The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

  “As I was falling, as I looked down, the first thing I thought of was the Road Runner cartoons. Did you ever see those? We go to a bar and they have Road Runner cartoons on Saturday, so we watch them, and you know how the Road Runner always out-maneuvers the fox, and the fox goes over the cliff, and for a couple of seconds he stands up there and runs in midair? That’s the first thing I thought of, and I looked down and saw the concrete, so I spun around.

  “They took me to the hospital in Lansing, fixed my leg up. I was there for a couple of days. They put it in a cast. I got out of the cast January 11.

  “After that a friend of mine introduced me to the superintendent of the riggers’ union, and I put my application in there. Took the physical and tests, passed those, and went into their apprentice program, and now I’m just waiting; it’s a slack time of year, so I’m waiting for a job to open. All I can do is just sit around the union hall waiting.

  “At the beginning I wasn’t too logical about the thing, I figured there was no way of them firing me for what I did, but now you see all this bad publicity and stuff, and the Police Department can fire you for just about anything. So I’m looking toward the future. I was planning to get my education in police administration, even before the riots, but now it would be sort of ridiculous for me to go into police administration at this moment, because if I’m fired from the Police Department, obviously I can’t go into that field.

  “So what I’m doing is going into education. Liberal-arts education major. And plan on, if they fire me from the Department, go into teaching. I figure it will take me four years, four and a half years to get my bachelor’s degree starting now, and it will take me two years to get my journeyman’s card, so at the end of two years I’m going to go into gunsmithing, and this is a two-year course, nights. Hopefully I’ll have my bachelor’s degree and my journeyman’s card as a rigger and a gunsmithing guild—this is more or less a hobby that I can do at night—so I’ll teach nine months out of the year, and summer is the most productive time for a rigger, so I can go into rigging during the summer months, and have a well-rounded life there. I can still have the satisfaction of teaching and not be cramped by teacher’s pay, because I’ll have—riggers make $5.50 and $6 an hour.”

  50

  THE LEGAL MAZE

  1. Get the Cops

  Upon becoming senior judge in Recorder’s Court at the beginning of the year, Judge Schemanske wrote, “No other court system in the nation has matched the Recorder’s Court continuing record of prompt disposition of criminal cases. The ‘law’s delay’ is not a problem in Recorder’s Court.”

  On December 1, sixty-three days after the pretrial examination in the conspiracy case, and one hundred twenty-eight days after the killings at the Algiers, this same judge finally delivered himself of his opinion on the conspiracy warrants.

  “All of these [black] witnesses were emphatic about repeated beatings and deliberately gave non-responsive answers in order to bring in further charges of violence against the various defendants and August, in an evident attempt to ‘get the cops.’ This was no doubt because of their resentment of what had happened to their friends, or it may have been instigated by relatives, such as Cooper’s father who interested himself in seeing that these residents were witnesses at the ‘mock trial.’ The shooting of Cooper, possibly before the arrival of any officers, if the blood was congealed, may also have been a factor in their thinking. He was shot.

  “However, in spite of their eagerness their incredible testimony could not possibly convince a disinterested arbiter of facts of their good faith or their truthfulness. Their calculated prevarication to the point of perjury was so blatant as to defeat its object.

  “That there was violence is evident and unfortunate but scarcely surprising when the emergency is considered. That the police may have been over-zealous to the point of violence because of ‘the worst incident of the rioting’ is apparent. The testimony establishes that two men were killed and there is reference to a third not identified. Whether or not the person shot and still bleeding when the Troopers arrived was shot while resisting an officer is a question; the testimony could well support a verdict of justifiable homicide if that were the issue here, which it is not here. As to the man who lay dead in the first room entered by the Troopers, it is even probable that he was shot before any officers entered the building since his blood was already congealed and perhaps even coagulated. . . .

  “After careful review of the notes taken during the trial and of the testimony from the transcript, the Court is unable to find any credible testimony supporting the theory of a conspiracy. . . .”

  Prosecutor Cahalan promptly appealed.

  2. Padlock Withheld

  On January 8, the padlocking case was heard in the State Circuit Court by Judge George E. Bowles. Judge Bowles did not order the premises shut down and the furniture removed, nor did he, for the time being, even issue an injunction against continuance of the alleged public nuisances in the Algiers. He asked both prosecution and defense to prepare further briefs, which were a long time coming.

  3. Pain and Mental Anguish

  On January 9, 1968, Fred Temple’s mother brought in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan a civil suit against August, Paille, Dismukes, Thomas, Senak, Fonger, and four John Does, alleging that the defendants had conspired to deny her son his civil rights and “the equal protection of the laws because of his race or color,” and “that as a direct and proximate result of the aforesaid acts of the defendants, the plaintiff’s decedent, Fred Temple, prior to his death suffered great bodily harm, pain, injury, and mental anguish and was greatly humiliated.”

  4. The Issue

  On February 20, Recorder’s Court Judge Gerald W. Groat, the man who later sent Lee Forsythe to prison for seven and a half to twenty years, denied the People’s motion for reinstatement of the conspiracy warrants.

