by John Hersey
“He was funny about food. He didn’t eat anything with onions, didn’t like boiled foods. You could give him French fries and chicken every day of the week and he’d eat it, that’s all he really liked. If you had rice with the chicken he didn’t like gravy, he wanted butter.
“Carl was kind of spoiled. He was the first boy on our side. My father was the only boy my grandmother had, and Carl was named after him. He was the oldest, he was seventeen when he died. Then comes Theresa, she’s fifteen, and Tamara, she’s thirteen. They’re Coopers. The four little ones, they’re Gills: there’s Della, she’s eight, Omar Junior, he’s seven, Michael, he’s six, and Julius here, he’s four.
“Carl, he liked nice things, and he liked to have money for them. He’d help people take their groceries out to get extra money. He liked to go to a show, and while he was seventeen he’d go to the show two, three times a week. I never had no trouble out of him at home. He always if he got money he’d give me some.
“He lied about his age to get these jobs, then they’d find out he lied and they’d let him go. He worked for the Housing Commission, and he worked in shipping for Wrigley’s Cap and Gown, and he worked at Chrysler’s. Before he was sent to Lansing, he worked in a drug store as a stock boy. In Lansing he was sent out to various jobs; worked for a car wash for a while.
“I work at Walker Crouse Enterprises, power sewing, I went to school for that. Carl wanted to go into tailoring. He liked clothes quite a bit, and he talked to my instructor out there a couple of times, you know, he went to the school with me and talked to him, and I think he gave Carl momentum to want to do this. After he got laid off from Chrysler’s, that’s when he went in and put in for this. He was supposed to start classes August the seventh.
“All the police knew Carl. Beginning when he was thirteen, fourteen, they began to pick Carl up, they’d take him to the police station and keep him overnight or maybe two days, there was never any charge, just suspicion, they never put a finger on anything he actually did, you know. One of the detectives told me once, ‘Carl isn’t a bad guy, he just doesn’t like people to talk nasty to him, call him “nigger,” “punk,” all like that.’ Once he come home with a black eye, they’d picked him up and drove him round in their car and took him in a dark street and just beat him up. I wanted to get a lawyer, but Carl said, ‘No, Momma, it would just be their word against mine, and you know how that would end up.’ One time he come home and said they grabbed his arm and bent it up his back, and they’re saying, ‘Come on, now, where you been? What you been up to?’
“When he began to get in trouble, going in people’s houses and like that, I’d ask him, ‘What you doing out there where white peoples live?’ And he’d say, ‘They the ones got the nice things, Momma.’ I’d get to crying and he’d say, ‘Don’t you cry, no use to cry, I did this to myself.’ We were pretty close, me and Carl, you know. Whenever he earned money or got ahold of some money, he would always give me some, to help out with the kids. And he would help out, you know, he was a big help. I used to scuffle so hard for them, and looked like he was trying to pay me back.”
6. As Though the Viet Cong . . .
“Negro snipers,” it said on the front page of the Detroit News the next morning, Wednesday, July 26, 1967, “turned 140 square blocks north of West Grand Boulevard into a bloody battlefield for three hours last night, temporarily routing police and national guardsmen. . . .
“It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot-blackened streets. . . .
“Tanks thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . .”
Then, still on the front page:
“Three unidentified Negro youths were killed in a gunfight behind the Algiers Motel, Woodward and Virginia Park.
“Their bodies were found on the ground floor of the Algiers Manor, a three-story annex to the motel.
“Police and Guardsmen were called to the scene about midnight when sniping began from the Manor.
“Homicide Detective Edward Hay said shots were coming from the roof and windows on all floors.
“Police and Guardsmen were pinned down for several minutes before the firing stopped. . . .”
7. A Hurt Feeling
“Carl Cooper’s auntie called,” Auburey’s sister Thelma told me. “Sortor was over there that night. She said, ‘Is your mother there?’ I said, ‘She’s asleep,’ you know. So she says, ‘It’s about your brother.’ So I thought he was in jail, because the riot was still going on.”
