by John Hersey
Lee had a cache of foodstuffs. “We bought them at the store,” Sortor told me. “They was in there before the riot broke out, you know; we had kept a icebox full of food.” Mr. Gill told me that when he went to the motel after the shootings to get Carl’s clothes, “I saw Lee had quite a bit of food, canned food and hot dogs and things.”
Lee and the girls cooked some hot dogs. The meal took about twenty minutes.
Carl, whose room was upstairs, “had a record player,” Juli testified, “and asked us if we wanted to listen to some records.” The girls decided they would like to do that, and they went with Carl and Lee up to A-14.
Sortor cooked some more hot dogs for Auburey and himself. He burned them, he testified, and opened the French doors onto the back porch to let out the smoke. At some point he turned the television set back on—loudly enough so that he and Auburey did not hear what happened upstairs in Carl’s room a few minutes later.
2. A Toy
When the two couples reached A-14, they found Michael there; the girls knew him. Carl started up some music on his record player.
“We were sitting around listening to records,” Juli testified in the conspiracy hearing. “Everyone, everybody was just sitting around talking and listening to records. And,” she added, “that’s all.”
Attorney Lippitt, cross-examining her, asked: “That’s all?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Come on, your memory is better than that, isn’t it?”
Juli made no response to that question.
They listened to music, she said, “approximately ten minutes, fifteen.” Then, according to the synopsis of a statement Karen made to the police, “Carl Cooper pulled a pistol out from under the bed. Cooper and Forsythe were playing with it. They had blanks in it and Cooper shot it twice.”
“During this time,” Juli told the police, “Carl Cooper fired a gold-and-silver blank pistol toward Lee Forsythe; Lee ran out as though frightened.” “He shot it once,” Juli testified later, “. . . toward the door . . . Lee Forsythe was standing quite close. . . . He didn’t fire at Forsythe; he fired at the direction that he was in. He wasn’t intentionally meaning to shoot Lee.”
Juli described the pistol as “a pellet gun or something, just looked like a plastic gun to me. . . . Silver or gold, one or the other. . . . a toy, a blank pistol or something. . . . It wasn’t a real gun.”
“Could it,” Prosecutor Weiswasser asked her, “fire a fatal shot, as far as you could see?”
“No.”
3. Three Days, a Week, Three Weeks
Michael Clark, who had spent time in prison for carrying a concealed weapon, could not be expected to wish it known, even during hearings weeks later, that a weapon might have been in in his possession, or even in his room, on the evening of the incident. Like all his friends, he was cynical to the soles of his feet about the judicial process; an oath in court meant nothing to him except as a factor in a larger danger. Fear of jail made most of the boys crafty; Michael was either less intimidated or less subtle than they, for he was blatant in his disregard for truth and even consistency in his testimony. His lies, which grew bolder, more disdainful, and more ironic with the passage of time, as well as the more cautious evasions and untruths of the other boys, confused even Prosecutor Weiswasser, who was supposed to be on their side; to them, he was just a prosecutor, a familiar enemy, and they were suspicious of his help.
“Clark stated,” according to the detectives’ synopsis of their interview with him, “he overheard Sortor tell a police officer that Clark had the pistol. When Clark was questioned, he denied having a pistol because three days previous, he had given the pistol to his brother-in-law.”
By the time of the murder hearing, a fortnight after this interview, the three days had grown into a week. In the conspiracy hearing, later still, Michael testified, “Look, I say that my brother-in-law had a pistol over there in the Motel about three weeks before all this happened, and he came and got it about three weeks before it happened. . . . It was a starter pistol.” Michael did not want it thought that he had even touched the pistol three weeks before the night of the killings.
“And he left it with you, didn’t he?” Attorney Kohl asked him.
“No, he didn’t leave it with me.”
“Who did he leave it with?”
“I didn’t know anything about the thing until I found it up under the pillow.”
“Until you found it what?”
“It was up under the pillow.”
“What pillow, sir?”
“The pillow on my bed.”
“The pillow on your bed?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I recognized it. I recognized the gun. I knew whose it was.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I didn’t; Carl took . . . the pistol from under my pillow . . . and he hid it.”
Michael would not admit that a starter pistol had been shot, as the girls said it had, in the annex on the night of the killings.
“Now,” Attorney Kohl asked him, “is there anything else that took place, as you sit here under oath; let me rephrase that question: Was there any shooting in that motel that night?”
“Not to my knowledge, no.”
4. A Gun of Any Kind
Sortor and Lee also denied under oath that there had been any starter pistol there that night.
“Before the police or military personnel started firing,” Weiswasser asked, “had there been any shots from within, from inside the Algiers Manor?”
“No.”
“Or annex?”
“No, no shots in there.”
And later Weiswasser asked, “Did you see anyone in that motel that night with a gun of any kind in his hand outside of police officers?”
“No,” Sortor said, “I didn’t.”
