The ordeal seemed to be drawing to a close.
One of the officers went into room A-4 and told Michael Clark and Roderick Davis to get off the floor and go out in the hall.
There were still seven people, five black men and two white girls, spread-eagled against the wall of the hallway. One of the girls had nothing on but her panties; the other was half undressed.
The big officer had come in from outside, and he stood behind one of the young men in the line and asked, “Do you hate the police?”
“No.”
“What have you seen here?”
“Nothing.”
The police said the blacks should go out the back way and go on home. One of the officers said, “Start walking in the direction you’re going with your hands above your heads. If you look back, we’ll kill you, because we’ll be following you all the way home.”
Roderick started out on stockinged feet, and he was sharply surprised when, passing into room A-2 on his way to a back door, he came on the body of Carl Cooper prone in a stain of blood on the carpet; he had not seen the body earlier, as most of the others had, and he had not believed, even after all the shooting he had heard, that the uniformed men were actually killing people. He had to step over the body, for it blocked the passage through the room between one of the beds and the dresser.
Seven men moved, in relays of twos and threes, past Cooper’s body and through the connecting door to room A-5 and out through its French doors onto the back porch and down the steps to the parking lot. The girls stayed behind. The older black man and the black paratrooper just back from Vietnam doubled around into the main part of the motel; the others walked across the parking lot and through the alley by the carwash out to Euclid and Woodward.
There, on the far corner, in front of the Great Lakes Mutual Life Insurance Building, National Guardsmen, seeing them coming, cocked their rifles and halted them and made them lie down in a row on the plot of grass in front of the building.
The Guardsmen stood the boys up one at a time. They searched each one. “What you been doing?” “Why you walking home?” The boys tried to answer, and the Guardsmen let them go at intervals with instructions to walk with their hands on their heads. One said to Roderick, when Roderick blurted out some of what had been happening, “Too bad. Keep walking. You niggers are always starting some kind of trouble.”
Roderick was next to last to be let go. His friend Larry Reed was about a block and a half ahead of him. After a couple of blocks Roderick peeked around behind to see if another friend was following them. He ran and caught up with Larry.
“Did you see Fred?”
“No,” Larry said. “Fred’s still in there.”
——
Lee Forsythe and James Sortor, two others who had been in the line, joined up and ran together toward Carl Cooper’s house, a mile and a half away. Carl’s stepfather, Omar Gill, told me later of Lee’s account of the flight. “He said he run and he crawled. He say he went down Clairmount, he say he come down cutting through yards and things down to Clairmount. They was stopped at Twelfth and Clairmount and beat again. They were hit again.” Sortor told me later that somewhere during the evening, probably here on the street, his wrist watch was pulled off over his hand and twenty dollars were taken from his pocket. They were sent on with hands up. “He said he was so weak,” Mr. Gill told me, “he say he started to kick a porch out, you know, with them slats in it, he say he started to kick a porch out and crawl up under there. He’d have probably laid there and bled to death. He said, ‘Something just kept telling me I had to get to you and Miss Margaret.’ ” Lee and Sortor kept running.
——
Michael Clark went to the Mount Royal, a transients’ hotel a half-dozen blocks north of the Algiers, with a soot-streaked façade of stone arches supporting three dark-brick upper stories, in its lobby a load of the past—potted palms, antiques, a weighing machine, an open-cage elevator with a folding iron gate. Michael checked in, and as soon as he was alone in a room he got on the phone.
——
“Michael called me,” Carl’s mother, Mrs. Margaret Gill, told me, “and I thought it was Carl calling me back, because I had laid down, and when he called me—this must have been about two o’clock when he called me and told me—I thought he was kidding, you know. I said, ‘Look, you all quit playing with me, it’s too late at night, I’m in the bed sleeping, or trying to go to sleep. Where’s Carl at?’ He said, ‘Miss Margaret, I’m not at the hotel, I’m down at another hotel.’ Said, ‘They killed Carl.’ He kept telling me that, you know. I said, ‘Aw, Michael, don’t play with me.’ He said, ‘I’m not kidding.’ He said, ‘They made Lee and them run and told them don’t quit running.’ He said, ‘They said they’d kill them out there running,’ you know.”
——
“After my wife woke me up and told me that Clark had called and said that Carl was dead,” Omar Gill told me, “I got up, and I went to the phone. His call was right after they turned Clark and them loose; it must have been like three o’clock in the morning, something like that. I didn’t notice the time, I wasn’t thinking about no time. Because I got mad with her, I told her, ‘I won’t play this, now don’t tell me this has happened.’ But then I looked at the expression on her face, and I could tell that this had happened, after I looked up at her, you know. So that’s when I went to the phone and called the hotel, and so when I called, a policeman answered the phone, the switchboard operator didn’t answer, a police answered. So I told him, I said, ‘Look, a guy just called me and told me that my son was dead, and I’d like to come over there and see if he’s dead, you know?’ I said that, and so he told me, he said, ‘You know you can’t come over here.’ I said, ‘What do you mean I can’t come over there? My son is dead, and I can’t come over?’ He said, ‘If you bring your goddam ass over here you’ll be dead just like him.’ And then I asked him, I said, ‘Well, why are you talking to me like this, and you killed my son?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ And he hung up the phone. Didn’t ask my name, or who I was, or anything.”
