The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

  14. Tensions

  I asked August what the morale of the Detroit force had been before the riots.

  “Very low,” he said. “Very low. I know that’s sort of a meager answer, just two little words, ‘very low.’ But there was tensions. I don’t think any of us actually expected any trouble last summer. If somebody would have asked me, the week before or the day before, if I thought there was going to be any trouble in the city of Detroit, and I says, ‘Well, no, because I don’t feel any trouble as far as racial problems come along.’ Seemed to me, I been down there in the precinct for three years, and I never seen it any different then than what I started down there. I didn’t actually feel anything different.”

  15. You’re Going to Get Criticism

  “Detroit,” August said, “has one of the finest police departments in the nation. The men have the ability, they have the desire to do the work, and I don’t think their cry is actually more pay. Sure, the money is going to help, but that’s not what they need. They need the public’s backing. Not the city government’s backing, but just the public’s general opinion and backing. You see, being a police officer is strictly not a get-a-patsy-on-the-back job. You can do the best job you can, and you’re still going to get criticism. You can stop a man for speeding, even catch him on radar, and onlookers are going to tell you you did it wrong, or you didn’t use the right approach. I think it’s the best police department in the nation, if they’d just let these men be policemen.”

  16. No Trouble

  “When we were an attack carrier,” he said, “we had ninety-three fellows in our Fuels Division, and when we changed over to support carrier we lost about half the division, they transferred them off. I think we had at one given time—let’s say when we had the ninety-three men, we must have had eight, nine, ten colored fellows in our division at the time. They had no trouble getting along.

  “I know a lot of colored people, and I always got along with them.”

  17. Percentages

  “When you work a Negro neighborhood,” he said, “naturally you’re going to have a high per cent of colored arrests. When you’re working a white neighborhood, it goes the other way.”

  18. Playing This Up

  “By the way,” he said, “I don’t go along with any sort of brutality. I blame your news media for playing this up so much. You get a police officer out there, not only in the state of Michigan, but what they had in Watts, and what they had in Harlem, and all the racial trouble they have across the nation, they never show you what the people are doing to cause all this thing, they just show you what the policemen are doing trying to stop it.”

  19. You Have to Be Persuasive

  “When you’re walking down the street,” Ronald August said to me, “and you see a man with a rifle on a rooftop, and you suspect a sniper in the area, you been sent over there to look for a sniper, and you ask this guy to identify himself, and, ‘Halt!’ and the guy disappears, maybe he runs along the roof and he climbs down a telephone pole, and you haven’t got the building surrounded as well as you thought you did, and you miss him, see. Well, say you do run up against him and you catch him, and you’re lucky enough not to have any cross-fire, well, I don’t go along with the idea where you got to beat the vinegar out of this fellow, but you can’t treat him with kid gloves, either. You have to be persuasive in the line of police work when you’re dealing with these people. You just can’t put diapers on them, and powder them up, and put them in the car. I mean you put the cuffs on them, you put them in the car, and if they give you any lip, you use force to effect your arrest, so to speak.”

  20. Very Good Public Relations

  “I mentioned to you before,” he said to me, “that I had quite a lot of interest in music. Well, the Police Department has a very fine Police Band, which I believe, along with the mounted bureau and your traffic safety and so on and so forth, is very good public relations for the Department. Well, anyhow, I played with the Police Band. I worked straight days.”

  21. A Nice Family-Type Fellow

  “I’m a police officer,” August’s partner of that Tuesday evening, David Senak, said to me, “and they could fire me, and ten years from now you could ask me and I’d still be a police officer, whether I’m fired or not. But August I don’t think is. I think he’s just a nice family-type fellow. I worked with him one time in uniform, and all he talked about was his family, and the band. Just a general nice guy. I worked with him a little bit in the riots, and there was a lot of rough-housing, you know, because after Olshove died, you know, everything just went loose. The police officers weren’t taking anything from anyone. If they gave him trouble, August would go out of his way not to give anyone trouble, or not to have to resort to violence.

  “He’s not a police officer in the degree that my friends are, and myself. He takes it as his job. It’s a job. I work as a rigger, it’s a job to me. He works as a policeman, it’s a job. You could almost say that when I took the oath as a police officer I married the Police Department. And I’m sure my sergeant did the same thing, even though he’s happily married. He gave a certain part of his life to the Police Department.”

  Robert Paille said to me, “Well, Ronald August there, I think he’s sincere, you know, he’s got a family and all that there, you know, and he’s responsible. He’s not a leader of men and all that there, you know, but I feel that he’s done a good job in the past there, you know. He hasn’t been outstanding or anything like that there, as far as I know, but as little as I do know of him he’s quiet and respectable.”

