’ve always had a good record with the Scouts and that there, and when I quit I was an Explorer Adviser. I was in charge of the boys fourteen years of age and older, and that was at a school over here.

  “When I was in high school I played some football, I played tackle and end, and I attended all the intramural games there when I was at Michigan Tech there, you know; we had these sports to keep us going up there. I played everything they had up there.

  “I like duck hunting, and I usually go up around Orchard Lake, or over there in Mt. Clemens. And I like hunting deer; I usually go up around Grayling, in that area, that’s where I usually hunt. That’s where I went last year. That’s about mid-state. It’s pretty nice up there. You have to go in the mountains, you know, at that time of year, because, you know, the acorns are up there and everything else, and the deer will be on that. That’s where I’ve gone the last two years, anyway.”

  3. Shooting Down a Muslim

  “I have a lot of meritorious awards,” he told me, “about six of those, and I just received a commendation. It covered a multitude of things there, the meritorious and all covered a fifteen- hundred-dollar Armed Robbery holdup, where we apprehended one of the people there, and a man who was terrorizing a jewelry store, and another one was about a week before the riot.

  “There was this kid, we arrested him for suspicion on Armed Robbery, and he didn’t want to come with us. He said, ‘You can kill me if you want to,’ he said, ‘but you’re not going to take me in.’ So we went out, you know, and we told him he was under arrest, and what the charge was, and we started to put handcuffs on him. So this kid spins around, and he hits the other officer and everything else, and gets behind the officer and takes his revolver out and uses him as a shield. And in the meantime here, I was there, you know. I couldn’t do anything at the moment; my gun was still in the holster and all. So the officer dove between the cars and left him in the open. In the meanwhile this boy was backing up, with his gun in his hand there, and he’s pulling the hammer back on it, so I immediately went down to the side there, pulled my revolver, and I shot him. I shot one bullet. It hit his arm, grazed off. It dropped him down, and he was unconscious. So we took him to the hospital. There was another man that was hurt as a result of the bullet there; hit him in the head, bounced off of it. So we took them to the hospital there, you know. The one I shot, he was okay. He was out of the hospital the next day, in fact, and the other man was released the same day.

  “That was a young Muslim that I shot down. He turned out to be a Muslim there, he was using an assumed name, and he was positive in the show-up there for Armed Robbery. He had a warrant on his person there, for his arrest, in regards to a Felonious Assault.”

  4. The Blue Flu

  Two months before the riot, Detroit’s police officers, outraged that the city had not budgeted a pay increase, rebelled against the pressure they felt was being applied to them to write more and more traffic tickets, which bring the city revenue. They began a slowdown; from mid-May to mid-June only 21,109 tickets were written, compared with 74,001 in the same period the previous year. The city retaliated with disciplinary action. Suddenly, in the middle of June, a large number of men began calling in sick; they were said to be suffering from “blue flu.” At one point almost a third of the city’s patrolmen were either claiming to be sick or had been suspended.

  “Yeah, I was involved in it,” Paille told me. “We don’t have too much arbitration measures in the city here, and we got to use what means we have available. I got the blue flu, and I was almost suspended one time because of that. I’d been called off sick and everything else there, and they told me, you know, I should be getting back to work and all. And at this time they were going around, the sergeants were collecting the traps from various officers and that—your traps consist of your badge, your gun, and everything, all your essentials, your ID card—so they were just ready to come out to me, in fact I beat them by half an hour, went out to sick bay, and I went out to the doctors there, and they told me to go back to work.”

  5. The Center of Crime

  “I thought the morale was fairly high, you know, just before the riots there,” Paille said to me. “But there was always the same thing, you know—that they weren’t getting enough pay and all. It’s true, because it’s a rough job. I’ve seen more in that precinct in two years than I have been told would be in any other for about ten, because that’s the center of crime, it seems, in the city, in that area.

  “It’s primarily a colored precinct. The only real experience I’ve ever had with coloreds prior to going into the police force was when I was in the service. We slept in open bays in the Air Force and that. There was sections of the room, you know, that they conglomerated in. I got along fairly well with them, except when they started playing their radios at night there, you know. They turned this offbeat stuff on, spiritualistic stuff and everything else, start telling jokes and all. Be tired, you know, from work and that. I’d tell them to shut up or something there, you know, and these fellows here, you know, would talk back and call you every name under the sun.

  “But other than that I had a lot of good colored friends in the service.”

