The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

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  “I seen,” Sortor testified, telling of joining the line, “a few officers hitting the ones up against the wall. . . . It wasn’t all of them hitting at the same time. . . . All of them didn’t hit me. . . . A few of them hollered out different things, you know, what they should do, you know.” Sortor testified that Senak was the one who had put him up against the wall. “This officer, he was walking back and forth hitting us in the head and everything.” As to how he saw anything at all, Sortor said, “You got your face sort of slanted to the side, you know. You weren’t going to turn all the way around with them beating you in the head.”

  ——

  “I had only my underwear on,” Larry Reed told me. “They wouldn’t even let me put my pants on.”

  ——

  One of the officers, Michael testified, “went over to Auburey Pollard, he got him off the wall. And then August”—Michael’s identifications, as we shall see, were not always accurate—“and Paille started beating him right there, right by the wall. And Auburey fell, and one of the police officers had a shotgun and he hit him with it, and the shotgun broke. . . .”

  “Pulled Auburey out the line,” Sortor told me, “and just bust him in the head with the gun, and he said, ‘This nigger made me break my shotgun. . . .’ ”

  “And then,” Michael testified, “Auburey said, ‘I’m sorry that I broke the gun.’ And then . . . they started beating him some more.”

  ——

  “They took twenty or thirty dollars out of my pocket,” Roderick Davis told me. “Reached in my pocket and took it out.”

  ——

  “The policeman who first entered room A-7,” Karen told the police—and elsewhere she identified that man as Paille—“walked up and down the line hitting people in the ribs and asking who had the gun and who was the sniper.”

  ——

  Sortor testified that Dismukes “came in about the time they was beating us.” Another time he testified that Dismukes hit him with a stick on the back of his head behind the right ear. “He just struck me with the stick and asked me where, where was the gun. . . . On my shoulder, you know, when I went down, he hit me across my shoulder. . . . When I went down, when I fell down to my knees, then he hit me across my shoulder, told me to get back up by the wall.”

  22

  JUST IN TIME TO PRAY

  1. Enter (?) Charles Moore

  Charles Moore told me that in the middle of that night he drove his Cadillac, crumpled in front from the collisions with the police car the previous Sunday, from his home in the northwest, down the Lodge Expressway; he got off at Pallister, made his way up two blocks to Virginia Park—“they wasn’t bothering anybody in the curfew”—and drove into the Algiers parking lot by the driveway between the annex and the main part of the motel. “As I was coming in between there,” he said to me, “a policeman stopped me. He had a shotgun. This was about when Dismukes started firing—way I figured after when I heard about it all. They took me in the building and put me in the line. Going in there I saw a body lying on the floor.”

  No one of all the witnesses, inside the annex or out, reported having seen any such person that night as Charles Moore; no policeman, Guardsman, or trooper told in court or in reports that he had seen a car pull into the Algiers parking lot or that he had taken a black man inside the building. Considering the number of men who remarked on the presence of the captive in the yellow shirt—he was taken at just about the time when Moore said he drove up—this lack of corroboration is especially notable. But Moore told me and others an extraordinarily circumstantial story.

  Moore told a reporter from the Free Press that he drove to the Algiers intending to visit his friend Adams in the motel proper; he said he also knew Shirley Williams, the man who had had been living in A-1, whose tape recorder had been taken out by the police that morning, and Eli (“Bubba”) Carter, the protector of the two white girls.

  “ ‘Turn around and face that wall,’ ” Moore told me the police commanded, “ ‘and don’t look in back of you.’ ” “Everybody was so scared,” he told the Free Press reporter, “begging them not to kill them. I was scared, too. They kept saying they were going to kill all of us.” “People were shouting, ‘I ain’t done nothing,’ ” he told me. “Pleading for their lives. And then they said to pray. ‘Pray out good and loud.’ ”

  2. Oh, Lord, Please

  Charles Moore told me he shouted out over and over, “Oh, Lord, please help me to get out of this alive.”

  Larry Reed told me he recited the Lord’s Prayer at the top of his voice.

  Roderick Davis, at the command “Start praying out loud,” called out first the Lord’s Prayer, he told me, then “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” then the Twenty-third Psalm. His voice was deep and strong: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . .”

  He told me: “One of the policemen said, ‘He’s really praying,’ and they all started laughing.”

  23

  ENTER WARRANT OFFICER THOMAS

  1. Too Much Paperwork

  Of all those who protested their reluctance to enter the annex and their tardiness in doing so, Warrant Officer Thomas was the most fervent.

  “It wasn’t but a matter of a short time,” he testified, “that the policeman came back out of the building. . . . The State Policeman walked back to the car and asked one policeman how many were shot, and I believe the statement was two or three, to that effect. When one State Trooper came back to the police car I heard him call his dispatcher and state that there was one dead and one was still kicking and to send an ambulance. . . .