“So when I got to the phone,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “she said, ‘Mrs. Pollard, you don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I’ve heard about you, but I’m sorry to tell you,’ she says, ‘but Auburey was killed this morning.’ I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, he was killed this morning. He was cooking hot dogs and the police walked in there and killed him.’ She said, ‘I can’t describe to you how they killed him. They killed him like a dog.’ She went to tell me how he was begging for his life. And when that woman told me that I had to let down the phone. I couldn’t talk to her. I was sick. My daughter had to finish taking the message. Then I called the morgue, because to verify it. They wouldn’t even give no information. Then I called my husband off his job. . . .”
“I was on a job,” Mr. Pollard told me, “at Outer Drive and Sherwood. I works for DPW. I loads a truck; I do not pull any punches. I’m a laborer aide. I do not mind it. So Pete was the foreman, the gentleman’s name is Pete, very nice guy, he came up to me, he says, ‘You’ve got a phone call from home, there’s something happened, one of your boys in trouble or one of your boys got hurt, one.’ Which do you know who I thought it was? I thought it was my third boy, because he’s always googy-googy. So I said, ‘Gee whiz,’ I was just shaking, ‘I hope it’s not Tanner.’ So therefore I goes in a telephone booth and I calls up. When I calls up between the operator was nice enough to let me listen to two conversations at one time, which when I picked up the family was already talking, she was saying, ‘Well, Auburey, they found Auburey dead this morning in the Algier Hotel.’ I said, ‘Oh, no,’ because he was supposed to be at home. I works two jobs, I was working right there on Sherwood right off of Outer Drive, that’s where I work at night. I work for a stainless-steel place, you know, where they put the rolls of stainless steel in, fix them up, but I was a janitor, not like a lot of people, I wasn’t no stainless-steel helper, I was working as a janitor. So I went home from there, you know. On the way I said to myself, ‘How in the world could all this be?’—you know. I said, ‘Maybe it’s a mistake.’ That’s the way I wanted to feel. So, my maw was there. My maw said, ‘Well, Baby, I tell you. We’ll go see.’ I said, ‘Maw, what’s this? A mistake?’ I said, ‘It couldn’t be Auburey, I know Auburey got more sense than that.’ Maw said, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Baby,’ she said, ‘you never know. So let’s go see.’ So we goes down to the morgue. So the lady at the morgue, she was very nice, she was beautiful, she was a stone champ. She was a very beautiful lady. She’s a ageable lady, she’s within knowledge of the world, she’s no fifteen, sixteen, twenty, or twenty-two years, she’s in her late forties or early fifties, right along there someplace. So we talked. We sit there and I bet you we talked for about thirty-five minutes, and we talked about youngsters, you know, how they communicate, how they do not if they want to be slick, you know—it’s life, we talked about everyday life. And then she says, ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I’ve been living in this place so long, just take out my trash I pay so much, just do little odds-and-end different things I have to pay so much.’ So we sit there and talk, and she said, ‘Well, I see you want to see him.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I walked up. There he was. She take me over and showed me Auburey. I said, ‘That’s my son.’ ”
“And when he went to that morgue and identified Auburey,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “he ain’t been right since. He ain’t been right since. I don’t know what kind of shape they had him in, but they had him buck-naked down there, and those bloody clothes we got back,
yessir, they give me his clothes back. I got the clothes and wallet. I got his clothes back. I got them for evidence, I got them bloody clothes. I can’t look at them. It makes me sick, just makes me sick to even look at them clothes.”
——
Lee had passed out, and Mrs. Gill was near collapse. Carl’s step-great-grandfather, James Young, brought his car to the Gills’ house. Mrs. Gill washed Lee up, took his bloody shirt off, and put a clean one on him. With the help of two men named Johnny and Bob who were living on the upper floor of the Gills’ house, they carried Lee out to Mr. Young’s car, and Mr. Young drove both Lee and Mrs. Gill to Northwest General Hospital. In the emergency room there Mrs. Gill was given something for her nerves, and a doctor took twelve stitches in the cut on the back of Lee’s head. Two policemen came into the emergency room, and Mr. Young told me that the following exchange took place.
