by John Hersey
Everything this teacher says about Auburey has to be measured against one statement he made to Neuman—namely that Pollard was known to be a black militant. If there was anything Auburey, and all of his friends, for that matter, Lee and Carl and Sortor and Michael, were not, it was “black militant.” There was not a breath of politics in them; perhaps they would have been better off as men had they been able to attach themselves to a political idea. The indiscriminateness of this judgment by a teacher who had had eight years to develop the keenest of insights is exactly equivalent to the indiscriminateness of the executions of such diverse youths as Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard, and Fred Temple, as if they were all black militants, which none of them was, or snipers, which none of them was, or pimps, which they were accused of being but which none of them was. If Auburey was a black militant in Mr. Sunday’s eyes, then he was truly invisible to the man who had him in class every day.
Sunday was frank to tell Neuman that he had been afraid of some of his students. “Some time when one of them is about thirty,” he said to Neuman, “down on his luck, out of a job, I wouldn’t doubt he’ll come back and try to kill me.” Neuman asked Sunday why he stayed at Northwestern if he was so fearful of young black militants. “I don’t care about color,” he said. “This is an inner-city school. I doubt if there’s one white person here. I’m proud of my job; I’m not going to let anyone run me out. Our kids know they’re getting more help here than they could anywhere else. We’re one of the few schools open twelve months. None of our kids was jailed during the riots. We had better attendance during the riots in summer school than our regular attendance.”
Speaking of Auburey, Mr. Sunday said, “He probably had an I.Q. of 70, but I can’t say that for sure. He was pretty high-strung. He was one of those whose veins and nerves are bulging.”
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“Auburey told me before it happened,” Thelma Pollard said to me, “that he was going to get into a fight with him. He said the teacher accused him of things he didn’t do. He called him a hoodlum and the leader of a gang. He said he wasn’t the leader of that gang, period. The teacher just blamed that on him.
“See, Central came up to Northwestern—Central’s a high school—and they started a fight, and somebody yelled to run and get Auburey, and in fact he could fight real good, and he was beating them all up, so the teacher called him a ringleader, and the teacher called him a punk.”
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Sunday said to Ladd Neuman that 150 kids from Central High School had come to Northwestern “with guns, knives, and everything,” looking for Auburey Pollard. “This is something like New York,” the teacher said to Neuman. “There’s a gang for every street”; and it was known around school, he said, that one of the gangs was after Pollard.
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“That day,” Tanner told me, “Auburey was sick and he didn’t want to go to school.” “He had a headache,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “because he had sinus, see, because I took him to a doctor.” “He said he had a headache in school,” Thelma told me, “so he asked the teacher could he go home, and so the teacher said he wasn’t sick, but he was, and so the teacher called him a punk, so he got mad at him and hit him.”
“He accused Auburey of things he wasn’t doing,” Mrs. Pollard said to me. “Him and Auburey had a few words, so he hit Auburey, before all the classroom, so Auburey beat him up.”
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“When you’re ill,” Sunday said to Neuman, “you have to go to the health clinic. At the health clinic, if there’s no one home, they won’t send them because you know they could go home and die. Auburey said he was sick. I sent him to the clinic. He called home and no one was home, so they sent him back. He got very angry and said, ‘I’m going home and no one’s going to stop me.’ I told him to sit down at his desk and lay his head on his hands and stay there. Then I got careless. I usually don’t turn my back—like the old gunman days in the old West. But this time I got lazy. This time I did, and I got hit across the back of my head. He hit me with his hands. He had four gold insignia rings on each hand. They worked just like brass knuckles.” Sunday said he went down on his knees and could hear Auburey cursing him; and that Auburey went on hitting him on the arms, back, and head until he was nearly unconscious and another teacher came in and pulled Auburey away.