  “The one prisoner that we had, I tried to pawn him off. I had no reason to keep a prisoner. I had no place for him. I asked one of the policemen, I believe it was a State Trooper, what he wanted to do with the prisoner. He said—he made the statement, ‘I don’t want him. There is too much paper work to him.’ ”

  “We interrogated the prisoner,” Thomas testified another time. “In fact, the one State Trooper searched him, and he told him to take off. He asked him where he lived, and he was clean. He said take off. I asked him if he wasn’t going to arrest him. He said, ‘There is too much paper work involved.’ That was the statement I got from the State Trooper. . . . And he told him to make it, and the guy wouldn’t—he said he wasn’t going to run, he was afraid of getting shot.”

  2. We Left the Scene

  “I was directed to stay with the patrol cars,” Trooper Robert Mickelsen told the Detroit detectives, “as a guard and radio communications, as the others dashed across the street. A short time later, someone yelled to call for an ambulance, which I requested by radio. The other officers returned to the patrol car shortly, and we left the scene before the ambulance arrived.” (It never did.)

  3. The Building Was Safe

  “I went back into the Great Lakes Building,” Thomas testified, “and I called my battalion commander, Colonel Dryden, and reported there had been a shooting, and we assumed, or I assumed, that one was dead and one was wounded critically, to this effect. And he referred me to the Sergeant-Major, and they were pretty busy. This was at the high command post. And the Sergeant-Major said, ‘Go over and check it out.’ All right. So I hung up there and called the president of Great Lakes Insurance Company, Mr. Gaillard, and reported to him that there had been a shooting in the area, but as far as I was concerned the building was still safe; that there was no damage done to the building.” This extraordinary latter phone call—announcing, in effect, that the property of the Great Lakes Insurance Company had not been damaged by Carl Cooper’s blank pistol, but that, indeed, this same Cooper and possibly one other had already given their lives for having threatened the property, if only with noise—was, at the very least, an ironic realization of the perception of the black population of Detroit, that law-enforcement officers were out in force during the rebellion in order to protect not human rights and human life but material property, store goods, buildings, capital investment.
This perception intensified the rage and gave the spur to stealing and burning.

  “I went out front asking one of the men to go with me. I had several volunteers—. . . I had two volunteers, and I picked Henson. . . .”

  “I can give you the time the phone call was put through,” Thomas offered in the conspiracy hearing. “The phone call came through to the battalion commander, I believe, at ten minutes to one. This was 0050 hours.” But chronology was always a pesky jumble to Thomas. In the Dismukes trial, he testified that he had called Mr. Gaillard first and the command post afterward.

  4. Check the Annex

  “Warrant Officer Thomas then returned to the Great Lakes Building,” the synopsis of Thomas’s statement to the Detroit police said, “and called the Battalion Commander, Lt. Colonel Dryden, informing him of the incident and reported no National Guard casualties. He was referred to Sgt. Major Kazup, who requested Warrant Officer Thomas to check the Annex and see what the situation was. In company with Pfc. Henson, Warrant Officer Thomas entered the front door, saw private watchman Dismukes, several Army personnel (about 5) and two Detroit Police officers, (One of the Detroit officers he recognized from an earlier incident) and 5 or 6 Negro men and 2 white girls lined up facing the wall on the east side of the lobby. One of the officers were beating one of the Negro men over the head with a pistol and then a blackjack. One of the girls was already bloody.”

  “To give you an idea of time,” Thomas testified, “I don’t know how long it takes for blood to dry on a person—the blood on the girl had already started drying. It was already dry. How long this takes, I don’t know, but I estimate it between fifteen, twenty, maybe thirty minutes after the original entry into the building.”

  5. Reluctance

  ATTORNEY LIPPITT: “How did you feel about this building?”

  THOMAS: “I didn’t want to go in there.”

  LIPPITT: “Were you frightened when you walked in there?”

  THOMAS: “I would say I was.”

  6. Pretty Rough

  “I think I seen this Dismukes first,” Thomas testified. “He was one of the first ones. . . . I believe I asked him how many was dead. . . . And I’m pretty sure of this. This is not really accurate. I think he said there was two dead. . . . There were two policemen. . . . They were questioning them, treating them pretty rough. . . .” Thomas, under examination, identified Senak as one who was hitting those in the line “. . . with a pistol. . . . It looked like a slap jack. I mean, he could have hit them with his hands, too. . . . I attempted to search one of the front rooms and also I . . . saw a shotgun with a broken stock on a chair in the hall.”

  “Warrant Officer Thomas looked in room A-2,” the synopsis reported, “and saw a Negro man whom he had seen on the street earlier in the night lying in the doorway apparently dead. In room A-3 was another Negro man propped by the bed. He also appeared to be dead. He saw no one else in the room. Thomas and Dismukes searched the second floor, found no weapons.”

  “I walked up the stairs into the hallway and came back down,” he testified. “It looked to me at the time it had been pretty thoroughly searched . . . because the beds were all turned over and stuff was laying out on the floor and pretty well scattered around.” Thomas returned to the hallway.

  7. Confidence

  “Then this warrant officer,” Robert Greene told Eggleton, “that’s when he came into the picture. . . . He said, ‘I know how to handle these niggers.’ ”

  24

  INTERROGATIONS

  1. About a Gun

  Now began a new phase of the incident—a series of individual interrogations. Foreshadowing the gruesome “game” to come, the officers began to take people from the line, one by one, into rooms, for what might have been called—and might strictly not—questionings.