Policeman: “Who brought him here?”
Mr. Young: “I brought him in.”
“You know him?”
“Yeah, I see him nearly every day.”
“How does that happen?”
“He’s a friend of my grandson. I see him at his house.”
“How do you happen to be there?”
“I’m the grandfather, why shouldn’t I be there?”
“Why’d you bring him in here?”
“I’d bring you here if I found you in his condition.”
Lee was now conscious, and the policeman questioned him. Lee said he had been beaten on the head by cops. “They told him he was lying,” Mrs. Gill said to me, “hadn’t no police beat him up, he’d jumped through some kind of plate glass, looting. Got the doctor kind of mad. The doctor said, ‘Why would he be lying? He’s under sedation.’ ”
The doctors sent Lee on to Detroit General Hospital, where he was given a bed.
——
Sortor testified that he went that morning to Dr. Thomas R. Carey, on Joy Road, who gave him some pills. Then he went to the morgue with Mr. Gill. They identified Carl’s remains and got his clothes. Missing from the trouser pockets was a roll of bills that Sortor estimated should have been about four hundred dollars; missing from the wrist of the body was a watch that had diamonds on it; missing from one of Carl’s fingers was a ring that Juli Hysell believed was worth more than a thousand dollars.
——
Lance Corporal Chaney Pollard, Company A, 7th Engineer Battalion, United States Marine Corps, Auburey’s twenty-one-year-old brother—Chaney happens to have been the surname of the black civil rights worker who was murdered in Mississippi in 1964 with two white colleagues—had been in Vietnam for nearly twelve months when Auburey was killed. “He could have been home,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “but see, he re-signed up to stay over there for another five months. After he could have come home. I felt pretty bad all the time about his being in Vietnam, I figured something was going to happen to him all the time, I wasn’t never thinking about something going to happen to Auburey. I was always thinking Chaney was going to get killed because he was over there in action, you know. He was going around building roads, digging booby traps, and stuff like that. I read there in the paper where some of the stuff he was doing, you know, it kind of scared me, you know. So I never thought it would be nothing ever happen to Auburey. I called the Red Cross, to Mrs. Hudson, and told them that my second son was killed, I had to have Chaney home. I had to verify it at the morgue to make sure before they sent for him, so my husband went down to the morgue and verified it, and I called them back. . . .”
——
Robert Jewel Pollard, Auburey’s seventeen-year-old brother, was imprisoned in the Michigan Reformatory at Ionia, serving a three-to-ten-year sentence for having stolen seven dollars from a newsboy. “My counselor, Mr. Jackson,” Robert told me, “was the first one who told me about it. He told me one of my brothers had got killed. He couldn’t pronounce the name too good, he said, ‘Aub, Aub, Aub.’ I didn’t say nothing. Wasn’t nothing for me to say. I called up, they let me call home. I called home that same day, and my mother and my brother and father told me. They didn’t know too much about it. They told me most of it. I learned about how the police beat on him and all that when I read it in the paper later. One of the police kept on telling my brother to stab him, that one that killed him—to stab him.”
——
Larry Reed’s father called the Temples very early that morning to say that someone had called to tell him that Fred Temple had been killed at the Algiers Motel. Mrs. Temple, who always got up at five in the morning to fix lunch for her husband to take to work, called at that hour to ask her sister to drive Mr. Temple to the motel. At the Algiers Miss Gilmore told Mr. Temple that the bodies had been taken away. A policeman took him to the annex, and Mr. Temple found Fred’s glasses on the floor of room A-3. From the Algiers Mr. Temple went to the morgue, which was closed; from there he went to police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien, where he could not learn anything; he went back to the morgue, but it was still closed. He went then to his job.
Later Eddie Temple, Fred’s oldest brother, went to the morgue and identified Fred’s body. There Eddie encountered Mr. Gill and Sortor, and they told Eddie what they knew. “This,” Eddie told me, “was the first I’d heard of the nature of the incident.”