  10

  AN ALARM OF SNIPERS

  Tuesday Night, July 24–5

  1. A Military Man

  Theodore Johnson Thomas was, as to habit, a military man. White; thirty-two years old; five feet nine inches tall; with a squarish, upholstered, pyknic figure; curly black receding hair and fleshy face with blithe blue eyes above puffy bags—this outwardly thick-set and inwardly lean and anxious person was a veteran of fourteen years in the U.S. Air Force, twelve of them spent as a teacher of rudimentary electronics for aircraft systems. The Air Force moved him from place to place; he, his wife, and his five children built up a backlog of roaming, and one of his daughters, he would proudly say, had been in forty-seven states.

  In 1966, after a five-year station in Oscoda, Michigan, and at a rank of staff sergeant, he dropped out of the Air Force, seeking better pay and opportunities, and he became a process engineer of electrical-discharge machines for General Motors. But, as he said to Ladd Neuman after he became at least locally famous because of his bizarre role in the Algiers affair, “After fourteen years of military life you just don’t drop away from it.” He looked into Air Force Reserve possibilities and was not impressed; then he visited a Michigan National Guard unit, which happened to need a radar officer—just his dish—and he joined, and after a year and a half, when this experience began, he was rated as a warrant officer.

  Warrant Officer Thomas was easily confused by the questioning. As to his education: “Actually,” he testified in court, “they credited me with fifty-six college hours—” Attorney Kohl asked, “Who credited you?” “—with GM, approximately.” “Do I understand you to mean, or to say, you went to college?” “Yes. Well, with the education I’ve gotten in the service and with the background—with my teaching experience plus the courses I’ve taken are credit courses.” “Well, have you been in college?” “No, sir, I’ve been in the service. . . .”

  Nor was Warrant Officer Thomas always clear as to the exact sequence of events. He spoke once in court of riot training that his National Guard unit had had. “And when was that?” “I believe that was—it’s pretty hard to remember. It was either in the fall or the spring of the year. I can’t remember; either last fall or this spring, early. . . . In fact,” he added, “about a week before the riot we had the mobile unit squad out at the Armory, and they also went through their riot-control formations for us also. We practiced.” “When you say ‘they,’ what organiz
ation are you referring to?” “The Tactical Mobile Units of Detroit. That’s the Detroit Police Department.”

  In a manner of speaking this military man was, at about ten o’clock on Sunday morning, July 23, when the telephone rang in his home, ready.

  2. In Case

  “I was put on a stand-by alert,” Thomas testified, as to that call. “This was—this told me that Detroit was under a state of, or about ready to go into a state of emergency, and we were on a yellow alert at this time. . . . I was called again around noon or a little after noon and told I should come down to the Armory because we’re probably—I’m also arms officer out there. I have the keys to the weapons, the vaults, and I should come down in case something did break, so I went down immediately.” At another hearing, he remembered one detail precisely: “I hadn’t eaten.”

  3. Not That Alert

  By Tuesday afternoon Warrant Officer Thomas was ragged. He was asked during the murder hearing how much sleep he had had on Sunday and Monday nights. “I figure approximately an hour and a half, sir. . . . From the time the alert went out—it was ten o’clock Sunday morning—until the time of this incident. Monday morning I had an opportunity to lay down but they moved us. I just got in a sack; my bedroom. And we had to get up. I hadn’t slept probably fifteen minutes at the most. Then Tuesday morning I got about an hour, hour and fifteen minutes sleep.” Attorney Lippitt asked, “How would you describe your condition at the time you came upon the Algiers Motel?” “Not very well,” Thomas answered. “Truthfully, I can’t say that I was that mentally alert.”

  4. Things Were Extremely Tense

  At three o’clock Tuesday afternoon, Warrant Officer Thomas was assigned four men—Sergeant Paul Gerard, Sp5 Thomas Kelly, Pfc. Wayne Henson, and Pfc. Robert Seaglan—and was directed to go by jeep to the Great Lakes Mutual Life Insurance Building, at the corner of Euclid and Woodward Avenues, with orders, as he put it in court, “to protect the building. . . . Inside and outside, we was to protect the building . . . from any kind of disturbance. I mean, a bombing, or fire, or sniper fire.” Thomas pulled the jeep right up on the sidewalk, snug against the building. The president of Great Lakes Insurance, Thaddeus B. Gaillard, showed Thomas about the building, gave him keys and left a telephone number to call in case there should be any trouble.

  The weary warrant officer’s spirits apparently fell dark with the day, and when he and his men heard some machine-gun fire at some distance across Woodward, he testified, “we were very concerned.” Everyone was jittery. This was to be, as things turned out, the night of culmination—a night of hallucination. Like a whisper grown too loud in mad imaginings, the word “sniper” scurried around town and became a kind of roar. On television sets across the country viewers sat amazed, that night, if not horrified, at the sight of American tanks rolling through the streets of an American city on the hunt for American citizens, and of military helicopters hovering over Detroit rooftops; memories stirred in my mind, at these images, of the nightmares of Warsaw in 1943, Budapest in 1956, Santo Domingo in 1965. During this insane night Tonia Blanding, a four-year-old black child, with her family and friends in an apartment from which sniper fire had been reported, was killed by a burst from a tank’s .50-caliber machine gun when someone in the room with her lit a cigarette and the flaring match was taken for the flash at the mouth of a sniper’s weapon; and Helen Hall, a fifty-year-old white woman from Oakdale, Connecticut, visiting Detroit to help inventory some electrical supplies her employers had purchased, was killed as she stood at a fourth-floor window of the Harlan House Motel, just after she had called to other motel guests to come and watch a tank in the street and had yanked the curtain back to give them a better view. This was the night of Detroit’s great so-called sniper battle.