——
“Lee got back here about a quarter after three,” Mr. Gill told me. “He didn’t ring the bell or anything, him and Sortor just came in, and when he came he fell and crawled and he was crying and he said, ‘Miss Margaret, they killed Carl.’ That’s all he was saying, ‘They killed him, they killed him, they killed Carl.’ And I said, ‘What did they kill him for?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘I think they killed Auburey, too,’ he said, ‘they took Auburey in a room and I heard them shoot and Auburey didn’t come out.’ I said, ‘Well, how do you know Auburey’s dead?’ He said, ‘Because everybody that was living left there, because they made them get out and run.’
“When Lee crawled in he was so bloody that he would have scared you. I wondered how he made it. I really did, and when I went to fix his head, I thought maybe I could just wipe the blood off, but the gashes in it was so big I just couldn’t. I told him, ‘Man, I can’t do nothing with this.’ Because you could see the bone.”
“You could see down in the white part of this boy’s head,” Mrs. Gill said. “There was two—one place was busted wider, that was along his head, then right off it was a lick, sort of. And other knots was in his head.”
“Sortor couldn’t talk,” Mr. Gill said. “Yeah, Sortor couldn’t talk. He had big knots on his head, almost big as my fist, just all over his head.”
——
Having walked forty-two blocks on stockinged feet, Roderick and Larry made their way across open lots and were about to cross some railroad tracks, near Dequindre, and a train came, and the light of the locomotive shone on them, and they waited. After the train had passed they crossed the tracks, and some police and Guardsmen stopped them. “Why are you all bloody?” The boys tried to tell them. “It’s a good thing,” the men said, “the light from the train was on you, because we were about to shoot.” Hamtramck policemen took the boys to St. Francis Hospital, where the worst cuts on Rod’s head were stitched. Then the officers drove Roderick and Larry to a police station in Hamtramck. “Where do you live?” “Where do you work?” “What have you been doing?” The two tried to tell. At last an officer drove them home.
——
Mrs. Gill, who was becoming hysterical, called her mother, and Lee got on the phone. “Grandma B,” he said, “Carl is dead. I looked at him, Grandma B, they beat me because I wanted to see if Carl was dead, but I know he’s dead.” And he said, “They took Auburey in the room, and I heard them shoot. Grandma B, if they hadn’t have shot him, the way they had beat Auburey up, the way he looked, I doubt if he could live anyway.”
——
“Sortor called,” Thelma Pollard, Auburey’s sixteen-year-old sister, told me. “He didn’t know what to say, he hung up. He says, ‘Auburey there?’ I was mad, because this was about four o’clock in the morning. I said, ‘Just a minute! Auburey’s not here. He didn’t come home last night.’ So he says, ‘Okay. Bye.’ ”
Sortor gave me a different version of this call. “I was at Carl’s house,” he said, “I called soon as I got to Carl’s house. I called and I said, ‘Well, may I speak to Mrs. Pollard?’ She said she was in bed. And so I said, ‘Well, you know, Auburey done got killed.’ So she hung up the phone. Then she called back and say, ‘He dead for real?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he got killed over there.’ ”
Auburey’s father sat square-shouldered and stiff with defiance on the edge of a sofa, weeks later, in the house to which, after the collapse of his family, he had moved to live alone, and, speaking in explosive and emphatic cadences, he talked to me, while he toyed with a knuckle of pork on a plate on a coffee table before him—his lonely supper—more or less about his dead son:
“He was a hell of a character. This is a fact; most people wouldn’t want to say this: He was a hell of a character. He always wanted to live up to par. But what I always told him: You got to give something to get something. He wanted to go a long ways. He loved to paint. He was a good artist, a beautiful artist. He was smart in some ways. Everybody’s dumb in some ways. He was young. Every father loves his own son, he loves his own because he’s older. I don’t have nothing to lose in life, but I don’t intend to give it away for nothing. You understand what I mean? Now, understand me thoroughly: I’ve got nothing to lose in life, but I’m not intending to give it away for nothing. Any time I give my life away it’s to save me.