“Did you at any time see any person,” the prosecutor asked Lee, “at any time while you were in the Motel that night other than a police officer or soldier or a trooper with a gun?”
“Nope.”
And later: “And up in that room on that night Carl Cooper shot the blank pistol, didn’t he?”
“Not while I was there, no. . . . I saw a blank cap pistol earlier that day,” Lee said. “I didn’t see any gun that night.”
5. Green Hornet
During the first stages of my relationship with these young witnesses, when they must still have thought of me as a detective-like person, they kept putting me on; and they denied to me, too, the presence or firing of the starter pistol.
“They said there was a starter gun they had there,” Lee said to me one day, “and in court they said that it was fired at me. Earlier that day my little brother had come over, and he had a little Green Hornet gun, but he took that with him. It sounded just like a cap gun, but it looked real.”
And Sortor said to me on another day, “Wasn’t no starter pistol. I don’t want to shit you or anything, but there wasn’t no starter pistol in there.”
6. Mocking the Police
Late one morning several weeks later, I was sitting in the back room of Sortor’s home with him and with a friend of his, whose right hand was wrapped in bandages, at a table covered with laundry, and Sortor was drinking wine, and a record player was going full blast in the front room, and we talked awhile about Auburey. Then I asked Sortor what had tripped off the episode at the Algiers that night.
He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “I know but I ain’t telling.”
Perhaps it was that I did not press him, or perhaps it was simply that much time had passed since the night when he had lost his two friends and the danger seemed somewhat remote at last, or perhaps it was the wine—whatever it was that made him decide that silence no longer mattered, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said, “Them girls didn’t even know what happened down there. Me and Auburey was downstairs, eating, sitting there, and we were looking at TV. See, Carl was somebody who always had to be having
fun. He come running downstairs, him and Michael, just trying to scare us, you know. They was mocking the polices that come in there in the morning to search us down, you know, hollering at us to put our hands up, and scaring us. He shot it twice. Michael said, ‘Look out!’ you know. They was only two blanks in the gun. Lee stayed upstairs. See, me and Auburey didn’t know it was a starter gun at first, and we was scared at first, you know. They was laughing at us. Shot one straight out and one at the floor, you know.”
It is quite possible that Sortor was putting me on again this time, all the way, but I do not think he was. I do believe he left something out of an essentially true story: something about one of those who may have been shooting craps, and was wearing a yellow shirt, and who may not have gone home when the others went.
Sortor pushed his hat forward on his head, as he finished the account, and looked at me as if to say, “That’s it.” But then he gave his friend a flicker of a look of wisdom and shared secret amusement. I could not begrudge their sharing and asked no more, as I supposed there was a good reason—perhaps loyalty—for the distortion of the record, if there had been one.
As they had watched television in A-5, Sortor and Auburey—and perhaps a lingering friend in a yellow shirt—had not heard Carl fire the starter pistol at Lee upstairs. Something Sortor mumbled to me once, then quickly corrected, led me to think that Carl might have chased him or Auburey or their friend right out onto the back porch, or that Carl (or perhaps another; perhaps the friend in the yellow shirt had also handled the gun) might have made some kind of demonstration out there on the back porch.
7. A Neighbor’s View
Synopsis of Statement taken from Willie Harris, 36/M/N, 47 W. Euclid:
“Willie Harris states that on Tuesday night, July 25, 1967, does not know what time, he heard a shot fired in the rear of his home. Harris investigated and observed a Negro man standing on the lower left rear porch of the Algiers Manor Motel, and saw the man fire a shot in the direction of Woodward and Euclid; it appeared that the man had a revolver.
“Harris stated that after the second shot, he observed a man who looked like a private guard fire a shot at the Manor Motel. Harris heard several shots after this. He described the Negro man as wearing a yellow shirt and dark trousers.”
8. Army under Heavy Fire
Were the shots of a blank pistol the sound of “snipers” that had caused Warrant Officer Thomas to call high command and tell them that he and his men were being fired upon; that caused the alarm that brought the police that killed the boys—“Army under heavy fire,” two cops had quoted their dispatcher as saying? I have not been able to find any other plausible explanation. Not one of the scores of witnesses has ever said, in court or to me or to anyone else I have been able to trace, that he saw real snipers at or near the Algiers that night.
What greater—or more bitter—irony could there be than that the three boys at the Algiers may have been executed as snipers because one of them, satirizing the uniformed men who had made them all laugh in the midst of their fear during the search that morning, had been playing with a pistol designed to start foot races, from which it was not even possible to shoot bullets?
Except, of course, that as it turned out the boys were not executed as snipers at all. They were executed for being thought to be pimps, for being considered punks, for making out with white girls, for being in some vague way killers of a white cop named Jerry Olshove, for running riot—for being, after all and all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time.
14
A GAME OF CHESS
1. A Guy in a Yellow Shirt
Warrant Officer Thomas was amazed by how fast the police came in response to his alarm of snipers.