  In a passage of highly tendentious cross-examination by Attorney Kohl in the conspiracy hearing, Warrant Officer Thomas testified on his state of nerves:

  Q. Machine-gun fire, you say?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. Small-arms fire?

  A. Small-arms fire, rifle fire. There was all kinds of shooting.

  Q. And this was throughout the evening?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. The later it became, the worse it became, right?

  A. I’d say yes.

  Q. All right, and there is no question whatsoever but what at that point and in that area things were extremely tense?

  A. Yes; yes sir. . . .

  Q. Tuesday night was one of the worst, wasn’t it?

  A. Yes, sir, it was the worst for me.

  Q. Right, all right, but in this area, on this night, there was a great fear and apprehension with reference to sniping?

  A. Yes, sir, this is when the sniping became its worst.

  5. A Man Who Had Made It

  Melvin Dismukes, a phlegmatic, big-bodied, twenty-six-year-old Negro private guard in the employ of an outfit called State Private Patrol, had been set to watch the Lucky Strike Supermarket and J&R Patent Medicines, directly across Woodward from the Great Lakes Building, one block up from the Algiers.

  Dismukes was a man who had “made it” in a certain way—to the point, if this could be taken as a sign of it, of having been accused by one of the black youths at the Algiers that morning of being an Uncle Tom and a black motherfucker. His nickname suggested a clean-living man; he was called Preacher. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 8, 1942, he had moved with his family to Detroit when he was nine. He attended six different city schools and reached twelfth grade, “with a major of machine technology,” in Chadsey High School. He had trouble, at first, finding employment; then landed a job, which lasted a couple of years, as a truck driver with Miami Colored Slab, a company that constructed patios; worked a few months as a “sanitary inspector” in Boulevard General Hospital; went back to patio-building as yard foreman awhile; then finally dug into a good steady job with W. J. C. Kaufmann Company, a construction firm, where, after some time as a laborer, he was promoted into welding, which he had been doing for about three years when these events took place.

  For five years he had also worked evenings as a private guard, and he had been given, in the hierarchy of watchmen, a rank of sergeant, chevrons and all. At first he had worked in a residential area known as Conant Gardens, where he would check the doors of some houses and flash a light around others.

  As welder and guard Dismukes took home about two hundred dollars a week; thus he provided for his wife, Carol, and daughter, Kimberly, aged four at the time of those events, and son, Melvin, Jr., who was one.

  Dismukes had another life, too. As president of the Volunteer Service Club at the Wigle Recreation Center, he was in charge of teen-age dances and roller skating, and he had trained a paramilitary drill team of both boys and girls; he was a volunteer assistant to the coach of the semiprofessional Alonzo Stokes girls’ baseball and basketball teams, which were mixed, white and colored, and had been named, once, “Volunteer of the Year”; and at Cass Baptist Church he was supervisor of gym and roller skating.

  On Sunday, the day the riot had begun, he had been called in the evening by State Patrol, and he had driven his ’60 DeSoto, all the way in low gear—for it had been “totaled,” he told me, just before the previous Christmas when “a guy came through a red light, injured my back and one hand”—two or three miles to his guard post on Woodward, which he shared with two other private guards. He had stood duty there until seven thirty Monday morning, had gone then to work at Kaufmann’s, where, because looting had started in the neighborhood, he had helped board up windows, and had finally gone home to bed. He had gone back out Monday night and Tuesday during the day. Several cars had stopped in front of the Lucky Strike, he told me, as if their riders were preparing to loot; men jumped out, and he and his colleagues had stepped forward from cover they had taken, and the looters had scrammed. Like Thomas, he was edgy. He had been warned that insurrectionists might be driving by with machine guns blazing or tossing out Molotov cocktails.

  Dismukes w
as carrying a .38-caliber pistol and a .350 Magnum rifle that he had bought about a year before for hunting.

  He had never actually shot game with that weapon, but he had practiced at a public range at Dequindre and Twenty-six-Mile Road. “If I was going to have a gun,” he said to me, “I might as well be able to hit something with it. That gun could stop a car.”

  When the National Guard jeep pulled up on the sidewalk across the street, Dismukes went over and introduced himself to the Guardsmen. Later he asked Thomas over for a cup of coffee with him and his men, and they chatted about the troubles. After dark, and after Thomas had posted two of his troops, Henson and Kelly, on the roof of the Great Lakes Building as lookouts, the watchman-sergeant and the warrant officer spent more and more time beside the jeep, talking and listening to news reports on a transistor radio. “Pretty comfortable,” Thomas said in court, “having somebody else out there with me.”