by John Hersey
“When Lee crawled in he was so bloody that he would have scared you. I wondered how he made it. I really did, and when I went to fix his head, I thought maybe I could just wipe the blood off, but the gashes in it was so big I just couldn’t. I told him, ‘Man, I can’t do nothing with this.’ Because you could see the bone.”
“You could see down in the white part of this boy’s head,” Mrs. Gill said. “There was two—one place was busted wider, that was along his head, then right off it was a lick, sort of. And other knots was in his head.”
“Sortor couldn’t talk,” Mr. Gill said. “Yeah, Sortor couldn’t talk. He had big knots on his head, almost big as my fist, just all over his head.”
——
Having walked forty-two blocks on stockinged feet, Roderick and Larry made their way across open lots and were about to cross some railroad tracks, near Dequindre, and a train came, and the light of the locomotive shone on them, and they waited. After the train had passed they crossed the tracks, and some police and Guardsmen stopped them. “Why are you all bloody?” The boys tried to tell them. “It’s a good thing,” the men said, “the light from the train was on you, because we were about to shoot.” Hamtramck policemen took the boys to St. Francis Hospital, where the worst cuts on Rod’s head were stitched. Then the officers drove Roderick and Larry to a police station in Hamtramck. “Where do you live?” “Where do you work?” “What have you been doing?” The two tried to tell. At last an officer drove them home.
——
Mrs. Gill, who was becoming hysterical, called her mother, and Lee got on the phone. “Grandma B,” he said, “Carl is dead. I looked at him, Grandma B, they beat me because I wanted to see if Carl was dead, but I know he’s dead.” And he said, “They took Auburey in the room, and I heard them shoot. Grandma B, if they hadn’t have shot him, the way they had beat Auburey up, the way he looked, I doubt if he could live anyway.”
——
“Sortor called,” Thelma Pollard, Auburey’s sixteen-year-old sister, told me. “He didn’t know what to say, he hung up. He says, ‘Auburey there?’ I was mad, because this was about four o’clock in the morning. I said, ‘Just a minute! Auburey’s not here. He didn’t come home last night.’ So he says, ‘Okay. Bye.’ ”
Sortor gave me a different version of this call. “I was at Carl’s house,” he said, “I called soon as I got to Carl’s house. I called and I said, ‘Well, may I speak to Mrs. Pollard?’ She said she was in bed. And so I said, ‘Well, you know, Auburey done got killed.’ So she hung up the phone. Then she called back and say, ‘He dead for real?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he got killed over there.’ ”
2. Auburey Pollard, Jr.
Auburey’s father sat square-shouldered and stiff with defiance on the edge of a sofa, weeks later, in the house to which, after the collapse of his family, he had moved to live alone, and, speaking in explosive and emphatic cadences, he talked to me, while he toyed with a knuckle of pork on a plate on a coffee table before him—his lonely supper—more or less about his dead son:
“He was a hell of a character. This is a fact; most people wouldn’t want to say this: He was a hell of a character. He always wanted to live up to par. But what I always told him: You got to give something to get something. He wanted to go a long ways. He loved to paint. He was a good artist, a beautiful artist. He was smart in some ways. Everybody’s dumb in some ways. He was young. Every father loves his own son, he loves his own because he’s older. I don’t have nothing to lose in life, but I don’t intend to give it away for nothing. You understand what I mean? Now, understand me thoroughly: I’ve got nothing to lose in life, but I’m not intending to give it away for nothing. Any time I give my life away it’s to save me.