  “It is evident,” he wrote, “that the People were indeed hampered by the type of res gestae witnesses on whom they had to rely. The handicap of the Defense was the undisputed fact that some officers may have been overzealous to the point of violence, although these officers were not well identified. Furthermore, another handicap has been the tendency of public communications media to inject the idea of police brutality and to see racism where that is not the issue. It was not the issue here. . . .

  “One element of the crime alleged, conspiracy, was sustained by no credible evidence direct or inferable. That was the element of concerted action. In the Court’s opinion the action of the Examining Magistrate was correct.

  “The motion to reinstate is denied.”

  5. Back to the Confessions

  On March 28, Judge Ford, acting on the Prosecutor’s appeal of Judge DeMascio’s decision to free Paille of the murder indictment, ordered Judge DeMascio to reopen the case and examine Lieutenant Hallmark, the man to whom August and Paille confessed. Such an examination would probably have the effect of causing Paille to be indicted for murder after all. Attorney Lippitt at once appealed on Paille’s behalf, questioning the legality of one Recorder’s Court judge’s reviewing a decision of another Recorder’s Court judge—a procedure to which Mr. Lippitt had naturally not objected when Groat had reviewed Schemanske and agreed with him.

  6. A Federal Case

  On May 3, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, Lawrence Gubow, announced that a federal grand jury, held secretly in Detroit in the preceding days, had indicted August, Dismukes, Paille, and Senak on a charge of conspiring to deny civil rights to Auburey Pollard, Fred Temple, Lee Forsythe, Cleveland Reed, Roderick Davis, James Sortor, Robert Lee Greene, Julia Ann Hysell, Karen Malloy, and Michael Clark. That Carl Cooper was not among those alleged to have been deprived of their rights indicated that the grand jury had not unraveled the mystery of Cooper’s death.

  Apparently the United States Justice Department thought there was reasonable doubt of the position taken as to a conspiracy by Detr
oit’s Judges Schemanske and Groat. At any rate, the sorry linkage of Michigan with Mississippi was at last complete, for this was precisely the federal charge brought in the deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.

  7. Distance

  The first actual trial of a human being in this maze of legal actions was that of the only accused black man, Melvin Dismukes, charged with Felonious Assault. The trial, before Recorder’s Court Judge Robert J. Colombo and an all-white jury, began on May 7.

  The demeanor of the witnesses for the People in this trial was quite different from what it had been in the pretrial examinations. Juli Hysell appeared first. She had been living with her family back in Columbus, working; she took the stand in a tasteful yellow-orange suit and low-heeled shoes, with her hair pinned up, her complexion flawless, makeup at a minimum. She answered hard questions with poise—candidly admitting a short period of prostitution beginning after the incident and ending with her arrest in September, and giving the impression that all that was far behind her—but she did not add much to her previous testimony on the incident itself. Sortor casually admitted he had done some looting—said he’d been caught with looted clothes in the car of a friend but hadn’t been prosecuted; this cast some backlight on his story to me of the cashmere coat that had been, he had told me, his all along. Michael Clark seemed transformed; he was cool and cooperative, hostile to no man. He confirmed Carl Cooper’s having fired the starter pistol, and when Defense Attorney Smith noted that this was the first time he had admitted the presence of the pistol in the annex, Clark at once said that it was not the first time; he had given the same testimony to the federal grand jury. This was a clue to the change in the tenor of the People’s testimony: The Justice Department had given the witnesses some sense of what was at stake in all these trials.

  But the vile events were now at nearly ten months’ distance; the passions of the accusers were not deeply engaged against this black man. The evidence against Melvin Dismukes began to seem somewhat thin, and Attorney Smith, eliciting from the witnesses a picture of confused mayhem in the annex, succeeded in making it appear that his client was a not-too-active participant in the affair.

  The verdict, agreed upon by the jury in thirteen minutes: not guilty.

  8. New Hint

  Unobtrusively, while these moves and countermoves were taking place in courtrooms in Detroit, presaging months and perhaps years of trials and appeals to come, workmen scaled the gaudy sign at 8301 Woodward, took down certain metal letters and put up others, and when they left, the neon palm tree drooped over a new name for the motel, a new hint of romance and sun-heat: THE DESERT INN. The Algiers Motel was no more.

  51

  LAST WORDS

  MRS. GILL: “It really turns a family around, it turns you around, it really does.”

  ——

  MAYOR CAVANAGH: “Victimized by rumors, the citizens of Detroit—both Negro and white—are arming themselves in unprecedented numbers. And in the suburbs surrounding Detroit gun sales have also soared. This arms race must be stopped. We must return to sanity.”

  ——

  JAMES SORTOR: “I want to buy me a house and a nice television and just set back and watch.”

  ——

  DAVID SENAK: “I’m just a patrolman. I don’t know, I can have a view on police matters, I don’t know if I have a view on race relations. I like to follow orders. If I have to risk my life for the Police Department and go into a place with criminals and arrest criminals, why that’s one matter. I think if the prosecutors would go as wholeheartedly toward the general laws and prosecute as they’re trying to prosecute myself and my partners, I don’t think they’d have any trouble at all. Because they’re doing things that are unprecedented in our case simply because it’s a civil-rights case.”

