The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

  11. We Felt Pretty Confident

  By the fourth day, when the court assembled to hear Judge DeMascio’s decision, the atmosphere surrounding the hearing—essentially the growing anger of the black onlookers at the realization that an old, old story was going to be told again—grew tense.

  “The last day of the murder hearings,” Paille told me, “Snick was all over the room, that’s a Negro organization, and we had a rumor that they were going to kill us that day, so I told August, I says, ‘If there’s any shooting over here, just dive down there, and I’ll get over you,’ and that there. Try to conceal him and that. And, you know, we’d stay out of the line of fire and all. But it happens that about fifty policemen showed up that day, too, so we felt pretty confident we’d get out of there okay. But the Muslims were there, Snick was there.”

  12. Decision

  Judge DeMascio’s decision was that, failing the presence of the statements he had ruled out, including the confessions, there was nothing on Paille, but there was enough evidence in Thomas’s fuzzy testimony to justify indicting August for murder—though the judge added, in a startling weighing of character rather than of evidence, “On the other hand, it is totally unlike defendant August.”

  The decision:

  “Accordingly, the motion of the People is granted as to defendant August; it is denied as to defendant Paille.

  “In view of the fact that in searching the record this Court found no reason to upset the judgment of one of the judges in setting bail, the bail as to defendant August is continued and that as to defendant Paille is cancelled.”

  13. How Could It Be Self-Defense?

  After the ruling, August’s wife and mother sat sobbing at one of the tables. A picket line of plain-clothesmen formed across the front of the gallery to insulate the court from the crowd, which began to file out. Still in the courtroom, Mrs. Pollard started shouting at Judge DeMascio.

  “It started,” she told me, “with me yelling in the courtroom, when they was going to turn loose the police, and I say, ‘How in the hell could it be self-defense? My boy didn’t have no knife, didn’t have no gun. And he had the gun. How could it be self-defense?’ I just jumped up and told the truth. I couldn’t take it no more. Turning them loose, and everybody was telling lies. I just told the judge, ‘Don’t turn them loose! Don’t turn loose that son of a bitch, because I know damn well he’s lying.’ And I said, ‘When he say he pulled the trigger one time and it didn’t go off and pulled it another time he was lying. He done beat his damn face off before he started shooting him up. How in the hell could it be self-defense? He done beat him till he turned helpless. When he beat him, that was enough! I told the judge, I says, ‘You know he’s lying.’ The judge didn’t want to say anything. And I said to that prosecutor there, I say, ‘You that’s on his side, you know damn well he’s lying. Because you all know you all beat his face off. Then you going to tell me it’s self-defense! No way in hell it could be self-defense.’ They started grabbing me and holding me and put me out of the courtroom. It was on television and on the radio. The man put the microphone out and said, ‘Put it right here.’ I want the world to know about it. I want everybody to know it. And I’m going to stay fighting and I’m going to hold up because I’m a damn good woman. It’s not going to get me down. I might go down afterwards but I’m not going down before. I ain’t planning on killing myself, and I’m not planning on hurting myself. But I’ll tell you one thing, you’ll see one thing: I’m going to fight this case as long as I got breath in me. I am. I’m telling you.”

  14. A Mean Face

  “Every time that I came out of court there,” Paille told me, “I could see these people lining the hallways, and that there, and they could cry out in court and everything else. And there was one fellow there, he just stood there and he looked at me with a mean face and everything else, just like he was going to grab me, and I think that one time, one fellow was ready to grab August. And as I drove my car out from the underground portion of the building there, I could see these fellows with beards and everything else there, looked like Muslims, were waiting out there. So we didn’t know what to expect.”

  35

  THE LAW WAS MADE BY PEOPLE

  1. Sickening, Man

  It would be for other and eventually higher judges to sustain or overrule Judge DeMascio’s decision on the constitutional issue in the murder hearing. But as to the perception of “justice” by the families of the Algiers victims, the response was immediate and virulent. The bare facts were known to all: The young men who had survived the incident had told them what Paille had done to them at the Algiers; Paille had been charged with killing Fred Temple, obviously for some reason; now he was scot-free, walking the streets of Detroit without bail. August, who had now been indicted but had tipped his hand that he would claim self-defense, was also at large, on bail, to be sure, but free.

  “They told this other policeman,” Omar Gill said to me, “that his statement couldn’t be used in court that he made at the Police Department, stating that he killed Auburey Pollard, saying because he wasn’t advised of his legal rights, and when a policeman picks you up he tells you of your legal rights, so he knew his legal rights. Why did he have to be advised of them? It was sickening, man, it was really sickening. If you could have seen it you would have just throwed up your hands.”

  2. Over My Dead Body

  “That judge,” Mrs. Pollard said to me, “putting words in the police’s mouth—that weren’t nothing but a fishy trial. I even hate that damned judge. They ought to get his ass off the stand, so there can be justice. That’s the way I feel about it. It hurts.