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After this incident, Mr. Sunday felt that incarceration in Northwestern High School would no longer be sufficient for Auburey Pollard. “He went downtown,” Thelma told me, “and took out a warrant on him. Auburey had to go to court for it.” Sunday told Neuman that his fellow teachers were surprised when he pressed charges. “They done took Auburey,” Mrs. Pollard said to me, “and had a trial without even telling me. And when we were back in court, because he was up for sentence, and we’d gone back, and when the judge read out the ticket”—the judge, Mrs. Pollard told me, and this will be a matter of interest later in this account, was the Honorable Robert E. DeMascio—“he say he going to let the students know they couldn’t fight with a teacher. And he said that Auburey was prejudiced, hitting him on account of prejudice. Auburey didn’t hit him for prejudice. Auburey hit him for calling him a hoodlum. And Auburey had said, that teacher, the next time he hit him on the back, hit him before the class, he was going to hit him back. So when he hit Auburey on the back, Auburey started beating on him. I want to give it to you straight. They sent him up right away for fifteen days”—to the Detroit House of Correction. He was sentenced on March 10, 1965. “At Dehoco,” Mrs. Pollard said, “he had to fire the furnace every day.”
13. No More Trouble
“After Auburey got fifteen days,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “he never got in no more trouble. He said, ‘Momma, I can walk over things now.’ Said, ‘Momma, I don’t want to get in no more trouble, I ain’t about to go out there no more.’ Whatever they did to him out there, he never did want to go back no more. He didn’t bother Mr. Sunday no more, he didn’t bother no teacher, ain’t bothered a soul since.”
14. Little Brother, Don’t Do That Way
Robert, the youngest Pollard boy, seemed to be getting in trouble a lot. Once a fur hat was stolen from a J. L. Hudson truck, and the police suspected Robert.
“I remember when the policemen came to the house,” Thelma told me, “and they came in and searched the house, without a search warrant, too. They just came on in, there was about three or four cars, looked like somebody had really stole something, or somebody’d been murdered, you know. But I don’t know, Robert, he didn’t take nothing off none of them, you know. They’d tell him to shut up, and he’d say, ‘I don’t have to shut up in my own house.’ ”
“Robert shouted at the policemen,” Mrs. Pollard said, “ ‘You don’t talk to me that way in this house. This is my house. Don’t you come in here swearing and yooping and yelling around. This is my house. You have no right in here without a warrant. Hit the door! Get out! I tell you, man, hit the door.’ ”
“So,” Thelma said, “they was getting ready to hit Robert, and Auburey ran down the steps like a light. He was going to beat them up if they hit Robert. Auburey’d been nice enough to let them in the house. But the policemen didn’t really search around much, because there was two white policemen, and they had known Auburey and Robert and me, and they came downstairs and said they had searched, but they hadn’t really. They were pretty good friends. But the hat wasn’t anywhere anyway.”
“After the police left,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “Auburey, he said, ‘Little brother, don’t do that way.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t ought to do no policeman that way.’ ”
15. Welding All the Way Around
Of all the young men who witnessed the Algiers Motel incident, I have only been able to find that one, and that was Auburey Pollard, was touched at any point by the $231 million spent on anti-poverty programs in Detroit under the Cavanagh administration. Some time after his fight with Mr. Sunday, Auburey dropped out of school, and on October 10, 1965, he enrolled in the McNamara Sk
ills Center, which operated under funds provided by the Manpower Development Training Act and was supervised by the Detroit Board of Education. “He took up welding,” Mrs. Pollard said, “and so he learned to weld all the way around, he got 348 hours of welding. He made twenty dollars a week while he was learning it, so after he learned it real good he was a arc welder. He wanted to go into commercial art, but my husband didn’t approve of it, because he said you couldn’t make no money as a artist. But I think he could have made money. But his father didn’t want him to, he wanted him to take up a trade, so he took up welding.”
The Skills Center records show that Auburey did not complete the course but dropped out on January 28, 1966, to take a job with the T. L. Gersack Company. “They first put him in a little bitty small place,” Mrs. Pollard said. “He didn’t like that.”