——
No official person ever notified any of the families of the deaths of their sons. “They don’t tell you nothing,” Mrs. Gill said to me. “They won’t give you no kind of information. What hurts me so bad is they didn’t even notify me that Carl was dead. If it don’t be for the boys I wouldn’t never have known it.”
“The police didn’t even notify us,” Mrs. Pollard said to me. “That’s a hurt feeling.”
——
“My maw and I left the morgue,” Mr. Pollard told me. “My maw and I was coming on home, my maw said, ‘Baby, I thought you was going by the Algier Hotel.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll go.’ So when I got to the Algier Hotel, there was people there. Some people talking, some not, some watching, and some isn’t, you know how people do.” The place, in fact, was swarming. Homicide was back; the seal at the front door had been broken long before they got there. “I’m very funny anyway,” Mr. Pollard said to me, “I’m very funny that way, I’ll never say anything when I don’t know anything, I don’t say nothing if I don’t know nothing. I’ll wait to see what I’m doing. So I told my maw, I say, ‘I’m going home and get my camera.’ I go back. So I started from the top floor and worked to the bottom. That’s when I went to finding deer shots. That’s what they killed Auburey with, deer shots. They used double-barreled. I found a 300 high-speed Savage, and deer shots, and shotgun shells. I worked with the detectives. They were very nice to me. Now if I’d been like the most averagest Negro, or the most average human being white or Negro, if it had have been his son, when he walked up and asked the guy something, he’d have been cussing, swearing; I never got overemotional. I never would have found out what I knew if I’d have got overemotional. And they was beautiful. Each one of those gentlemen was beautiful. I talked to a guy of the Homicide, and he gave me a card to see him. I goes downtown to see him, and when I goes downtown looking for him, he was the same guy I just got through talking to! So I picked up real quick, so I just cooled it, I played it cool. But I never give up what I was doing, I doubled right back around and went back doing what I was doing. I didn’t think hard of him, because he had a job, that’s why the city pays him, because he got a job to do. He’s got a filthy job. Most filthy job in the world. And I’ve got the next to the filthiest job in the world.”
——
“After I’d heard that Fred had been shot in the Algiers,” Eddie Temple told me, “I heard in the news reports that three snipers had been killed at the Algiers. So when I heard the way it happened, I was sure that that was the way it happened. I knew Fred would never pick up a gun and shoot anybody, or shoot at somebody, or be a party to anything like that, ever. When I got home, Cleveland [Larry] Reed came over, and he told the fami
ly what had happened. About the line-up, and how he saw blood running down the back of Fred’s head. I talked with him at length. Then I talked with one of his friends, Rod, Roderick Davis. And it was after that that I called Detective Schlachter. I had heard his name at the morgue as the person who was investigating this. I waited down there at the morgue; I wanted to talk to the investigating detective on this. They said it would be Detective Schlachter who would be taking care of this. So it’s pretty hard to get through to the police to talk about anything. I went down to the Police Department. They wouldn’t let me in. They had it quadroned off, and they wouldn’t let you up the steps. So I telephoned, and I got him. He said he’d heard about it, but he hadn’t had a chance to get over and start the investigation yet. He said three snipers had been killed. That was when I proceeded to tell him that they were not snipers, that there wasn’t any sniping from that particular building, but that they were murdered.”
8. Fred Temple
In an immaculate living room with a carpeted floor and white plaster mirror frames and sconces against dark walls and crinkling, transparent plastic covers over handsomely upholstered sofa cushions, Mrs. John Temple, a large woman with an aquiline nose and a steady, deep gaze, talked to me, her voice controlled and her words measured, about her dead son:
“He was kind of slow in his books. Anyway, I never had any trouble out of him, he was always a good boy at home. He liked to work with photography, that was what he mostly liked. He was the baby: first Ella, then Eddie, then Eva May, then John, then the twins Hal and Herbert, and he was the last one, Freddie.
“He was a normal child, that’s all. After he got to be seventeen, he wanted to work like his father, wanted to get a good job in a factory. He slipped out of school and got a job with the Ford Motor Company. I got on him so bad trying to get him to get back in school, but he’d had a hard time with his reading, and he said the teacher told him it would be best to work at a job and go to adult school.
