The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

  “Let’s see, we moved around some. I’ve been in Detroit for twenty-six years, and Fred’s father, he’s had the one job, machine operator, Thompson Products, the same job for twenty-three, twenty-four years. Let’s see, he went, let’s see, to Catherine B. White School, Cleveland Junior High, Nolan Junior High, and in Pershing he reached 11B.

  “He had low blood pressure at one time, and his last job at Ford’s they had him working around the fires, and he couldn’t stand the heat. So he quit there, and he started working with his uncle seven days a week. His uncle’s a contractor—Robert Williams—he said he was going to teach Freddie to lay bricks to have a trade. Fred just didn’t work that one Sunday. Larry Reed called him, and I just thought he was going over on the next block, said he was going to do some backstage work. That’s why he got to the Algiers at all.

  “I just feel it didn’t have to come to this. If they’d been any kind of police. I don’t want to feel bitter toward no one, but when someone can be that cold. It looks like after you beat people for an hour you ought to be able to come to some kind of sense. . . .”

  2

  A DANGEROUS ACCOUNT

  At this point in the narrative, enter myself. Reluctantly. I have always, before this, stayed out of my journalism, even as a manipulative pronoun, having believed that it sufficed for a writer to “come through” to the reader—by the nature of his selections from the whole, his filtering of all that had gone through his eyes and ears and mind; by the intensity of feeling that might be read in the lines; by his “voice.” But this account is too urgent, too complex, too dangerous to too many people to be told in a way that might leave doubts strewn along its path; I cannot afford, this time, the luxury of invisibility. For the uses of invisibility, as Ralph Ellison has made so vividly and painfully clear—an inability or unwillingness to see the particularity of one’s fellow man, and with it a crucial indifference as to whether one is seen truly as oneself—these uses of not-seeing and of not-being-seen are of the essence of racism.

  In August 1967, soon after the Detroit riot of that summer, David Ginsburg, who had been appointed executive director of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders, asked me if I would write part of the commission’s report. After much thought I declined, on the ground that I did not want to attach my work to a document over which, as a whole, I would have no control at all. In the aftermath of that decision, however, I came to feel that I owed some sort of debt of work to this, the most intransigent and fear-ridden issue in American life, and I broke off the writing of a novel in order to undertake a piece of reportage on one of the summer rebellions. I went to Detroit, with a general intention of writing overall about the devastating uprising there, and I began to interview various officials, starting with Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh and Police Commissioner Ray Girardin and certain Negro leaders and some young black militants.

  As I explored Detroit’s riot in those first weeks, the incident at the Algiers Motel kept insisting upon attention, and eventually I determined to focus on it. This episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny that they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven in our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents.

  It was not easy to get started. It took weeks to build bridges into the still-seething ghetto. I simply could not barge in on the homes of the bereaved and injured, like a carpetbagging lawyer with cash in hand to purchase witnessings; I needed friendly introductions, and I was fortunate, at last, in finding a young woman who was a close friend, not only of one of the families that had lost a son, but also of the black militant who organized the tribunal about which, if you go on, you will in due course read. She opened doors for me, and then I was on my own.

  My own education in the course of the researches that followed was a staggering one. At the outset I learned how little I knew. I learned that experiences that I might have considered as credentials for this task had not given me sufficient insights for all that I was to confront. I had been born in China, had felt as a child the puzzling guilt of being pulled through the streets in a rickshaw by a yellow man; I had witnessed death and pain in war; I had tried to learn something about racism while writing several novels with racial themes; I had lived for part of the anxious summer of 1964 in the home of a black farmer (I was anxious; it was truly dangerous for him) in Holmes County, Mississippi; and for the past two years I had lived in intimacy with college students, the most open, most threatened, most serious, most generous people I had ever known. But these were not enough. Now I learned all sorts of new things, both about reality and about myself, and I learned how much more I have to learn about issues of race in my country.

  At first, when I moved at night through streets of the scattered ghettos of Detroit, I felt the foreignness I had experienced as a child in China; the sense of apartness, of being alien and in a minority. I was afraid. My fear was indiscriminate. The people I came to know helped me to rid myself of that fear. Like them I am prudent now when I move through the night streets, but I am no longer afraid in that particular way. In dealing with them I was obliged, in order to reach out all the way to their trust, to confront myself with a searing honesty, and at times, I must now confess, I was deeply chagrined to discover that stereotypic thoughts lurked in corners of my own mind, which I had hoped was more or less open, and that some of my own fears had been tinged by the irrational in our history.

  I was immeasurably aided in the ventilation of my mind by that surpassingly remarkable document of our time The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which every white American with any pretensions to racial understanding simply must read. (If you have not read it, close this book now and read that other and come back to these premises, if you will, later. I also wish, by the way, that some of our black friends who revere Malcolm X would read again with special care the last chapters of his book.) I had, besides, over the years, made it my business and pleasure—sometimes—to read works by Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, John Williams, LeRoi Jones, John Oliver Killens, William Melvin Kelley, Eldridge Cleaver, and other authors of their race, and I had found, indeed, that life imitated their art, when they achieved it, and that they had prepared me for my work.