  “Everybody got a temper to a certain extent. I got one. I got one. And I feel if those damned judges turn those policemen loose I feel I should start something in that damned courtroom, I feel that something should happen to them, and I feel if I was able I would do something to them, if I could do it. If I had something to do it with, I would. I been thinking about it. I just ain’t got anything to worry me. I feel they got the dirtiest judge there is.

  “And I’m like this man that came on television, I can’t call his name, and he said, ‘Let there be a white policeman and a colored policeman together when they go in these places.’ And if they’d take the white polices out of the colored neighborhood I think he told the truth about it. Because one day two white policemen will be running in some of these colored neighborhoods, and some of these here places, and they going to have the same thing written on them that they did in the Algiers Motel. And it won’t be no more than justice. Because you can’t trust them in your house. And I feel right now, if the policeman came to my door and he was just a white police, I don’t think I’d let him in. He could break down the door, that’s the only way he could get in, but I don’t think he could get in here. And I don’t think as long as I live another one better set foot in my house. Now if a colored one come along, I’d open my door, but I’m not going to let another damned white police come in my house. That’s the way I feel about it. If he do, he’ll come over my dead body. That’s the way I feel about it.”

  3. What the Law Is For

  “Those police,” Mr. Pollard said to me, “was prejudiced in the first place. They was taught to be prejudiced in the first place. The average gray, you know for your own self, is brought up with the prejudice instinct within him. He don’t want no black boy living over here. ‘The black boy brings my property down.’ We both know that, don’t we, huh? Now you take it out at Birmingham, you think if I would move to Birmingham, by tomorrow afternoon—well, you know what I mean!

  “You have to have enough common sense to know ignorance when you meet it. Because any time that a gentleman is over some thirty years old, and he’s not a mental case, he’s supposed to be broad-minded enough not to go out and slaughter a eighteen- or nineteen-year-old-kid. And I’ll tell Judge DeMascio the same thing.

  “The law is like this. The law was made by people, the people made the law. The community ar
e the people, and the community made the law. The community did not make the law to be brutality. They made the law so they could have respect. The average Negro don’t know that, he don’t even know what the law is for. Now, you take the average Negro boy walking up and down the street, the police grabs him, hang his hands up side of the wall, go in his pockets, pull everything out he’s got, kick him in the butt, turn him loose—he thinks he lucky because he’s loose! Because he don’t know no better. Now, send the same police out in Palmer Park, the same guys, and let them start kicking those young kids in the fanny, and see how long he’ll do it. They’ll put him so far out here in River Rouge walking around in a circle with nothing to hold him up and he’ll have to stay till it’s pitiful. Because the big shots that go up there aren’t going for that, they’re not going to go for that. But the Negro, he can talk loud but he doesn’t have no help. He doesn’t help himself.”

  4. A Solution

  “If those guys want to fight all that bad,” Mr. Pollard said, “why in the hell don’t they go over to Vietnam? All they got to do is take all those nuts that wants it bad, put them on a truck, drive them out, and say, ‘Now, this is unknown territory, you can just fight and kill till you get your fill. When you come back we’ll be sitting here waiting for you. And we’ll give you a big Purple Heart.’ ”

  5. Too Young to Die

  “I still say they’re lying,” Mr. Pollard said. “Every one of them is lying. Because somebody is covering up for somebody else. Each one of those kids was too young to die for nothing. Somebody’s lying.”

  6. A Letter

  “Mrs. Temple sent me a letter in her own way there,” Robert Paille told me. “She stated in so many words that if you did kill my son, which, you know, would be immoral, I hope you’re getting everything that’s coming to you. But she didn’t say too much on the innocent side, you know. It was all illiterate, you know; i’s were small and all.”

  36

  LAW AND ORDER FOR ALL?

  1. One Flame in a Nationwide Fire

  On the second day of the murder hearing, as it happened, Mayor Cavanagh and a team of men from his administration appeared in Washington before the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders.

  There was an air of sadness and weariness in the Detroit delegation. Before its riot Detroit had been one of our cities of hope, and Mayor Cavanagh had been widely praised as one of the most forward-looking urban leaders in the country. Now there were ashes in his mouth as he began his presentation with a long catalogue of the warnings to all America that he had been uttering for five years. He reviewed the history of race relations in Detroit, highlighting the race riot of 1943 and an incident in 1966 in the Kercheval district that might have flared into a mass disturbance but did not. The best he could manage was to relate Detroit’s great rebellion to a national condition.

  “I think it should be emphasized from the beginning,” he said, “that both the incident last year in Detroit and this year’s tragedy are part of a national picture of deep discontent in American cities today.

  “The explosion that ripped Detroit had many points of origin over a long, long period of time. It has its links with events of recent years in Washington, D.C.; in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama; in Jackson, Mississippi; in Cambridge, Maryland; in Kansas City, Missouri; in the Watts district in Los Angeles; in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City; on the South Side in Chicago; and in the cotton fields of Louisiana and Texas. . . .

  “There has been no discernible relationship between the location or degree of violence in these disorders to social or economic or governmental factors. If there was a pattern, it was a crazy quilt. It is clear from our experience that you cannot extinguish a single flame in a general fire. You must extinguish the entire fire, and damp down all the sparks and ignition points.