“He was fast-minded. Everything he did he wanted to do it real quick. If it couldn’t be done real quick, he’d say, ‘Oh, well, it takes too long.’ Because he was young! And when I was young I was the same way, I’d figure if I wanted to go to the store I’d walk fast. I’m forty-three now, I can move pretty good, I can move pretty daggone good if I have to. But the boy, he was just a normal American boy. He didn’t know nothing about no discrimination, about no hate, because I never taught him. I always taught him one thing: to treat people as you want to be treated. If you should step on my foot and I happen to glance over my shoulder and see that you’re not mentally balanced, why should I turn myself around and get myself in trouble over you? Well, that’s just one foot stepped on, I can bypass that one. If I’m not shoved in a corner, why should I have to come out fighting? I always told him that. I don’t give a kitty, if you’re going east and I want to go due north, I’m going due north, it’s my prerogative. Your prerogative is to go where you want to go, and my prerogative is to go where I want to go. You must have a mind of your own! Without something of your own you have nothing. And any time you got to follow somebody else you’re stone weak in the beginning. You just a stone weakling. I’d rather be dead on my own than to have to follow the crowd to say I’m right, just to be seen or heard. I don’t want to be seen or heard, I want to be happy within myself.
“The Negro always wants to make the Joneses look good, and the grays do the same, they want to make the Smiths look good, and I don’t care anything about what the Smiths or the Joneses or the Beedles or the Doodles do, I want to be happy. I don’t care if I’m loading manure, if I’m happy and loading manure that’s my business. But most people, they follow one pattern. ‘Well, the Joneses, they got two cars,’ and ‘Oh, she’s got new bedroom slippers.’ I don’t know what they’re doing when their doors are closed, they don’t know what I’m doing when my doors are closed. So I’m not worried about what they’re doing, as long as I am happy and at peace, I am satisfied.
“It’s too many nice jobs for Negro kids today for them to make the same mistakes I made. He can go to school, he can work in a bank, he can be a computer, a teacher, he can work in a scientific laboratory, it’s a million things he can do—work for the government! Auburey started, he was a pretty good welder. Now, I’m going to tell you something else. Now, most fathers would say he’d been a champ. You know what I’m going to say? It’s this: He had to find himself. Within himself, when he’d have found himself, then he’d have been as great as he wanted. I’m not going to build him one teeny little bit to say he’d have been the best welder in the world. The boy wasn’t old enough to find himself. I’m forty-three years old, and I haven’t fully found myself.
“I’ll tell you what this have done to me. I lost a son. That’s all that matters to me. The rest of the world, I’m not worried over it; I’ve lost a son. I have lost a son. I have lost something that with the world at the rate it’s going now, with automation going as it’s going now, he could have lived and prospered with a good life, maybe. What I mean, he was only a baby. I went in the service when I was sixteen years old—lied about my age—and I was only a baby. That’s the only way I learnt life, that’s where I learnt my life. I wouldn’t be hard like I am now if I hadn’t have been. I learnt the hard way. But the poor little thing, he never knew what hardness was, he had to crawl through a bucket of blood. The poor little fellow, he didn’t even know what life was really all about. Auburey was a beautiful kid, but he was just a baby, that’s all. Just a baby.”
The Algiers Motel was one of many transients’ hostelries on Woodward Avenue, a rod-straight street, the city’s spine, that divides eastern Detroit from western Detroit. A couple of miles north of the cluster of massive buildings called “downtown,” and only a few blocks from the section of Twelfth Street where the black uprising of those July days and nights had started, the Algiers stood at the corner of Woodward and Virginia Park, an elm-lined street elegantly brick-paved in the old days but potholed now and patched with asphalt, a street of once prosperous wooden and brick houses with boastful porches and back-yard carriage houses recently declined into rooming houses and fraternity houses and blind pigs, as Detroit calls its illegal after-hours drinking spots. The section had evolved from proper WASP to up-and-coming second- and third-generation immigrant to, recently and more and more, middle-class black.
Detroit is a vast flat sprawl of houses planlessly intermixed with schools and colleges and great automobile factories and little works and warehouses and stores and public buildings, and in this sprawl the resident nations of black and white had for years been encroaching and elbowing and giving way to each other; there was no great ghetto; there were pockets of prosperity, of ethnic identity, of miserable poverty, of labor, of seedy entertainment and sometime joy. The Algiers had had a habit of reaching into several of these pockets; its management had changed a few years back, and it was now run by Negroes mainly for a pleasure-loving black clientele.
Facing Woodward, the main part of the motel was announced by a massive sign on two fieldstone posts, with a neon-fronded palm tree drooping over a chrome frame enclosing the legend of its Africa-whispering name. Behind the bold advertisement stood a complex that would have been admirably suited to a Florida beachfront—a discreet glass-fronted office off to the left, straight ahead a large pool with tables and beach umbrellas around it and cabana-like rooms beyond, and to the right a two-story wing of rooms with pink-painted concrete-block walls.
The Algiers Manor House, where most of the action of this narrative hid itself, was an annex to the motel proper, originally one of the big bourgeois houses of Virginia Park, a three-story brick bulk trimmed in white wood. From under the odd curving eyebrows of enormous dormers on the third floor jutted air conditioners; big bay windows on the ground floor were primly curtained in white; a high, wide, and unhandsome porch was supported by too-heavy white pillars.