  In the end my new friends gave me such trust as to tell me secrets I wish I had not heard, for I must, or be a monster, withhold attributions of them from the book, and I had really wanted to avoid all holding back, all distortion; I heard murmurings of incest, of crime-breeding hatreds within families, of urges to kill outside families and across the dreadful color line. But I heard—apart from some ritual salutes from a few young militants I met—no word of hatred of me because of my being white; I was taken into black homes and was made to feel serenely at home; I observed at firsthand manifold examples of courage, loyalty, and family closeness; particularly moving were the sweet consideration of the tough young men for their mothers and their extreme loyalty to each other at all hazard; I had with these families and young men a sense of the importance of every moment of life much like that imparted to me by my student friends.

  Eventually I had to face the problem of how to write about what I had learned, and I made certain decisions which I want to share with you, at a risk of being (as is my habit) obvious, before we go any farther. There was a need, above all, for total conviction. This meant that the events could not be described as if witnessed from above by an all-seeing eye opening on an all-knowing novelistic mind; the merest suspicion that anything had been altered, or made up, for art’s sake, or for the sake of effect, would be absolutely disastrous. There could be no “creative reconstruction.” Doubts about chronology could only be revealed, not resolved. No names could be changed, because whe
n you change a man’s name you change the whole man. The story would have to be told as much as possible in the words of the participants; and because I was all too aware that the truth had not always been told me, and indeed had not always been spoken under oath in court, I would have to let you, the reader, know at every step of the way exactly who was speaking, and to whom, and under what circumstances; and I could only use quotation marks when I had actually heard words spoken with my own ears, or was quoting from testimony given in court, or could give a clear attribution of a source which you could evaluate for yourself. An able Detroit newspaperman, Ladd Neuman, helped me run down some details; I will tell you when he quotes others. In a story involving such a large cast of characters and such terrible cross currents of jeopardy and of desire for justice and safety and revenge, I am bound to have made some mistakes, no matter how scrupulous I may have tried to be. I can only hope they will have been small ones.

  Let not any of this suggest to you that I have been trying to persuade you, in the fraudulent tradition of American journalism, that I have been, or shall be, “objective.” There is no such thing as objective reportage. Human life is far too trembling-swift to be reported in whole; the moment the recorder chooses nine facts out of ten he colors the information with his views. I trust this chapter will have revealed some of my bias for discount.

  There were limitations within which I had to work. Trials of this case were being prepared, and some participants could not, and some would not, openly speak to me. I was unable to see three important witnesses. Nevertheless, I think you will find that a great deal was disclosed by those who did talk to me and did testify, for their very speech—the cadences, the images, the texture of their telling, the conscious and unconscious subterfuges they used—was, in my view, profoundly revealing.

  Why did I not wait for the trials to be spun out? Was there not a risk of distorting or adulterating the legal process by such exposure as this? There was. I was fearfully aware that jail sentences, reputations, and perhaps even lives were at stake in the trials that were pending from this case. But I was also aware that lives had already been lost in it; that trials and appeals might drag on for several years (one constitutional issue at the first murder hearing might well be destined to go to the Supreme Court of the United States); that time does not stand still in the crisis of black and white in our country; that the families of the slain boys perceive the justice of a Northern city—one that was supposed to have been particularly enlightened—as being barely distinguishable from that of Mississippi. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which occurred during my writing of this book, demonstrated that white racists had learned nothing from that great preacher of nonviolence and less than nothing, even, from the instructive violence in the summers in the cities; and it gave me, along with a sense of despair, a sense of great urgency about the completion of this book. I am not so foolish as to believe that my telling of these events will change the course of history, or even of justice in this narrow instance; but I do believe that every scrap of understanding, every door-crack glimmer of illumination, every thread that may lead not just to survival of the races but to health—all should be shared as soon as possible. There is so much to be done in so little time.

  Perhaps I should say at this point that I will not take any money from any source for the publication of this story.

  If this declaration suggests to anyone that part of my motive in writing it may have been guilt, so be it. There is plenty of guilt lying around for the taking. Perhaps the whole point of this book is that every white person in the country is in some degree guilty of the crimes committed at the Algiers.

  The report of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders, which was published in March 1968, blamed the explosive conditions in our cities that gave rise to the summer rebellions of recent years upon white racism. In its tone of frankness this was a remarkable document, and the spectacle of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had not hesitated over the months to suggest, by epithet and innuendo, that anyone who disagreed with his Vietnam policy was a coward—the spectacle of this man running for cover from the conclusions of the commission which he created, and which he charged with the high task of seeking truth, was not only disgusting; it was positively inflammatory, for it denied the very thesis of the report. The Texan seemed to want to deny the charge of white racism. Only with the death of Dr. King did he stir himself to piety, and then his words proposed much too little much too late.