“He was fast-minded. Everything he did he wanted to do it real quick. If it couldn’t be done real quick, he’d say, ‘Oh, well, it takes too long.’ Because he was young! And when I was young I was the same way, I’d figure if I wanted to go to the store I’d walk fast. I’m forty-three now, I can move pretty good, I can move pretty daggone good if I have to. But the boy, he was just a normal American boy. He didn’t know nothing about no discrimination, about no hate, because I never taught him. I always taught him one thing: to treat people as you want to be treated. If you should step on my foot and I happen to glance over my shoulder and see that you’re not mentally balanced, why should I turn myself around and get myself in trouble over you? Well, that’s just one foot stepped on, I can bypass that one. If I’m not shoved in a corner, why should I have to come out fighting? I always told him that. I don’t give a kitty, if you’re going east and I want to go due north, I’m going due north, it’s my prerogative. Your prerogative is to go where you want to go, and my prerogative is to go where I want to go. You must have a mind of your own! Without something of your own you have nothing. And any time you got to follow somebody else you’re stone weak in the beginning. You just a stone weakling. I’d rather be dead on my own than to have to follow the crowd to say I’m right, just to be seen or heard. I don’t want to be seen or heard, I want to be happy within myself.
“The Negro always wants to make the Joneses look good, and the grays do the same, they want to make the Smiths look good, and I don’t care anything about what the Smiths or the Joneses or the Beedles or the Doodles do, I want to be happy. I don’t care if I’m loading manure, if I’m happy and loading manure that’s my business. But most people, they follow one pattern. ‘Well, the Joneses, they got two cars,’ and ‘Oh, she’s got new bedroom slippers.’ I don’t know what they’re doing when their doors are closed, they don’t know what I’m doing when my doors are closed. So I’m not worried about what they’re doing, as long as I am happy and at peace, I am satisfied.
“It’s too many nice jobs for Negro kids today for them to make the same mistakes I made. He can go to school, he can work in a bank, he can be a computer, a teacher, he can work in a scientific laboratory, it’s a million things he can do—work for the government! Auburey started, he was a pretty good welder. Now, I’m going to tell you something else. Now, most fathers would say he’d been a champ. You know what I’m going to say? It’s this: He had to find himself. Within himself, when he’d have found himself, then he’d have been as great as he wanted. I’m not going to build him one teeny little bit to say he’d have been the best welder in the world. The boy wasn’t old enough to find himself. I’m forty-three years old, and I haven’t fully found myself.
“I’ll tell you what this have done to me. I lost a son. That’s all that matters to me. The rest of the world, I’m not worried over it; I’ve lost a son. I have lost a son. I have lost something that with the world at the rate it’s going now, with automation going as it’s going now, he could have lived and prospered with a good life, maybe. What I mean, he was only a baby. I went in the service when I was sixteen years old—lied about my age—and I was only a baby. That’s the only way I learnt life, that’s where I learnt my life. I wouldn’t be hard like I am now if I hadn’t have been. I learnt the hard way. But the poor little thing, he never knew what hardness was, he had to crawl through a bucket of blood. The poor little fellow, he didn’t even know what life was really all about. Auburey was a beautiful kid, but he was just a baby, that’s all. Just a baby.”
3. A Pleasure-Loving Clientele
The Algiers Motel was one of many transients’ hostelries on Woodward Avenue, a rod-straight street, the city’s spine, that divides eastern Detroit from western Detroit. A couple of miles north of the cluster of massive buildings called “downtown,” and only a few blocks from the section of Twelfth Street where the black uprising of those July days and nights had started, the Algiers stood at the corner of Woodward and Virginia Park, an elm-lined street elegantly brick-paved in the old days but potholed now and patched with asphalt, a street of once prosperous wooden and brick houses with boastful porches and back-yard carriage houses recently declined into rooming houses and fraternity houses and blind pigs, as Detroit calls its illeg
al after-hours drinking spots. The section had evolved from proper WASP to up-and-coming second- and third-generation immigrant to, recently and more and more, middle-class black.
Detroit is a vast flat sprawl of houses planlessly intermixed with schools and colleges and great automobile factories and little works and warehouses and stores and public buildings, and in this sprawl the resident nations of black and white had for years been encroaching and elbowing and giving way to each other; there was no great ghetto; there were pockets of prosperity, of ethnic identity, of miserable poverty, of labor, of seedy entertainment and sometime joy. The Algiers had had a habit of reaching into several of these pockets; its management had changed a few years back, and it was now run by Negroes mainly for a pleasure-loving black clientele.
