by John Hersey
By the time the Detroit team appeared before the Commission on Civil Disorders, Girardin and the Mayor were convinced that the Detroit riot was not, as Cavanagh said before the commission, “the work of revolutionaries who belong to the black extremist movements. . . . In fact, the discussions among the extremists were that 1968 was the year for Detroit.”
But it remained for the Detroit Free Press, in a brilliant piece of team journalism published on September 3, to puncture once and for all the inflated myth of the black sniper in 1967.
2. One of Forty-three
The article, “The 43 Who Died,” prepared over five weeks by three reporters, Gene Goltz, William Serrin, and Barbara Stanton, was a careful analysis of the deaths that had been attributed to the riot; a full account was given of each one.
The horrifying conclusion of the team was this: “A majority of the riot victims need not have died. Their deaths could have been—and should have been—prevented.”
At least six of the forty-three victims were killed by the National Guard, “five of them,” according to the team, “innocent, the victims of what now seem to be tragic accidents.” Five other deaths were caused by bullets that might have been fired by either police or National Guardsmen; four of these victims were clearly innocent. Two looters were shot by store owners; three others were killed by private citizens, two of whom were promptly charged with murder. Fire killed two looters; electric power lines killed a fireman and a civilian. We have witnessed the death of the only policeman killed, Jerome Olshove; a second fireman was killed, either by a sniper’s bullet or, as seems more likely in the context, by a stray National Guard bullet; a nineteen-year-old boy was killed accidentally by an Army paratrooper; a twenty-three-year-old white woman was shot by an unknown gunman; and Carl Cooper was killed by “an unknown assailant”—or, perhaps we can now say, by more than one.
Eighteen of the forty-three were killed by Detroit policemen. Fourteen of the eighteen were looters. One such was Joseph Chandler, who, as we have seen, was shot by Senak and another policeman as he vaulted a back-yard fence. (As we have seen, the other Senak killing outside the Algiers, that of Palmer Gray, Jr., was not considered riot-connected.) “The legal basis for shooting a looter,” the team wrote, “is found in state law which permits officers to fire at fleeing felons after an order to halt is disregarded. Technically, most of those who were killed clearly fall in that category, though one is still left with a feeling that the thief who takes $5 worth of goods from a grocery store shelf and runs ought not to be required to pay with his life. Nonetheless, the question of whether looters will be shot is a matter of public policy. No decision was ever made and announced publicly; as a result, the value of the law as a deterrent was minimal.”
The other four killed by the police were Auburey Pollard and Fred Temple; a suspected but unproved arsonist; and the one and only sniper killed in the uprising.
This sniper did not fit, by any means, the picture of the dedicated, educated, intellectually sharpened, politically aware, suicidally inclined black revolutionary zealot of the sort those who feared a national plot had been describing.
3. Drunk and Dangerous
“His name,” the team reported, “was Jack Sydnor, and on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 25, he was drunk and he was dangerous.
“For the riot’s first two days, Sydnor, a Negro, had remained at home with his common-law wife, Zella Mallory, 37. On Tuesday, he went out, as Mrs. Mallory remembers it, ‘to get a loaf of bread.’ He returned with a companion, went out again, came back drunk.
“His wife found him fingering a pistol that had long been hidden in the apartment. ‘I wonder if this thing will work,’ he mused. It did. At 9:15 p.m., frightened tenants called police at the Livernois Station, reporting that Sydnor was shooting onto the street from the third-floor window of his apartment at 2753 Hazelwood.
“Thirty minutes later, Sydnor was dead. Wounded in the chest and abdomen by police gunfire, Sydnor jumped or fell three floors, then died, probably of gunshot wounds.
“Before he was killed, Sydnor had seriously wounded Patrolman Roger Poike, pinned down policemen in a two-block area, and terrified his wife and neighbors. A dozen more policemen risked their lives rushing Sydnor’s apartment to silence his pistol fire. As Poike burst through the apartment door at the head of a group of officers, Sydnor fired, striking him in the abdomen. Police ripped the apartment with gunfire and hurled in tear gas.”
4. A Difference
“One major critical observation must be made,” the team wrote. “Both city and Army authorities acted to try to keep the death toll at a minimum, though they did so in different ways. In both cases, their efforts were not successful and permitted unnecessary death.
“At 11:20 Monday night, within hours after the National Guard had come under Federal control, Lt. General John Throckmorton, the commanding officer, issued a general order commanding all troops under his control to unload their weapons and to fire only on the command of an officer.
“Throckmorton’s regular Army troops obeyed that order; only one person was killed in paratrooper territory”—Detroit east of Woodward Avenue, where order was quickly achieved—“in the five days that followed.
“The National Guard did not obey, in many cases because the order was improperly disseminated and was never made clear to the men on the street. As a result, the Guard was involved in a total of eleven deaths, in which nine innocent people died.”
5. Vastly Overstated
As to sniping, the team concluded, “Both the number of snipers active in the riot area and the danger that snipers presented were vastly overstated. Only one sniper is among the riot victims and only three of the victims may possibly have been killed by snipers, two of them doubtful. In all, some 31 persons were arrested and charged with sniping”—out of 7,231 arrested altogether.