  ——

  MRS. TEMPLE: “They’re trying to cover up a little too much down there. There’s too much to try to hide. It’s a little too much to sweep all this under the rug.”

  ——

  TANNER POLLARD: “I know some guys want to go down and burn down that police station.”

  ——

  PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: “We will not let violence or lawlessness take over our country. Crime that haunts the streets of our cities today is a major disgrace.”

  ——

  PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS: “The policeman in the ghetto is a symbol not only of law, but of the entire system of law enforcement and criminal justice. As such, he becomes the tangible target for grievances against shortcomings throughout the system: Against assembly-line justice in teeming lower courts; against wide disparities in sentences; against antiquated correctional facilities; against the basic inequities imposed by the system on the poor—to whom, for example, the option of bail means only jail. The policeman in the ghetto is a symbol of increasingly bitter social debate over law enforcement.”

  ——

  RONALD AUGUST: “I wish I could be more verbal. One never knows what something like this is until he gets involved in it. I don’t classify myself as a murderer, like a few people have. I feel like I’m free in the wind, like I feel like a balloon on a string. Who’s going to pull the string for me?”

  ——

  DONALD LOBSINGER, head of a white Detroit suburban organization called Breakthrough: “If another riot comes, we will protect our property. . . . We will protect our homes. . . . And we will fire! . . . If any blood is shed, it is going to be their blood and not the blood of our families or of our children. . . . Thank God.”

  ——

  AUBUREY POLLARD, SR.: “I don’t hate anyone.”

  ——

  ROBERT PAILLE: “I think the best is yet to come.”

  ——

  THE NEW DETROIT COMMITTEE, a coalition of business, education, labor, and civil-rights leaders, formed after the riot as “a great healing source” for the city: “The issue raised by the Algiers Motel case is fundamental, beyond any particular case or participant. It is no less than the credibility of our system of justice as embodied in our criminal courts. Any case which fails or appears to fail to achieve justice contributes to decline in respect for the rule of law and to the impulse to resort to alternative, extralegal, or illegal recourse. The New Detroit Committee believes full and fair examination of the Algiers Motel case is essential to arresting this trend in Detroit.”

  ——

  MRS. POLLARD: “I’m going to fight this case as long as I got breath in me.”

  52

  WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE COUNTRY?

  1. A Tremendous Emotional Effect

  On June 5, 1968, there took place a jointure of American tragedies, vastly different in kind and force yet fitting together like mortises and tenons cut to be glued.

  In May, Prosecutor Weiswasser, foreseeing that Robert Paille might, after all, be indicted for murder and urging that he and Ronald August should be brought to the bar together, had moved to have August’s trial for the murder of Auburey Pollard postponed until autumn. But Attorney Lippitt had vigorously argued on August’s behalf against putting the trial off, and Recorder’s Court Judge Vincent Brennan, ruling for the defendant, had set June 5 as the trial date.

  Early on that very morning, in the kitchen of a hotel in Los Angeles, Robert F. Kennedy was shot down—the only pursuer of the presidency in either party who had won a widespread affirmative response from the black community and who might have helped to narrow the racial gulf in our country. Heavy on that morning’s air, as we pondered the streak in America that had already taken another Kennedy, was the memory of the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., shot by a racist.

  At half past eleven in Detroit, when the Recorder’s Court of Judge Robert J. Colombo was gaveled to order, Attorney Lippitt stood before the bench:

  MR. LIPPITT: If the Court please, I have been in conference with Mr. Weiswasser since early this morning about the matter of this trial; this particular matter was
to commence today, and I told him in my conference with him that I was extremely troubled over the fact of the assassination attempt in California last night, and it’s my earnest belief, your Honor, that there is a very good possibility that this could have a tremendous emotional effect on any jury one way or the other that were drawn. For that reason I have asked Mr. Weiswasser if he would be kind enough to consent to an adjournment of this matter. . . .

  THE COURT: Mr. Weiswasser?

  MR. WEISWASSER: The People cannot have any objection under the circumstances as it now exists.

  THE COURT: I concur in that, too, and let the record indicate that we’ve had a long and lengthy discussion on this matter in chambers. . . . It raises a very definite question of whether or not, on this day, certainly, any defendant in a jury trial could receive a fair and impartial trial, free from any inflammatory feelings that there are in not only this community but throughout the country. . . . Nobody could foresee yesterday the tragedy that occurred last night. The very reports on the radio and television are indicative of the feeling of the people in general about what has happened; very inflammatory statements about what is wrong with the country. I do think that this would have an adverse effect on this trial, possibly almost any trial which would be tried on this date. And I accept the stipulation of counsel for both the prosecution and the defense, recognizing that Mr. Lippitt is the moving party, and I do adjourn this matter until . . .

  This trial and all the others growing like weeds around the late Algiers Motel would doubtless be reconvened and repostponed and heard and appealed and retried and finally brought to the weary end of the road of judgment, if not of justice. But surely there could not be, in any of these trials, another coming together like this one, demanding by its conjunctions answers to the “inflammatory” query: What is wrong?