Behind the motel and the manor was a blacktop parking lot which could be reached from Virginia Park by a driveway running between the motel proper and the annex, and which also gave onto an alleyway that ran through to the next street to the north, Euclid Avenue.
North of the motel on Woodward, between the Algiers and Euclid, were Max’s 25-Cent Car Wash and a Standard Oil gasoline station.
Detective Thayer and Warrant Officer Thomas testified to parts of this in court; Detective Hay reported some of it in his Detective Bureau write-up of the night’s mission; Charles Hendrix told part of it to a Free Press reporter; Clara Gilmore told some of it to Homicide; and the Wayne County Morgue forms for Autopsy No. A67-1011 confirm certain essential facts:
Not long after the task forces drove away from the Algiers, Charles Hendrix, Negro owner of the private-guard firm known as Hendrix Patrol, himself in the uniform of his enterprise, came to the motel office and found his employee Fletcher Williams, who was also in uniform and was supposed to be on duty guarding the Algiers, and Clara Gilmore, the young black receptionist at the motel desk and switchboard operator, huddled in the office, chatting and looking scared. He “got kind of mad,” as he put it later; he wanted to know why Williams was not doing his job. When Williams and Miss Gilmore began to talk about some gunfire, Hendrix asked why Williams had not checked on it, and Williams said there had been so much shooting he was afraid to go out.
Clara Gilmore was able to say that she had heard several shots out back in the direction of the annex, the Algiers Manor, and that a few minutes later she had seen an Army jeep and three or four police cars park on the west side of Woodward, right in front of the office. Several men in uniform took cover behind trees and behind the several sections of turreted, stone-capped brick walls that formed an annunciatory two-lane gateway to the faded gentility of Virginia Park, the elm-lined street to the south of the Algiers, onto which the manor’s front door gave. She heard several shots. A little later, the switchboard buzzed; a girl was calling, and she said she had been talking a few minutes before to her boyfriend, Larry Reed, in room A-3 in the annex, and she’d heard shots in the background, and Larry had just gone off the phone without hanging up, and she was worried about him. Miss Gilmore cut into A-3 and found the line open. She heard someone yell, “Get your hands up.” Someone else shouted, “Watch out!”—and something about grabbing a gun. Then, hearing several shots, she panicked and pulled the plug. She and Williams then sat talking fearfully about what was going on.
Hendrix, having heard her story, hurried to the manor, and he came on three bodies, one in A-2 and two in A-3, and he felt them and found them still warm. He went back to the office and called the Wayne County Morgue to report the deaths and to ask that the cadavers be taken away.
Marvin Szpotek, a clerk at the morgue, telephoned the Homicide Bureau of the Detroit Police Department and told Detective Joseph Zisler, who picked up the phone in the Homicide bullpen on the fourth floor of Police Headquarters, that a party had called him from the Algiers Motel and told him there were corpses over there.
Detective Zisler set in motion a radio command, which was picked up at about two o’clock in the morning by Scout Cars One, Two, and Seven from the Thirteenth Precinct: “8301 Woodward. At the Algiers Motel check for dead persons.”
Half a dozen policemen soon descended on Clara Gilmore. She told the men where to look, and after a search of the annex Patrolman Edward Gardocki returned to the motel office and called Homicide and spoke to Detective Edward Hay, telling what he had seen.
Detectives Hay and Lyle Thayer and a police photographer, Patrolman Dale Tiderington, arrived at the scene at a few minutes after three. Besides Patrolman Gardocki and his fellow officers from Thirteenth, there were now on hand, Detective Thayer later testified, “several people that purported to be newspaper people in front of the place.” The detectives took down Miss Gilmore’s story, to which she now added the embellishment of a U-turn of scout cars on Woodward before the assault began, and then Hay and Thayer proceeded to the annex, where they conducted what Detective Thayer called “a preliminary search” for weapons. They found a knife near the body in room A-2, but no firearms. Though by Thayer’s account the detectives stayed for nearly two hours, they did not pick up any of the many cartridges and shell casings that were strewn on the floors; they removed no slugs from woodwork; they took no firearms evidence.
Everyone was jumpy. When the detectives checked an exit giving out from a dormer in room A-15 on the third floor to the top of a white-railed wooden fire escape which ran down the back of the building, a private guard out on Euclid Avenue, who had seen their dim figures climbing around, apparently on the roof, for all the world like a pair of snipers, gave a new alarm to National Guard Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas, stationed at the Great Lakes Building on the next corner north, and Thomas shouted a challenge. The detectives withdrew. As Thayer put it in court, “We had been taking photographs, the flash of the bulb, and some of the rooms had no lights, the flashlights and us moving around the different floors—we felt that it was not safe.”