  6. That Immorality They Have

  “I’ve saw a lot of nice Negro homes there,” Paille told me, “poor people and all, but they’re real clean homes and that, and they’re decent people and all. But there’s not enough of those places, there’s other places where a fellow is making two hundred and fifty dollars a week, I’ve seen that, a construction worker, he didn’t have one single good stick of furniture in his house. We had to vacate a man like this already. A construction worker, two fifty a week, he couldn’t afford to buy one piece of furniture. What does he use this money for? That’s what I’d like to know. And the answer I got was pleasures. So these people here, a good part of them are immoral. Any policeman knows that, in those areas. You’ve got to get at this basic problem. Lot of people told me you should separate the children, you know, from these people here, because they’re influencing these kids here. This is what’s going to make tomorrow! These people. But something’s going to have to be done with that immorality they have. If you pour funds into them there, that’s not going to help them. They’ve got to have that pride. Basically I believe they’re more immoral than corresponding white people and all. Because you get a lot of these families over there
, you know, and you’ll find there’s prostitutes and everything else there.”

  7. A Whore as a Hero

  “I think,” he said to me, “that prostitution has a bearing on these riots, because in the past here we have the Cynthia Scott case here.” At three in the morning, on Friday, July 5, 1963, Patrolman Theodore Spicher (twenty-eight, six feet three, 200 pounds) stopped his patrol car to question Cynthia Scott (twenty-four, six feet, 193 pounds), who was walking south on John R, near Edmund, with her left hand full of money—forty-three dollars, the man who was walking with her, Charles Marshall, said. Spicher and his partner tried to pull Cynthia Scott, who had had eight convictions for prostitution, to his scout car for questioning, and the policemen said she pulled a knife. Spicher shot her in the back twice as she tore herself away, and shot her again in the chest as she wheeled, half facing him; and she died. A week later civil-rights leaders assembled a protest meeting of seven hundred at police headquarters, 1300 Beaubien. She came to be known as St. Cynthia. “She actually led parades afterwards,” Paille said to me—though that could not have been, because she was dead. “She was a hero in their eyes. And they claim that was because of her color and all that there. Actually, when you make a whore or prostitute a hero, that’s something else, you know!”

  8. A One-Time Deal

  “I’ve gone out with a lot of girls and that there,” Robert Paille told me, “and I’ve come pretty close, at times, you know, to marriage and that, but I’ve never felt that I’ve met a girl that I really wanted to marry. Because marriage as far as I’m concerned is a one-time deal there, you know. You don’t get married a thousand times like some people do. I mean, you get married and you’re married for good.”

  9. A Sentimental Atmosphere

  David Senak had nothing to say about Robert Paille; although they had ridden together on that Tuesday night, he said he hardly knew Paille.

  “Bob Paille is a very likable fellow,” Ronald August said, “kind of a sentimental atmosphere when you get to know him. Maybe when you talk to him you’ll think he’s on the muscle. I don’t know, I think I am, myself. Maybe sort of on the defensive. I feel like I’ve been kicked around a little, to be honest with you. You can get a broader picture by just that kicked-around statement, because I think I’m getting a raw deal. But Bob’s a nice guy.”

  8

  THE THIRD DAY

  Tuesday, July 25

  1. In the Stomach

  When the police officers of the Thirteenth Precinct reported for work on the third morning of the riot, they were greeted by a shocking piece of news. One of their colleagues, Patrolman Jerome Olshove, had been killed.

  “It happened Monday night,” David Senak told me with great emotion. “Heard about it Tuesday morning. At morning roll call. They told us. We knew when we came in. Shotgun in the stomach.”

  2. Olshove’s Death

  At three o’clock that morning, according to witnesses, a car full of uniformed men cruising down John R passed, at the corner of Holbrook, an A&P store where looters were at work; a single shotgun blast was discharged from the car.

  A few minutes later, according to the police warrant report, a Thirteenth Precinct scout car manned by Olshove (pronounced All′-shuh-vee), Roy St. Onge, and William Bolgar responded to a radio run to the A&P to check for looting. On arrival they found a man named Albert Phillips standing in front of the store, his face bleeding from shotgun wounds; Phillips collapsed on the parking lot. He was taken to Detroit General Hospital later (and was discharged after three weeks).

  The officers, seeing two men looting inside the A&P, shouted to them through the broken window a command to come out, and they did—Danny Royster, a twenty-year-old, and Charles Latimer, nineteen. According to the police report, the patrolmen ordered the looters against a wall; Latimer obeyed and Olshove handcuffed him; Royster hesitated, and Bolgar and St. Onge, who had a twelve-gauge shotgun in his hands, shoved him.

  A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Claudette Wilson, who, aroused by the earlier shotgun blast, was peeking through a second-story window directly across Holbrook from the A&P, testified in court that one of the men had come out as if to surrender, “but it seemed as though an officer went to hit the other man. When he tried to retaliate they began scuffling, and both men appeared to grab for the shotgun.” St. Onge said Royster tried to grab the gun and it went off. The shot killed Olshove.