6. A Few
“These snipers, now,” Ronald August said to me. “I don’t believe there was a heck of a lot of them. I think there was a few, but I think they’d ring out one shot, these guys are no dummies, they’re not going to stay there. By the time the police are called and get to the scene, this guy is six blocks away doing the same thing all over again. It was a merry chase. And he sure is not going to shoot one while you’re down there. It can happen, but the average guy is not going to be that bold. Oh, we’d run and run and run; all night long. One end to the other. In fact, I got shot up, I mean I got shot at, coming home one night. Right about the Children’s Hospital, as I was going to get on the Expressway. It was around two thirty in the morning. I seen all the National Guardsmen, and paratroopers, whoever they were, I don’t know, but they seen me coming down the road, and they told me to halt, and I did step on the brakes, and I was halted. They didn’t hit the car or anything, but the guy in front of me, they hit his car. He was a policeman, too. We both left the station and I was following him down Warren, and we got there by Beaubien and Warren, and buhWOOM!”
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FUEL FOR THE FIRE NEXT TIME
1. Sadness and Bitterness
“I viewed these deaths with great sadness and bitterness,” Dan Aldridge, a young black nationalist, a Wayne State graduate student, wrote in an account of the People’s Tribunal on the Algiers case which he helped to organize. “I realized that they had been executed, as have most of the deaths that occurred during the ‘rebellion,’ but the question was, Could it be proved?
“Then finally a break came. Dorothy Dewberry (SNCC) told me that she had spoken with Carl Cooper’s family and was convinced that he and the others had been executed. At this point, a law student friend and I decided to go over to Carl Cooper’s house and to take a statement from his stepfather, Omar Gill.
“Mr. Gill told us that his son had been executed and he wanted the guilty parties punished. He explained to us that early Wednesday morning, July 26, 1967, while he was asleep, his wife received a call from Lee Forsythe and James Sortor telling her that Carl was dead. He further explained that
he called the Motel and told someone in his son’s room, who could have been either a policeman or a detective, that he was coming over to the Motel to see his stepson’s body. A voice, apparently Caucasian, told him, ‘You had better keep your black ass home. If you come over here, you’ll get the same.’ About this time Lee Forsythe and James Sortor stumbled into his (Gill’s) living room covered with blood and telling how they were beaten and how Carl and Auburey were murdered. Mr. Gill told us that something had to be done.
“In possession of this information, Lonnie Peek, Curt Slaughter, and myself began to check all the witnesses involved and all of the evidence.
“Our first move was to check with the undertakers and parents in order to find out what the autopsy reports showed. We learned that while the parents were in the midst of their grief, the Detroit Free Press had taken autopsy pictures and had paid for the autopsy. An attempt was made by us to look at the pictures but the Free Press refused to let us see them.
“Finally, the week of the Preliminary Examination came for Patrolmen August and Paille. Curt Slaughter and I attended every day of the Examination. We noted that the Prosecuting Attorney Weiswasser’s case was extremely weak. He decided not to call many of the witnesses who could have tied policemen Paille, Dismukes, Senak, Thomas, August, and the others all together. Although subpoenaed, Sortor and Forsythe were never summoned to testify. I became suspicious and decided to ask Weiswasser why he did not call the main Black witnesses involved. He retorted, ‘Their testimony would be irrelevant.’ Having spoken with Sortor and Forsythe and realizing the relevance of their testimony, I decided that this case must be taken to the Black community. During the Preliminary Examination, the police came into the court room before it opened and grabbed all of the prime seats. The ‘white’ press referred to this as moral support, but to the youths who were to testify, it amounted to intimidation—especially when some of the policemen who had abused them at the Motel were sitting on the front pews of the court.”
2. Black Jesus
In the third week in August a coalition of militant black leadership in Detroit was formed; it called itself the Citywide Citizens’ Action Committee. The group chose as its chairman the pastor of the Central United Church of Christ, Rev. Albert Cleage, Jr.
Son of an Indianapolis surgeon, a Wayne State B.A. and an Oberlin B.D., Cleage had run unsuccessfully four times for public office—for Governor, for the Detroit Common Council, for the Detroit Board of Education, and for Congress.
In March 1967, issuing a “Call to a Black Ecumenical Movement,” he promulgated a doctrine partly derived from the Negro nationalism of Marcus Garvey in the twenties and based upon the white North American categorization of any man who has a single drop of black blood in him as black—a doctrine of a black Jesus.
“For nearly five hundred years,” Cleage wrote in his “Call,” “the illusion that Jesus was white dominated the world only because white Europeans dominated the world. Now, with the emergence of the nationalist movements of the world’s colored majority, the historic truth is finally beginning to emerge—that Jesus was the non-white leader of a non-white people struggling for national liberation against the rule of a white nation, Rome. The intermingling of the races in Africa and the Mediterranean area is an established fact. The Nation, Israel, was a mixture of the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Midionites, the Ethiopians, the Kushites, the Babylonians, and other dark peoples, all of whom were already mixed with the black peoples of Central Africa.