The detectives called Assistant Wayne County Medical Examiner Dr. Edward Treisman, and according to Thayer’s testimony he “refused to come to the scene. He didn’t feel it was safe.” Dr. Treisman ordered the bodies, unpronounced dead on the spot by him, to be removed to the morgue. The detectives called for transportation, and eventually, shortly before five in the morning, a morgue wagon and a General Hospital wagon arrived, and the detectives ordered the manor doors sealed with paper warnings from the Medical Examiner’s office; in their haste the morgue people put a seal only on the front door, the glass of which, in any case, was broken out. The corpses were carted off. “And we,” testified Detective Thayer, “left the premises to be searched at a more safe time.”
The crucial issue here was how word of the killings reached the authorities. Under cross examination in court, Detective Thayer said that he did not know for a fact that the central communication office of the Police Department had not received a report on the killings from police officers who had been present; but had such a call actually been received, it would have been reported at once, as a matter of iron routine, to Homicide. There is no record of such a call; no one has come forward, in court or out, to say that such a call was received. Indeed, this was the first-noticed and finally fatal flaw in the theory that three snipers had been killed in an open firefight at the Algiers that night: the evident failure of the patrolmen who had been present during the shootings to follow the dictates of prudence, of humanity, and of standard operating procedure even during the confusion of the riot, by reporting the deaths to headquarters.
In her parlor, which was strewn with her older children’s long-playing records and her younger children’s toys, Mrs. Omar Gill, Carl Cooper’s mother, a plump woman of thirty-six with a broad face and wide-set eyes, sitting on a hassock, dragged-down and weary-looking, in a dressing-gown, with her four-year-old Julius and a mongrel puppy playing around her feet distracting her, told me about her dead son:
“In a way of speaking, he was kind of a mean kid. In other words, he didn’t take no stuff off of anybody, didn’t like no one to mess with him.
“He liked school. He was no trouble in school. His teachers spoke well of him. He went to Sherrill, then Pattengill, and Angell, and Sampson, and Lessenger. He tried to play baseball a little while, took up wrestling at the Training School and got a few awards for it there. Course he liked music and dancing.
“See, he was very likable. You never seen him without a smile. You’d be walking along the street and he’d go to smile at you. He had a lot of friends.
“He was funny about food. He didn’t eat anything with onions, didn’t like boiled foods. You could give him French fries and chicken every day of the week and he’d eat it, that’s all he really liked. If you had rice with the chicken he didn’t like gravy, he wanted butter.
“Carl was kind of spoiled. He was the first boy on our side. My father was the only boy my grandmother had, and Carl was named after him. He was the oldest, he was seventeen when he died. Then comes Theresa, she’s fifteen, and Tamara, she’s thirteen. They’re Coopers. The four little ones, they’re Gills: there’s Della, she’s eight, Omar Junior, he’s seven, Michael, he’s six, and Julius here, he’s four.
“Carl, he liked nice things, and he liked to have money for them. He’d help people take their groceries out to get extra money. He liked to go to a show, and while he was seventeen he’d go to the show two, three times a week. I never had no trouble out of him at home. He always if he got money he’d give me some.
“He lied about his age to get these jobs, then they’d find out he lied and they’d let him go. He worked for the Housing Commission, and he worked in shipping for Wrigley’s Cap and Gown, and he worked at Chrysler’s. Before he was sent to Lansing, he worked in a drug store as a stock boy. In Lansing he was sent out to various jobs; worked for a car wash for a while.
“I work at Walker Crouse Enterprises, power sewing, I went to school for that. Carl wanted to go into tailoring. He liked clothes quite a bit, and he talked to my instructor out there a couple of times, you know, he went to the school with me and talked to him, and I think he gave Carl momentum to want to do this. After he got laid off from Chrysler’s, that’s when he went in and put in for this. He was supposed to start classes August the seventh.
“All the police knew Carl. Beginning when he was thirteen, fourteen, they began to pick Carl up, they’d take him to the police station and keep him overnight or maybe two days, there was never any charge, just suspicion, they never put a finger on anything he actually did, you know. One of the detectives told me once, ‘Carl isn’t a bad guy, he just doesn’t like people to talk nasty to him, call him “nigger,” “punk,” all like that.’ Once he come home with a black eye, they’d picked him up and drove him round in their car and took him in a dark street and just beat him up. I wanted to get a lawyer, but Carl said, ‘No, Momma, it would just be their word against mine, and you know how that would end up.’ One time he come home and said they grabbed his arm and bent it up his back, and they’re saying, ‘Come on, now, where you been? What you been up to?’
“When he began to get in trouble, going in people’s houses and like that, I’d ask him, ‘What you doing out there where white peoples live?’ And he’d say, ‘They the ones got the nice things, Momma.’ I’d get to crying and he’d say, ‘Don’t you cry, no use to cry, I did this to myself.’ We were pretty close, me and Carl, you know. Whenever he earned money or got ahold of some money, he would always give me some, to help out with the kids. And he would help out, you know, he was a big help. I used to scuffle so hard for them, and looked like he was trying to pay me back.”