Mr. Pollard made a comment to me one day on anti-poverty programs. “It’s just pitiful how the Negro, just all the Negroes in Detroit, and the ones with money and without, they do not understand that without one ball you cannot bounce. Don’t look for no pity. No sympathy. Nobody going to give you that. Know what I mean? Patting you on the back, that ain’t going to help you none. If I can’t run, you can pat me all day, and hell, I’ll still be sitting here. But if I make up my mind I want to run, seeing everybody else run, I’ll get up and go right along with them. I might be a little slow. A friend of mine says, you know, he says, ‘I might not be a racehorse but I’m a Shetland pony running on the racetrack with all the racehorses. I might be way back here, but I’m still running.’ ”
16. Supposed to Be a Pretty Good Job
Employment records of the Ford Motor Company show that an Auburey Pollard was hired at the Rouge complex on October 20, 1966. “He was a arc welder at Ford’s,” Mrs. Pollard said to me. “Supposed to be a pretty good job. Sometimes his eyes were bothering him, because the first job they got for him, he burned his cuticles in his eyes, didn’t have his mask right, probably. So he worked at Ford’s on arc welding.”
17. Decide a Whole Lot of Things
Toward the end of his life, Auburey began to feel that he was something of an outsider with his friends; they were using him as a fighter, they didn’t really like him. Part of the basis for this feeling may have been established in the fall of 1964, when all three of his best friends were sent as juvenile delinquents to the Boys’ Training School, in Lansing. “They sent me up for B. and E.,” Sortor told me, “Carl for B. and E., Lee for car theft. Me and Carl, we was in the same place. There was about thirty-six in a cottage; we wasn’t in the same cottage, you know, his cottage was over further than mine, but we’d see each other when we come out to go to our details, used to talk to each other.”
“At the Training School,” Lee said to me, with a faint smile at his lips, “they showed you how you could get along without taking cars and without stealing and stuff like that. That you don’t have to do anything like that. It was all right, though. You had a chance to study and decide a whole lot of things before you get out. I was office boy. I got out about a month before Carl, three weeks at the most. Sortor got out a week after I did.”
18. A Less Happy Circle
“I don’t hate no policemans,” Mr. Pollard said to me one day, speaking of the kind of justice black men and boys get in Detroit, “don’t hate no judges, but if justice is going to be—when I do wrong, I gets fined, I suffer for it, and I don’t expect any more. I could ask for leniency, but I really don’t expect it, because I’m poor. But as far as the Negro, he lives in the ghettos, he doesn’t know anything else but the ghettos, his parents teach him that because he comes up that way from a little small fellow, to get what you can—grab, quick! The Negro is looked upon as a minority group. Anything that he does, everybody see it. If you think I’m lying, go down to court tomorrow. You’ll see how many—now”—and he began to count white suburbs on his fingers—“out in Dearborn, they got their own court; Birmingham, they got their own court; Redford, they got their own court. Murder, regardless to what it is, unless there’s a case where they bring it downtown, but they keeps it out. What does this do with the Negro? It puts him in a circle, puts him in one little circle. And every one of them, he got to go down in front of Judge DeMascio, Judge Davenport, and the rest of them. It’s a racket, that’s all it is! It’s the politicians. They work in a circle. You can see the money moving. You don’t have to be blind unless you’re stupid!”
19. She Taught Him about Life
“This one time,” Sortor told me, “I come out of the Training School, home leave, and I seen Auburey. He say he was staying with his older sister. I say, ‘Come on, man! I know you ain’t got no older sister.’ It was this older woman; she had a place of her own.”
I asked Mrs. Pollard later if she had liked the woman. “Like her? How could I like her? She’s older than I am! Her son was a friend of Auburey’s. She liked boys, she taught him about life. Auburey wasn’t but seventeen years old, and she took him in, her own children sleeping in the house and she’s sleeping with Auburey. Once when a boy of hers had a burst appendix, Auburey took him in his arms and carried him to the hospital. It was right then, while they was waiting for news from the hospital, that she took Auburey. Auburey told me he loved her, told me not for me to break it up. I didn’t break it up. She’s the one broke it up!”