“That white Americans continue to insist upon a white Christ in the face of all historical evidence to the contrary and despite the hundreds of shrines to Black Madonnas all over the world, is the crowning demonstration of their white supremacist conviction that all things good and valuable must be white. On the other hand, until Black Christians are ready to challenge this lie they have not freed themselves from their spiritual bondage to the white man nor established in their own minds their right to first-class citizenship in Christ’s kingdom on earth. Black people cannot build dignity on their knees worshipping a white Christ. We must put down this white Jesus which the white man gave us in slavery and which has been tearing us to pieces.
“Black Americans need to know that the historic Jesus was a leader who went about among the people of Israel, seeking to root out the individualism and the identification with their oppressor which had corrupted them, and to give them faith in their own power to rebuild the Nation. This was the real Jesus whose life is most accurately reported in the first three Gospels of the New Testament. On the other hand, there is the spiritualized Jesus, reconstructed many years later by the Apostle Paul who never knew Jesus and who modified his teachings to conform to the pagan philosophies of the white Gentiles. Considering himself an apostle to the Gentiles, Paul preached individual salvation and life after death. We, as Black Christians suffering oppression in the white man’s land, do not need the individualistic and otherworldly doctrines of Paul and the white man. We need to recapture the faith in our power as a people and the concept of Nation, which are the foundation of the Old Testament and the Prophets, and upon which Jesus built all of his teachings two thousand years ago.”
3. Genocide
“I escorted Mr. & Mrs. Omar Gill, Carl Cooper’s parents, and Mr. & Mrs. James Young, Carl’s grandparents, to the first meeting of the City-wide Citizens’ Action Committee,” Aldridge wrote. “Mrs. Margaret Gill explained that she had lost her firstborn, and although she realized that she could never get him back, she wanted someone to do something so that other black mothers would not have to suffer as much as she had suffered.
“The meeting voted to send as many people into Judge DeMascio’s court the next day as possible to hear the verdict. The following day, one hundred sober Black faces heard Judge DeMascio bind August over for trial on $5,000 bond and let Paille go free for lack of sufficient evidence. The credit for letting Paille go free belongs to Prosecuting Attorney Weiswasser, for he alone did not summon the witnesses and he alone only mentioned Paille’s name once during the Preliminary Examination. Weiswasser made the statement, ‘If they had only kept their mouths shut, they wouldn’t be here now.’
“Having viewed these proceedings, we decided that we would hold a tribunal so that the people could evaluate the evidence for themselves. The Black community needs to see that the type of justice we receive in Recorder’s Courts is the same kind that is meted out in Mississippi. That as long as you are south of Windsor, you may as well be in Mississippi. We wanted to show Black people that if this is the law, they had better be proud of their lawlessness because we must not respect a law which does not respect us. Our lawlessness may be the means for our survival, because one of the major downfalls of the Jews in Germany was that they were too damn law abiding. The Germans simply passed a law to march into camps.
“We invited the International Press because we wanted people all over the world to see what it means to be a Black so-called American. We wanted to inform Black people that the courts represent another subtle means of genocide that white America practices on us daily.”
4. Atrocities
“At the meeting last Wednesday,” June Brown Garner wrote in a column in the Chronicle, “it was announced that the sex organs of the boys in the Algiers Motel had been shot off by police, and pictures of the bodies were shown. One boy’s arm was shot off while he was still alive, and the undertaker had to piece his body back together and make him a face out of plastic. This case brought tears to the eyes of most of us, and it has increased our determination to rebuild the city so that things like the riot and the atrocities that followed it will never happen again.”
5. Our Brothers Have Been Brutally Slain
The tribunal was announced for Wednesday, August 30, at the Dexter Theater. The CCAC distributed leaflets that said, “Watch accurate justice administered by citizens of the community. Witness the unbiased, legal action of skilled black attorneys. Review and watch the evidence for yourself.”
Th
ree days before the meeting, Rap Brown spoke, urging that the black community “should hold a people’s tribunal and give them a trial. If they are found guilty—and I don’t see how they can be found anything else—the brothers should carry out an execution.”
Shortly before the mock trial was to be held, Aldridge and Peek learned that the management of the Dexter Theater had gotten cold feet and that it would not be possible to hold the tribunal there. The executive board of Cleage’s church met and announced that the affair would move to the church. “We love our church,” the board statement said, “and the building in which we worship. But even if granting permission for the People’s Tribunal to be held here means the destruction of our building, as churches have been destroyed in Birmingham and all over the South, we still have no choice. We serve the Black Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, who came to unite and free an oppressed black nation. Our brothers have been brutally slain, and it is only right that the voice of truth, silent in the corrupt halls of justice, should ring out in the House of God.”
6. The Sheer Horror
Four men were named as defendants—August, Paille, Dismukes, and Thomas. The jury included the novelist John Killens and Rosa Parks, who started the transportation boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, by refusing to yield her bus seat.