Facing Woodward, the main part of the motel was announced by a massive sign on two fieldstone posts, with a neon-fronded palm tree drooping over a chrome frame enclosing the legend of its Africa-whispering name. Behind the bold advertisement stood a complex that would have been admirably suited to a Florida beachfront—a discreet glass-fronted office off to the left, straight ahead a large pool with tables and beach umbrellas around it and cabana-like rooms beyond, and to the right a two-story wing of rooms with pink-painted concrete-block walls.
The Algiers Manor House, where most of the action of this narrative hid itself, was an annex to the motel proper, originally one of the big bourgeois houses of Virginia Park, a three-story brick bulk trimmed in white wood. From under the odd curving eyebrows of enormous dormers on the third floor jutted air conditioners; big bay windows on the ground floor were primly curtained in white; a high, wide, and unhandsome porch was supported by too-heavy white pillars.
Behind the motel and the manor was a blacktop parking lot which could be reached from Virginia Park by a driveway running between the motel proper and the annex, and which also gave onto an alleyway that ran through to the next street to the north, Euclid Avenue.
North of the motel on Woodward, between the Algiers and Euclid, were Max’s 25-Cent Car Wash and a Standard Oil gasoline station.
4. It Was Not Safe
Detective Thayer and Warrant Officer Thomas testified to parts of this in court; Detective Hay reported some of it in his Detective Bureau write-up of the night’s mission; Charles Hendrix told part of it to a Free Press reporter; Clara Gilmore told some of it to Homicide; and the Wayne County Morgue forms for Autopsy No. A67-1011 confirm certain essential facts:
Not long after the task forces drove away from the Algiers, Charles Hendrix, Negro owner of the private-guard firm known as Hendrix Patrol, himself in the uniform of his enterprise, came to the motel office and found his employee Fletcher Williams, who was also in uniform and was supposed to be on duty guarding the Algiers, and Clara Gilmore, the young black receptionist at the motel desk and switchboard operator, huddled in the office, chatting and looking scared. He “got kind of mad,” as he put it later; he wanted to know why Williams was not doing his job. When Williams and Miss Gilmore began to talk about some gunfire, Hendrix asked why Williams had not checked on it, and Williams said there had been so much shooting he was afraid to go out.
Clara Gilmore was able to say that she had heard several shots out back in the direction of the annex, the Algiers Manor, and that a few minutes later she had seen an Army jeep and three or four police cars park on the west side of Woodward, right in front of the office. Several men in uniform took cover behind trees and behind the several sections of turreted, stone-capped brick walls that formed an annunciatory two-lane gateway to the faded gentility of Virginia Park, the elm-lined street to the south of the Algiers, onto which the manor’s front door gave. She heard several shots. A little later, the switchboard buzzed; a girl was calling, and she said she had been talking a few minutes before to her boyfriend, Larry Reed, in room A-3 in the annex, and she’d heard shots in the background, and Larry had just gone off the phone without hanging up, and she was worried about him. Miss Gilmore cut into A-3 and found the line open. She heard someone yell, “Get your hands up.” Someone else shouted, “Watch out!”—and something about grabbing a gun. Then, hearing several shots, she panicked and pulled the plug. She and Williams then sat talking fearfully about what was going on.
Hendrix, having heard her story, hurried to the manor, and he came on three bodies, one in A-2 and two in A-3, and he felt them and found them still warm. He went back to the office and called the Wayne County Morgue to report the deaths and to ask that the cadavers be taken away.
Marvin Szpotek, a clerk at the morgue, telephoned the Homicide Bureau of the Detroit Police Department and told Detective Joseph Zisler, who picked up the phone in the Homicide bullpen on the fourth floor of Police Headquarters, that a party had called him from the Algiers Motel and told him there were corpses over there.
Detective Zisler set in motion a radio command, which was picked up at about two o’clock in the morning by Scout Cars One, Two, and Seven from the Thirteenth Precinct: “8301 Woodward. At the Algiers Motel check for dead persons.”