  Remarkable as the commission’s report was, it did not face up to the implications of its own historic accusation. All of its recommendations were in the nature of palliations, and they did not attack the root problem of racism itself. There was not a whisper in all its pages about sex, which I believe to be at the very core of racism. If real progress is to be made, it cannot be made simply by expenditures of funds, even in great sums, on “programs”; racism must be educated or coaxed or wrenched or stamped out of the centers of injustice and grievance—namely, out of police forces, courts, legislatures, unions, industry, schools, the civil service, and the bureaucracy of welfare.

  There are four main causes of racial violence: unequal justice, unequal employment opportunities, unequal housing, unequal education. This book, to put it in perspective, deals only with the first. I believe that is the one that should be attacked first, because it is at the cutting edge of irritation in the inner cities; because it is the prime cause of the deep anger of those without whom there would be no summer rebellions, the young black males; and because, to be practical about it, its remedy would cost not a cent. The remedy is in the minds of men. Unequal justice is experienced by the black populace at two points: what happens with the cop in the street, and what happens with the prosecutor and lawyer and judge in court.

  The men and women involved in the Algiers incident were caught up in processes much larger than themselves. This does not mean that they do not deserve compassion or punishment or, in one or two cases, both. It means rather that their fates—for fate intervenes precisely when the individual is helplessly caught up by cyclonic forces of history and of human nature—their fates, far from being commonplace, are elevated to something close to the tragic. I do not think I am overblowing. Though the principals of the Algiers incident may not be heroic figures and so may not be entitled to the fullest measure of tragedy, I bid you to read on about them and see whether you are not pretty well purged of pity and terror as you follow this tale of humble citizens to its unresolved ending.

  3

  TOO HOT TO HANDLE

  Wednesday evening, July 26, to Monday afternoon, July 31

  1. We Began Yelling

  “It was kind of an accident,” Leon Atchison, administrative assistant in Detroit to U. S. Representative John Conyers, Jr., told me, “that we took the Algiers case to the Justice Department. Me and Congressman Conyers and Arthur Featherstone and Julius Watson of our staff here and State Senator James Del Rio, a friend of ours named Lester Morgan, and Julian Witherspoon, who works for TAP, had volunteered to go out on Wednesday night, take these bullhorns out and try to persuade people to observe the curfew, you know. We went over to the Tenth Precinct. The Police Commissioner had called over there and told this lieutenant that we were coming, and we went in the office there and the lieutenant sat us down and told us what the routine would be, said there were going to be these three squad cars to take us out and the officers who were going to ride in those squad cars were having dinner, and we would just wait for them there in the office.

  “So we sat around awhile, and then we got tired of waiting, and we wandered out into the lobby. The police stations in Detroit were the most guarded place of any place in the city. They had all these National Guard and policemen and Army people standing around at parade rest with their guns, so there were so many of them there that when we got out there in the lobby they didn’t even notice us, and we just stood around there and watched what was going on.”

  This was not the first time
Congressman Conyers had been willing to take his chances in the riot. Conyers, a handsome, mustached, impeccably dressed bachelor, one of two Negro U.S. Representatives from the city—Detroit being the only city in the country in 1967 to have two Negro Congressmen—had gone out on Twelfth Street late Sunday morning and had climbed up on the hood of a car with a bullhorn to try to cool the first mob of the riot. “We’re with you,” he had shouted, according to The New York Times. He tried to tell the crowd that he would make an effort to have all white policemen withdrawn from the area. “No, no, no,” the rioters chanted. “Uncle Tom!” “Don’t want to hear it!” A bottle crashed on the curb by the car. A rock hit a nearby policeman. Someone gave Conyers a hand and he jumped down. “You try to talk to those people,” he said to a Detroit newspaper reporter, “and they’ll knock you into the middle of next year.” Later he said to another newspaperman that he doubted if anyone—except possibly the late Malcolm X—could have stemmed the riot at that point.

  Atchison went on: “And they were taking these prisoners out of the garage beside the station one by one past the desk sergeant to another door, where they were having the interrogations. We were just standing around there, and the door from the garage flew open, and here came this cop with no shirt on, with a judo lock around the neck of this fellow, a colored man, and he was shouting, ‘You big black motherfucker, you come on now, come on, get in here.’ He couldn’t move him, so he took two handcuffs and put them around his hand and hit him on the forehead and just split his head open. And then a little bit later the interrogation room door flew open, and this prisoner came out all bloody and with a smashed nose, and they took him out and put him on a bus; they had three buses outside they were putting these prisoners on. And after that the door to the garage opened, and this woman came out just covered with blood.