“When she wanted to break it up,” Sortor told me, “she had two men, one named Mac and another one, up to her flat waiting for him when he come in, they was going to beat Auburey up. But Auburey beat them up. They went down and made a complaint against Auburey, and he got taken down there, and they made him put up a peace bond”—a device, used by the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, which has no legal force but is simply a warning to contentious persons to cease combat for a given time or face prosecution.
20. Equal Friends
Sortor and Carl and Lee were back from Training School. “We was all equal friends,” Sortor said. “Everybody liked the other guys. Whenever one of them got down to the police station, we’d go down and see what they got him for, and the police would say, ‘Well, he got to go down to court for something,’ so we’d leave him some cigarettes and candy. Carl and Lee had cars. But Lee’s Bonneville was broke, so we’d drive around in Carl’s—a ’63 Grand Prix. We’d ride to the Twenty Grand, and go out to the White Castle, around there, go to after-hour parties. Sit around playing records, drinking a little beer. Where we was going, they used to know us, they was just a place where a guy liked to throw a little party, you know, after a dance.”
21. On Being Beaten Up
The Twenty Grand was the boys’ favorite place. “It’s one of the most popular spots as far as the Negro grass roots,” Al Dunmore, managing editor of the Negro Michigan Chronicle, told me. “They have a bowling alley there. They have a hall available for quantities of dances, plus most of the blues and rock-and-roll outfits, the second-line Motown artists—this is the stepping stone to the top white places, like the Roostertail and the Elmwood. It’s a place where you can pick up a girl. You go in the door, and you sit at a table, and shortly after you’ll be sitting by a girl.”
One night at the Twenty Grand, Sortor told me, “some friend went up to Auburey and said I was going to shoot him, you know. So he came over there to see me before I’d shoot him, we was talking. When I first went in the Twenty Grand I seen him and went up to him and shook hands, walked around and talked for a little while, so I said, I’m going on over here on the other side of the floor, man.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll see you around here.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And so I went over there and set down and talked with two or three girls, you know, then I seen Pratt and some more girls talking with Auburey, next thing I know he ran over there and hit me on the side of my head, see.”
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“Him and Sortor was fighting,” Auburey’s younger brother Tanner said, “and the police turned around, and Sortor got away some way. Sortor had said something, told everybody Auburey was going to kick his butt, or s
omething like that, so Auburey went over there and started fighting with Sortor, and so everybody was standing around watching, and the police, they came over and they grabbed Auburey and they started beating him up, and then they grabbed Sortor, and the next thing I know they let Sortor go, and so I was standing there, watching them beat up Auburey, and so everybody was talking about, ‘That’s your brother, you know, why don’t you go on and help?’ And I say, ‘No.’ So finally I just walked up there, and I say, ‘That’s my brother.’ So the policeman turn and say, ‘What? What?’ I say, ‘That’s my brother.’ So he turned around and hit me. So then some more policemen came over and started hitting me, and so we started fighting.
“There was so many polices, you know, they didn’t beat me that bad, they just got in a couple of hits, but they was swinging so fast, you know, I was moving out the way, and they was hitting each other. I’d duck down like this, you know, and this one policeman’s hand would just go on over and hit the other one. There were so many of them, you know how it is, hitting one person. There was so many policemen that they probably beat up they own self, beat up each other.
“And so anyway they took us down in the basement, to this little room. That’s when they beat me up, when they took me down there. One of them was holding me, and another was talking about, ‘Where do you get hitting me at?’ I said, ‘I didn’t hit you.’ And he say, ‘Yes, you did.’ Other one says, ‘That’s the one. That’s the one hit you. Go ahead.’ And then one policeman run up to you and hit you, and then another one run up to you and hit you. And then they’d hold you up, you know, and hit you in the stomach and stuff, you know, and hit you in the teeth, you know.