“Negro snipers,” it said on the front page of the Detroit News the next morning, Wednesday, July 26, 1967, “turned 140 square blocks north of West Grand Boulevard into a bloody battlefield for three hours last night, temporarily routing police and national guardsmen. . . .
“It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot-blackened streets. . . .
“Tanks thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . .”
Then, still on the front page:
“Three unidentified Negro youths were killed in a gunfight behind the Algiers Motel, Woodward and Virginia Park.
“Their bodies were found on the ground floor of the Algiers Manor, a three-story annex to the motel.
“Police and Guardsmen were called to the scene about midnight when sniping began from the Manor.
“Homicide Detective Edward Hay said shots were coming from the roof and windows on all floors.
“Police and Guardsmen were pinned down for several minutes before the firing stopped. . . .”
“Carl Cooper’s auntie called,” Auburey’s sister Thelma told me. “Sortor was over there that night. She said, ‘Is your mother there?’ I said, ‘She’s asleep,’ you know. So she says, ‘It’s about your brother.’ So I thought he was in jail, because the riot was still going on.”
“So when I got to the phone,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “she said, ‘Mrs. Pollard, you don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I’ve heard about you, but I’m sorry to tell you,’ she says, ‘but Auburey was killed this morning.’ I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, he was killed this morning. He was cooking hot dogs and the police walked in there and killed him.’ She said, ‘I can’t describe to you how they killed him. They killed him like a dog.’ She went to tell me how he was begging for his life. And when that woman told me that I had to let down the phone. I couldn’t talk to her. I was sick. My daughter had to finish taking the message. Then I called the morgue, because to verify it. They wouldn’t even give no information. Then I called my husband off his job. . . .”
“I was on a job,” Mr. Pollard told me, “at Outer Drive and Sherwood. I works for DPW. I loads a truck; I do not pull any punches. I’m a laborer aide. I do not mind it. So Pete was the foreman, the gentleman’s name is Pete, very nice guy, he came up to me, he says, ‘You’ve got a phone call from home, there’s something happened, one of your boys in trouble or one of your boys got hurt, one.’ Which do you know who I thought it was? I thought it was my third boy, because he’s always googy-googy. So I said, ‘Gee whiz,’ I was just shaking, ‘I hope it’s not Tanner.’ So therefore I goes in a telephone booth and I calls up. When I calls up between the operator was nice enough to let me listen to two conversations at one time, which when I picked up the family was already talking, she was saying, ‘Well, Auburey, they found Auburey dead this morning in the Algier Hotel.’ I said, ‘Oh, no,’ because he was supposed to be at home. I works two jobs, I was working right there on Sherwood right off of Outer Drive, that’s where I work at night. I work for a stainless-steel place, you know, where they put the rolls of stainless steel in, fix them up, but I was a janitor, not like a lot of people, I wasn’t no stainless-steel helper, I was working as a janitor. So I went home from there, you know. On the way I said to myself, ‘How in the world could all this be?’—you know. I said, ‘Maybe it’s a mistake.’ That’s the way I wanted to feel. So, my maw was there. My maw said, ‘Well, Baby, I tell you. We’ll go see.’ I said, ‘Maw, what’s this? A mistake?’ I said, ‘It couldn’t be Auburey, I know Auburey got more sense than that.’ Maw said, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Baby,’ she said, ‘you never know. So let’s go see.’ So we goes down to the morgue. So the lady at the morgue, she was very nice, she was beautiful, she was a stone champ. She was a very beautiful lady. She’s a ageable lady, she’s within knowledge of the world, she’s no fifteen, sixteen, twenty, or twenty-two years, she’s in her late forties or early fifties, right along there someplace. So we talked. We sit there and I bet you we talked for about thirty-five minutes, and we talked about youngsters, you know, how they communicate, how they do not if they want to be slick, you know—it’s life, we talked about everyday life. And then she says, ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I’ve been living in this place so long, just take out my trash I pay so much, just do little odds-and-end different things I have to pay so much.’ So we sit there and talk, and she said, ‘Well, I see you want to see him.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I walked up. There he was. She take me over and showed me Auburey. I said, ‘That’s my son.’ ”
“And when he went to that morgue and identified Auburey,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “he ain’t been right since. He ain’t been right since. I don’t know what kind of shape they had him in, but they had him buck-naked down there, and those bloody clothes we got back, yessir, they give me his clothes back. I got the clothes and wallet. I got his clothes back. I got them for evidence, I got them bloody clothes. I can’t look at them. It makes me sick, just makes me sick to even look at them clothes.”