  “The explosion in Detroit was one flame in a nationwide fire. A spark fell in Detroit, and an ignition took place. Newark seemed to set the sparks flying, but the elements of combustion were there for many, many years.

  “Every city has its individual aspects—its strengths and its weaknesses. We thought we were in a stronger position in terms of human relations than many other cities. Every outside observer agreed that we were. And I believe we were. But the difference wasn’t deep or fundamental enough to forestall the catastrophe.”

  2. The Fuse

  After reviewing the specific short-range precautions his administration had taken “to forestall the catastrophe”—the Mayor’s Summer Task Force, an Early Warning System, summertime activities at 589 recreation centers, the full range of anti-poverty programs (“funded at levels well below recognized needs in the city”), and a package of summer programs and summer-employment efforts which were all delayed by funding difficulties—he mentioned, for the only time specifically in his report, the Detroit Police Department, and then it was merely to point with pride to its “battle-tested” riot-control plan, from which we have seen some quotations, and to wonder whether the summer’s labor troubles and the blue flu had affected police performance during the riot.

  The Mayor then showed the commission some movies of the uprising, and after the lights went back on in the hearing room he said, “Look at the faces. You will see mostly young men. These young men are the fuse. For the most part they have no experience in real productive work. For the most part, they have no stake in the social arrangements of life. For the most part, they have no foreseeable future except among the hustlers and minor racketeers. For the most part, they are cynical, hostile, frustrated, and angry against a system they feel has included them out. At the same time, they are filled with the bravado of youth and a code of behavior which is hostile to authority.”

  3. The Danger

  “When a substantial number of people in a community come to feel that law and order is their enemy and their oppressor, that community is in danger. Such groups exist in most of our communities today.”

  4. Molotov Cocktail

  “As for those,” the Mayor said later on, “who feel that the total answer to the situation—to the dangers whose manifestations we have seen—is simply more guns, clubs, and force, they are wrong, catastrophically wrong.

  “Of course, the increased availability and more effective use of peace-keeping forces is vital and essential.

  “But those who cherish the thought that the situation, nationwide, can be dealt with simply by sterner measures of force and repression are deluding themselves.

  “Repression without channels of release is a Molotov cocktail. It takes only one match to set it off, and then its destructive effects can spread everywhere.”

  One must trust that the Mayor believed what he said, yet when, after many, many more words, he came to proposals for solutions, the very first of seventeen major recommendations was this:

  “1. To restore law and order we must modernize our techniques for dealing with mob action, adopt the latest scientific devices, revamp our plans for dealing with civil disorder by planning for a more effective and fluid governmental response. I have requested planning assistance from the Secretary of the Army (letter attached) and support federal legislation which will grant aid directly to the cities in training, equipping, and paying police officers. There is the need for a federal riot police force to be located in our major cities and to be a part of the local police. I have asked Governor Romney to consider the formation of National Guard Riot Battalions located in the metropolitan areas to provide skilled and speedy response to civil disorders.”

  I do not mean to suggest by this ironic juxtaposition that our cities should abandon the principle that the business of life should be transacted in a setting of law and order. The point here is that the city of Detroit, in its presentation to the commission, failed to ask such questions as these:

  In what relationship does the need for law and order stand to other pressing needs in our society? Or, to put it another way, whence stems widespread consent to law and order?

  What kind
of law and order must we have?

  Is the law equally applied to all citizens?

  Should law be used to support or to retard obviously needed changes in the fabric of society?

  As things actually go in our cities and states, are not the performances of the agencies that enforce the law and keep the order—namely, the police, the irregular military, and the courts—heavily stacked against all who happen not to be white?

  Is there time for gradual reform?

  Do we not need—does not the Algiers Motel incident help us to see that we need—an urgent and thoroughgoing overhaul of our national system of policing and judging and penalizing, to the end that every United States citizen would truly be able to perceive law and order as benefits to himself?

  5. Not a Word

  Not in all the several hundred pages of the report of Detroit’s appearance before the commission, and not even in the sixty pages of tightly detailed summary of large and little occurrences in the uprising, entitled “Sequence of Events,” is there a single word about the killings at the Algiers.

  37

  UNDER INDICTMENT

  1. You Just Can’t Sit

  “After this happened I was home for a month,” Ronald August told me. “I was suspended one week after the incident happened, then they issued a warrant for arrest two weeks after this incident happened. In the mail I had threats. My phone is unlisted. Haven’t had one phone call that was a threat; had a few that offered help as far as assistance in attorney fees and so on and so forth, that came through the switchboard, Bell Telephone, that shouldn’t even have got here, but they got through. Now if anyone wanted to make a threat, apparently they didn’t get through, I don’t know. I’ve just had mail. I’d give a guess at about six letters, which it came within a week after the incident. I stayed home for a month, just did nothing. My friends naturally came over and talked to me, and this was no good, either, because you just can’t sit and do nothing. So I started working grounds maintenance. Our job was raking leaves and edging along the sidewalk and curb lines. It was a very good job if you like outdoor work, and which I do. But this is sort of a seasonal operation.”