  (Royster and Latimer were later both charged with first-degree murder, even though the latter was handcuffed at the time of Olshove’s death. As of this writing, the men were still being held untried in Wayne County Jail.)

  3. Crying like Babies

  “I take it,” I said to David Senak, “that this was the source of a great deal of anger.”

  “It sure was.”

  Then after a long pause, during which his face reddened and he seemed to be having difficulty breathing, he said with feeling, “We had guys there at roll call that were like brothers to him, couldn’t go on the street for a half hour, forty-five minutes. They were crying like babies.

  “He worked a cruiser. If it had been a regular patrolman it would have gotten a good response, but Olshove was just a real well-liked man. It hurt even more, when a good man went. Everyone knew he was supposed to quit that Thursday to take a job with IBM. If the riots had held off for another week, he’d never have been there.” A career police officer, Olshove, at thirty-two years of age, had been studying police administration at Wayne State University, and had also been taking community leadership courses in spare time. He had won twenty commendation and citations. “I’d been in the cruiser with him, and cleanup work also at times. Only the best police officers make the cruisers. He was a very young police officer. The cruiser, that’s the heavy car. Three plain-clothesmen and one uniformed driver, and they’re picked because they know their business, they know the precinct, and they only handle the most important runs, the holdup runs in progress, and when they’re not doing anything, if it’s a slow night, they help clean-up.

  “Athletic, very congenial. A lot of police officers are gruff and hard to talk to. Jerry wasn’t like that. Police officers are very clannish, and when they have new rookies come in there, they’re not readily accepted until they prove themselves, and Jerry always had a nice word for everyone. He was on the golf team, the Police Department golf team.

  “The men got real excited at first. One of the sergeants came up and said, ‘Nah, he’s not dead,’ he said, ‘he’s in the hospital. He’s going to be all right.’ This was two stories. This was to cool the men off. But it took a worse effect when people saw that our own supervisors were lying to us.

  “He left a little four-month-old kid.”

  4. Out of the Algiers Area

  “And there’s another thing,” Senak went on. “My partner, the fellow Bill that I’ve told you about, arrested one of the guys that shot Jerry, who are held now for his shooting, about a month before, for beating up an elderly man, a seventy-five-year-old man, just about half a block away from the Algiers Motel. They jumped him on the street and beat him up. They were out there, one guy had the old man down, the other guy was pushing his head into the concrete. If they would have given them five more minutes they would have killed the guy. Bill and his partner caught these guys, took them downtown, and had they been retained in jail for this offense, they wouldn’t have been out there. And who knows how many other crimes would be curbed by just a little more diligence?

  “Holbrook and John R”—where Olshove was killed—“are very close to Woodward and Euclid”—where the Algiers stood —“and this man was attacked almost a month before right in front of the Algiers. In fact, he made a citizen’s complaint to Cavanagh, and Bill got a copy of the letter; so Bill got a citation. And they said that the Algiers Motel is a detriment to the neighborhood, and they would like to have some way of curbing the crime in there, because they’d been having all kinds of trouble like this. And he said that the man that jumped him came from the Algiers Mot
el. He said they jumped out of the Algiers Motel area. And later the one man that was connected with Olshove’s killing was one of the guys Bill caught out there.”

  5. A Gun at My Head

  At about eleven o’clock Tuesday morning, Rod and Larry told me, at the Algiers Manor, in room A-3, which had two double beds, four of the Dramatics—Fred, Rod, and the two Larrys—were lying in bed, two by two watching a movie on television. The other two, Ronnie and Michael, had spent the night over in the main part of the motel with the Chicago go-go girls. Suddenly, at the door of A-3, there was a loud knock, the door flew open, and the room seemed to swarm with uniformed men.

  “They looked in the closets,” Rod told me, “in the drawers, under the covers. One of them put a gun to my head and shouted, ‘Get up!’ They took us outside. . . .”

  6. Everybody Started to Laugh

  “They came there that morning,” Sortor told me. “They came in asking for dope or something. We”—Sortor, Auburey, Lee, and Michael—“was all in Lee’s apartment. Soldier walked in and he asked where the stuff we smoked was at, or something. I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He started searching the room, they didn’t say nothing about no loot, they just came in, asked for that grass. We laughed at this one guy, because he told us to go outside, he said, ‘Move!’ Didn’t nobody move. He started hollering, and everybody started to laugh.”

  “I was in bed when they came in that morning,” Lee said to me. “They got me out of bed and made us go outside and go on the wall of the main motel. They lined us up sort of the same way they did that night.” The boys were taken out through the French doors at the back, which opened on Lee’s apartment, A-5.