——
Lee had passed out, and Mrs. Gill was near collapse. Carl’s step-great-grandfather, James Young, brought his car to the Gills’ house. Mrs. Gill washed Lee up, took his bloody shirt off, and put a clean one on him. With the help of two men named Johnny and Bob who were living on the upper floor of the Gills’ house, they carried Lee out to Mr. Young’s car, and Mr. Young drove both Lee and Mrs. Gill to Northwest General Hospital. In the emergency room there Mrs. Gill was given something for her nerves, and a doctor took twelve stitches in the cut on the back of Lee’s head. Two policemen came into the emergency room, and Mr. Young told me that the following exchange took place.
Policeman: “Who brought him here?”
Mr. Young: “I brought him in.”
“You know him?”
“Yeah, I see him nearly every day.”
“How does that happen?”
“He’s a friend of my grandson. I see him at his house.”
“How do you happen to be there?”
“I’m the grandfather, why shouldn’t I be there?”
“Why’d you bring him in here?”
“I’d bring you here if I found you in his condition.”
Lee was now conscious, and the policeman questioned him. Lee said he had been beaten on the head by cops. “They told him he was lying,” Mrs. Gill said to me, “hadn’t no police beat him up, he’d jumped through some kind of plate glass, looting. Got the doctor kind of mad. The doctor said, ‘Why would he be lying? He’s under sedation.’ ”
The doctors sent Lee on to Detroit General Hospital, where he was given a bed.
——
Sortor testified that he went that morning to Dr. Thomas R. Carey, on Joy Road, who gave him some pills. Then he went to the morgue with Mr. Gill. They identified Carl’s remains and got his clothes. Missing from the trouser pockets was a roll of bills that Sortor estimated should have been about four hundred dollars; missing from the wrist of the body was a watch that had diamonds on it; missing from one of Carl’s fingers was a ring that Juli Hysell believed was worth more than a thousand dollars.
——
Lance Corporal Chaney Pollard, Company A, 7th Engineer Battalion, United States Marine Corps, Auburey’s twenty-one-year-old brother—Chaney happens to have been the surname of the black civil rights worker who was murdered in Mississippi in 1964 with two white colleagues—had been in Vietnam for nearly twelve months when Auburey was killed. “He could have been home,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “but see, he re-signed up to stay over there for another five months. After he could have come home. I felt pretty bad all the time about his being in Vietnam, I figured something was going to happen to him all the time, I wasn’t never thinking about something going to happen to Auburey. I was always thinking Chaney was going to get killed because he was over there in action, you know. He was going around building roads, digging booby traps, and stuff like that. I read there in the paper where some of the stuff he was doing, you know, it kind of scared me, you know. So I never thought it would be nothing ever happen to Auburey. I called the Red Cross, to Mrs. Hudson, and told them that my second son was killed, I had to have Chaney home. I had to verify it at the morgue to make sure before they sent for him, so my husband went down to the morgue and verified it, and I called them back. . . .”
——
Robert Jewel Pollard, Auburey’s seventeen-year-old brother, was imprisoned in the Michigan Reformatory at Ionia, serving a three-to-ten-year sentence for having stolen seven dollars from a newsboy. “My counselor, Mr. Jackson,” Robert told me, “was the first one who told me about it. He told me one of my brothers had got killed. He couldn’t pronounce the name too good, he said, ‘Aub, Aub, Aub.’ I didn’t say nothing. Wasn’t nothing for me to say. I called up, they let me call home. I called home that same day, and my mother and my brother and father told me. They didn’t know too much about it. They told me most of it. I learned about how the police beat on him and all that when I read it in the paper later. One of the police kept on telling my brother to stab him, that one that killed him—to stab him.”
——
Larry Reed’s father called the Temples very early that morning to say that someone had called to tell him that Fred Temple had been killed at the Algiers Motel. Mrs. Temple, who always got up at five in the morning to fix lunch for her husband to take to work, called at that hour to ask her sister to drive Mr. Temple to the motel. At the Algiers Miss Gilmore told Mr. Temple that the bodies had been taken away. A policeman took him to the annex, and Mr. Temple found Fred’s glasses on the floor of room A-3. From the Algiers Mr. Temple went to the morgue, which was closed; from there he went to police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien, where he could not learn anything; he went back to the morgue, but it was still closed. He went then to his job.
Later Eddie Temple, Fred’s oldest brother, went to the morgue and identified Fred’s body. There Eddie encountered Mr. Gill and Sortor, and they told Eddie what they knew. “This,” Eddie told me, “was the first I’d heard of the nature of the incident.”
——
No official person ever notified any of the families of the deaths of their sons. “They don’t tell you nothing,” Mrs. Gill said to me. “They won’t give you no kind of information. What hurts me so bad is they didn’t even notify me that Carl was dead. If it don’t be for the boys I wouldn’t never have known it.”