  A warning should be posted, at this point, as to chronology. There was so much confusion in the hallway, with so many uniformed men acting independently, spontaneously, and dangerously, that the record is unclear; memories of officers and witnesses alike were shaded or distorted later by guilt, fear, and bewilderment. We have seen how some have tried to emphasize the lateness of their entry into the annex. I am continuously aware that my reliance in this narrative on the statements of witnesses tends to fragment the story; it is not so much written as listened to, in bits and pieces. The sequence of these fragments follows, as far as it is possible to follow, my sense of the run of the actual events, but I must emphasize that I cannot vouch for many minor and some major points of chronology.

  Lee Forsythe, I am quite sure, was first to be taken. He was at the head of the line, and several witnesses agreed that he went first. He testified that Paille took him into room A-4, the door to which was more or less across from the fountain in the hallway. This room, with a large bay window looking out, by day, on the elm-lined avenue of Virginia Park, contained a double bed, a kitchenette against the wall opposite the bay window, and a television set by the window across from the foot of the bed.

  “He was going up and down the line,” Robert Greene, the veteran, said of one of the officers. “Two boys were standing there, and they were living on the top floor. So one of the guys said, ‘I was up in my room, but I don’t know who was shooting. All I heard was bullets coming through the window upstairs.’ So then he said, ‘This guy here, he was in the window.’ So he took this guy here in the other room, A-2”—if Greene was referring to Lee, I believe he got the room number wrong—“and they talked to him a little bit. . . . You could hear blows being thrown.”

  Lee told me how Paille “started questioning us, asking us where the gun was. And I kept telling him I didn’t know, so he pulled me out of the line and took me into A-4, I think it was, and began beating me and tried to make me tell where the gun was. I was the first one in the line. The biggest one was the one took me in the room, Paille. I remember him from the dimple on his chin. When he took me in the room, he told me he was going to find out where the gun was. ‘You black bastards, you been giving us a whole lot of trouble.’ ”

  “He just asked me about a gun,” Lee testified. “I told him I didn’t know anything about a gun. . . . He knocked me on the bed. . . .”

  “And then,” he told me, “he just picked me up and put me back in the line.”

  2. A Further Search

  Sortor was next. He told me about what happened on the line after Paille brought Lee back out. “So he said, he asked us which ones he brought from the third floor. So Michael and Auburey said he brought them from the third floor. I didn’t say nothing. So he started beating us, so he pulled Michael, to tell him who the other one was, or he was going to kill him, you know. Michael told him it was me. Then Paille said he was going to kill me. So he took me in this room, busting me on my head. He hit and tripped me, so I fell on the floor, you know. So I got up, you know. He pulled the trigger right”—cocked his pistol, in other words—“and he say he should blow my head off. He was going to blow it off if I didn’t tell him where the gun was. He held his gun to my head and he said, ‘I’m going to give you a count of three.’ But I said I hadn’t seen no gun.”

  “I could hear them beating Sortor,” Michael testified.

  “They told us a wagon was coming,” Lee told me, “so Sortor pretended to go find a gun, to pass the time till the wagon came.”

  “He said,” Sorter told me, “ ‘You go on with me to find this gun.’ I told him I didn’t know where no gun was. So he took me upstairs, and around the rooms, looking for a gun.”

  “An officer forced Sortor to accompany him,” the police synopsis on Sortor said, “while he searched Apts 5 and 14, and another apartment with a fire escape, for the gun.”

  “And when I went upstairs I looked into a few rooms,” Sortor testified. “He told me to look around up under the beds and stuff upstairs where I was on the third floor.”

  “He told me to pull some of the beds loose and stuff,” Sortor told me, “made me look in the closets, pull some of the clothes out. So he
brought me back on downstairs, told me to get up against the wall.”

  “And when he come back,” Lee told me, “they started beating us again.”

  3. Pleading for Mercy

  For some reason Auburey seemed to attract more blows than anyone else. Roderick Davis, who stood not far from Auburey in the line, told me that Auburey had begun to weep as he begged for his life after the officer broke the gunstock over his head.

  “They come and got Auburey,” Michael testified, “and they beat Auburey all the way from the wall all the way in there and beat him some more. . . . He was still telling him he hadn’t seen no gun and that he hadn’t did anything.”

  “He got another guy,” Greene said to Prosecutor Eggleton, apparently, in the sequence, speaking of Auburey, “and took him in there. You could hear blows being thrown also. Then he said, ‘No, I don’t know anything about it.’ And he pleaded for mercy. Then they brought him back and put him against the wall.”

  4. Sea Change

  Up to this point all the physical and mental torture in the hallway and the rooms had been in the guise of a search for a sniper’s weapon. It was now that a final sea change toward horror occurred, spreading subtly from the loins of some of the men of law and order.

  “They took the girls into A-4,” Robert Greene told Eggleton. “That’s the room right across the hall. You could hear blows being thrown and you could hear the girls screaming. And then he called me in there. I had my hands up when I went into the room. He told me to put my hands down to my side.”