Half a dozen policemen soon descended on Clara Gilmore. She told the men where to look, and after a search of the annex Patrolman Edward Gardocki returned to the motel office and called Homicide and spoke to Detective Edward Hay, telling what he had seen.
Detectives Hay and Lyle Thayer and a police photographer, Patrolman Dale Tiderington, arrived at the scene at a few minutes after three. Besides Patrolman Gardocki and his fellow officers from Thirteenth, there were now on hand, Detective Thayer later testified, “several people that purported to be newspaper people in front of the place.” The detectives took down Miss Gilmore’s story, to which she now added the embellishment of a U-turn of scout cars on Woodward before the assault began, and then Hay and Thayer proceeded to the annex, where they conducted what Detective Thayer called “a preliminary search” for weapons. They found a knife near the body in room A-2, but no firearms. Though by Thayer’s account the detectives stayed for nearly two hours, they did not pick up any of the many cartridges and shell casings that were strewn on the floors; they removed no slugs from woodwork; they took no firearms evidence.
Everyone was jumpy. When the detectives checked an exit giving out from a dormer in room A-15 on the third floor to the top of a white-railed wooden fire escape which ran down the back of the building, a private guard out on Euclid Avenue, who had seen their dim figures climbing around, apparently on the roof, for all the world like a pair of snipers, gave a new alarm to National Guard Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas, stationed at the Great Lakes Building on the next corner north, and Thomas shouted a challenge. The detectives withdrew. As Thayer put it in court, “We had been taking photographs, the flash of the bulb, and some of the rooms had no lights, the flashlights and us moving around the different floors—we felt that it was not safe.”
The detectives called Assistant Wayne County Medical Examiner Dr. Edward Treisman, and according to Thayer’s testimony he “refused to come to the scene. He didn’t feel it was safe.” Dr. Treisman ordered the bodies, unpronounced dead on the spot by him, to be removed to the morgue. The detectives called for transportation, and eventually, shortly before five in the morning, a morgue wagon and a General Hospital wagon arrived, and the detectives ordered the manor doors sealed with paper warnings from the Medical Examiner’s office; in their haste the morgue people put a seal only on the front door, the glass of which, in any case, was broken out. The corpses were carted off. “And we,” testified Detective Thayer, “left the premises to be searched at a more safe time.”
The crucial issue here was how word of the killings reached the authorities. Under cross examination in court, Detective Thayer said that he did not know for a fact that the central communication office of the Police Department had not received a report on the killings from police officers who had been present; but had such a call actually been received, it would have been reported at once, as a matter of iron routine, to Homicide. There is no record of such a call; no one
has come forward, in court or out, to say that such a call was received. Indeed, this was the first-noticed and finally fatal flaw in the theory that three snipers had been killed in an open firefight at the Algiers that night: the evident failure of the patrolmen who had been present during the shootings to follow the dictates of prudence, of humanity, and of standard operating procedure even during the confusion of the riot, by reporting the deaths to headquarters.
5. Carl Cooper
In her parlor, which was strewn with her older children’s long-playing records and her younger children’s toys, Mrs. Omar Gill, Carl Cooper’s mother, a plump woman of thirty-six with a broad face and wide-set eyes, sitting on a hassock, dragged-down and weary-looking, in a dressing-gown, with her four-year-old Julius and a mongrel puppy playing around her feet distracting her, told me about her dead son:
“In a way of speaking, he was kind of a mean kid. In other words, he didn’t take no stuff off of anybody, didn’t like no one to mess with him.
“He liked school. He was no trouble in school. His teachers spoke well of him. He went to Sherrill, then Pattengill, and Angell, and Sampson, and Lessenger. He tried to play baseball a little while, took up wrestling at the Training School and got a few awards for it there. Course he liked music and dancing.
“See, he was very likable. You never seen him without a smile. You’d be walking along the street and he’d go to smile at you. He had a lot of friends.