“The police didn’t even notify us,” Mrs. Pollard said to me. “That’s a hurt feeling.”
——
“My maw and I left the morgue,” Mr. Pollard told me. “My maw and I was coming on home, my maw said, ‘Baby, I thought you was going by the Algier Hotel.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll go.’ So when I got to the Algier Hotel, there was people there. Some people talking, some not, some watching, and some isn’t, you know how people do.” The place, in fact, was swarming. Homicide was back; the seal at the front door had been broken long before they got there. “I’m very funny anyway,” Mr. Pollard said to me, “I’m very funny that way, I’ll never say anything when I don’t know anything, I don’t say nothing if I don’t know nothing. I’ll wait to see what I’m doing. So I told my maw, I say, ‘I’m going home and get my camera.’ I go back. So I started from the top floor and worked to the bottom. That’s when I went to finding deer shots. That’s what they killed Auburey with, deer shots. They used double-barreled. I found a 300 high-speed Savage, and deer shots, and shotgun shells. I worked with the detectives. They were very nice to me. Now if I’d been like the most averagest Negro, or the most average human being white or Negro, if it had have been his son, when he walked up and asked the guy something, he’d have been cussing, swearing; I never got overemotional. I never would have found out what I knew if I’d have got overemotional. And they was beautiful. Each one of those gentlemen was beautiful. I talked to a guy of the Homicide, and he gave me a card to see him. I goes downtown to see him, and when I goes downtown looking for him, he was the same guy I just got through talking to! So I picked up real quick, so I just cooled it, I played it cool. But I never give up what I was doing, I doubled right back around and went back doing what I was doing. I didn’t think hard of him, because he had a job, that’s why the city pays him, because he got a job to do. He’s got a filthy job. Most filthy job in the world. And I’ve got the next to the filthiest job in the world.”
——
“After I’d heard that Fred had been shot in the Algiers,” Eddie Temple told me, “I heard in the news reports that three snipers had been killed at the Algiers. So when I heard the way it happened, I was sure that that was the way it happened. I knew Fred would never pick up a gun and shoot anybody, or shoot at somebody, or be a party to anything like that, ever. When I got home, Cleveland [Larry] Reed came over, and he told the family what had happened. About the line-up, and how he saw blood running down the back of Fred’s head. I talked with him at length. Then I talked with one of his friends, Rod, Roderick Davis. And it was after that that I called Detective Schlachter. I had heard his name at the morgue as the person who was investigating this. I waited down there at the morgue; I wanted to talk to the investigating detective on this. They said it would be Detective Schlachter who would be taking care of this. So it’s pretty hard to get through to the police to talk about anything. I went down to the Police Department. They wouldn’t let me in. They had it quadroned off, and they wouldn’t let you up the steps. So I telephoned, and I got him. He said he’d heard about it, but he hadn’t had a chance to get over and start the investigation yet. He said three snipers had been killed. That was when I proceeded to tell him that they were not snipers, that there wasn’t any sniping from that particular building, but that they were murdered.”
In an immaculate living room with a carpeted floor and white plaster mirror frames and sconces against dark walls and crinkling, transparent plastic covers over handsomely upholstered sofa cushions, Mrs. John Temple, a large woman with an aquiline nose and a steady, deep gaze, talked to me, her voice controlled and her words measured, about her dead son:
“He was kind of slow in his books. Anyway, I never had any trouble out of him, he was always a good boy at home. He liked to work with photography, that was what he mostly liked. He was the baby: first Ella, then Eddie, then Eva May, then John, then the twins Hal and Herbert, and he was the last one, Freddie.
“He was a normal child, that’s all. After he got to be seventeen, he wanted to work like his father, wanted to get a good job in a factory. He slipped out of school and got a job with the Ford Motor Company. I got on him so bad trying to get him to get back in school, but he’d had a hard time with his reading, and he said the teacher told him it would be best to work at a job and go to adult school.
“Let’s see, we moved around some. I’ve been in Detroit for twenty-six years, and Fred’s father, he’s had the one job, machine operator, Thompson Products, the same job for twenty-three, twenty-four years. Let’s see, he went, let’s see, to Catherine B. White School, Cleveland Junior High, Nolan Junior High, and in Pershing he reached 11B.
“He had low blood pressure at one time, and his last job at Ford’s they had him working around the fires, and he couldn’t stand the heat. So he quit there, and he started working with his uncle seven days a week. His uncle’s a contractor—Robert Williams—he said he was going to teach Freddie to lay bricks to have a trade. Fred just didn’t work that one Sunday. Larry Reed called him, and I just thought he was going over on the next block, said he was going to do some backstage work. That’s why he got to the Algiers at all.
“I just feel it didn’t have to come to this. If they’d been any kind of police. I don’t want to feel bitter toward no one, but when someone can be that cold. It looks like after you beat people for an hour you ought to be able to come to some kind of sense. . . .”