“Jeez, it seemed like I just walked out of the building,” he testified, “and they were coming. I don’t think any more—I ran out of the building and I believe I was across the street in the wash-rack area or pretty close to that area when the police cars were coming down the street. . . . I believe I was at the garage area or the wash-rack area. I believe that was where I was standing. . . . I was under the assumption they were coming because I called them. . . . I had another man with me, Seaglan.”
One of the private policemen—not Dismukes, Thomas testified, but another—“went in behind the gas station, between the gas station and the wash rack there. . . . I heard a shotgun blast—what to me was a shotgun blast or what sounded like a shotgun blast. . . . About this time the police were coming down Euclid. . . . I can’t truthfully say whether or not the police were already there or they were coming down the street. It was real close.”
——
“One of my men,” Melvin Dismukes told me, “went around between the car wash and the parking lot there, and he found a boy crouched down behind a car. He had on a yellow shirt and green pants.”
——
From Report: Riot Duty in Detroit, State Trooper Stan Lutz, 829, Paw Paw Post 51:
“Upon arriving at the scene of the shooting incident, officers made contact with other riot personnel. The first one contacted by undersigned officer was a Negro Civil Defense officer [private guard]. He advised that he fired a warning shot over the head of the subject in the alley just prior to this officer seeing him walk out of the alley.”
——
Thomas, testifying:
“Approximately at this time the prisoner came out of the alley or out of the back yard or out of the Algiers area. I’ll put it that way. . . . The private guard brought a man out of the alleyway. I assumed he came from the alley.”
——
From Synopsis of Statement made by Corporal Hubert C. Rosema, Michigan State Police, Paw Paw Post:
“Corp. Rosema states he observed an unknown Negro male about 20 yrs old coming from the alley next to the car wash, his hands above his head, holding sun glasses. Negro man was searched and informed Rosema he had just left an apartment where he had been playing chess and was on his way home which was four houses from the car wash.”
——
Thomas:
“Well, it’s pretty hard to describe him. All I can say is he had a bright-colored shirt on. That’s about it. He had been surrounded and I asked him who was in there, and he said two of his buddies and two white girls.”
——
Testimony of State Trooper John M. Fonger, Houghton Lake Post:
“There was a colored man coming from the building, walking. I can’t say he was coming from the building. He was walking down by the Shell gas station which is right there. I believe it’s a Shell gas station.” (It was, in fact, a Standard station. This detail matters only as one of a thousand exemplifications in this narrative of the thesis of Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace that history has to contend with the phenomenon that after a battle there are as many versions of the battle as there were participants in it. This is especially true, as we shall see later, where the factors of guilt and personal danger enter into the history. Justice, as well as history, has to contend with this variance, and we shall see that the white man’s justice, in a Northern city just as much as in Mississippi, almost invariably prefers the unreliable testimony of whites to the unreliable testimony of blacks.) “He was walking down there and he was stopped, being it was after curfew. He was asked where he was going. He said he was going home after playing chess.”
——
Thomas:
The private guard “said he had seen two guys either go into, or in the back of, the annex there at the Algiers. . . . He said, ‘Be careful.’ He said, ‘They went in there,’ or, ‘They were in there,’ and he said, ‘They were awfully young-looking.’ That was the statement. . . .
“I believe the other private policeman told Seaglan, or asked Seaglan, to watch him, to hold him in other words. . . .
“And then we tried to get one of the policemen to take the prisoner and nobody wanted to take him. I asked a couple of them if they wanted him, and they said, ‘No,’ and the one state trooper told him to take o
ff.”
To Ladd Neuman, Thomas reported this order in more pungent terms: “The guy said, ‘Well, boy, you can get your ass going. Take off.’ ”
——
Trooper Lutz was stuck with the prisoner. “This subject,” Lutz wrote in his report, “was approached by undersigned and two other unidentified officers and was searched for any weapons. While searching the subject, other shots were heard from the rear of the car wash building, this officer could not determine where they came from, as the view was blocked by the car wash building. The subject was ordered to lay down on the ground and undersigned officer guarded him while the other officers took cover. Undersigned officer and the subject taken from the alley were inside the car wash building in one of the open driveways for protection from gunfire.”
——
Thomas:
“At this time they started shooting. It was quite a few shots. Some of them were at street lights.”
——
“Trooper Davies stated “—to the Detroit police—” he fired 4–5 shots at a light in the rear of the car wash. . . .”
——
“Rosema stated he was carrying a 30 cal. Carbine and had fired 3 shots at a street light near the car wash.”
——
Thomas: “Then I attempted to put out the street light.”
Prosecutor: “Did you succeed in putting out that street light?”
Thomas: “No, but I believe my sergeant did.”
——
Thomas:
“The group began shooting in the direction of the annex.”
——
“It was like a war,” Thomas testified. “I mean this is a fact. I am not hiding anything. This is war. I mean, there was shooting, there was all kinds of shooting. I imagine there was two hundred rounds shot within a ten- or fifteen-minute period.”