JOHN HERSEY AND THE TRAGEDY OF RACE
Thomas J. Sugrue
In August 1967, John Hersey, then master of Pierson College at Yale and an accomplished novelist, rushed to Detroit to examine firsthand the aftermath of the city’s bloody riot. In nearly a week of violence in the Motor City, forty-three people had died. Seventeen thousand armed officials, including the city and state police, the National Guard, and the 103rd Airborne, patrolled the city and arrested more than seven thousand people, disproportionately young African American men. In the aftermath of the uprising, President Lyndon Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of the urban riots during the “long hot summers” of the mid-1960s. Hersey had been invited to write part of the commission’s report, but declined, preferring the freedom to conduct his own inquiry.1
Hersey had long since established himself as one of America’s leading fiction writers, though he was most famous for his book Hiroshima (1946), a passionate journalistic account of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. Born in 1914 to a family of American missionaries in China, Hersey began his career as a writer for Time magazine in the late 1930s, after a brief stint as secretary to novelist Sinclair Lewis. During World War II, Hersey quickly established himself as a writer of great talent. He won the Pulitzer Prize at age thirty for his novel about the American occupation of Sicily, A Bell for Adano (1944). Both in fiction and nonfiction, Hersey passionately engaged some of the most controversial issues of his era, including Jewish resistance to Nazism, racial prejudice, educational reform, student radicalism, and the brutality of war. A political liberal committed to civil rights and a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party, Hersey was drawn toward the troubled streets of Detroit.2
Detroit in the mid-1960s was a place of paradox. Nationally celebrated as a “model city” of race relations, it had been a major beneficiary of government largesse during the Great Society. Under the leadership of liberal Democratic Mayor Jerome Cavanagh (1962–69), Detroit garnered more federal redevelopment and antipoverty money than any other city but New York. But mid-twentieth-century Detroit was also a troubled place, economically and racially. The nation’s “Arsenal of Democracy” during World War II and the international capital of automobile production, the city went through a period of wrenching economic change and racial conflict beginning in the late 1940s and accelerating through the 1950s and ’60s.3
Amidst the superficially prosperous post–World War II years, Detroit’s economy began a steady decline. Between 1948 and 1967, Detroit lost nearly 130,000 manufacturing jobs. Many of the city’s companies picked up and relocated to suburban and rural areas, and replaced thousands of unskilled workers with new “automated” manufacturing technology. This economic restructuring affected all Detroiters, but hit African Americans particularly hard. During and after World War II, Detroit had been a magnet for black migrants seeking steady and secure blue-collar jobs. But the city’s economy promised more than it could deliver. Though a large number of blacks found work in the city’s automobile factories and, increasingly, in city government, whole sectors of the city’s labor market remained lily white throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. In addition, black workers tended to hold the city’s “meanest and dirtiest jobs,” precisely the unskilled jobs that were beginning to disappear as companies downsized. By 1960, black unemployment rates were more than double those of whites. Young blacks were hit especially hard. Thirty-five percent of nineteen-year-old black men, but only 8.9 percent of nineteen-year-old white males, were out of work. Many underemployed youths hung out on street corners unable to find work; others were drawn into the city’s expanding underground economy.
Detroit also simmered with racial tension. As the city’s black population expanded between World War II and the 1967 riot, white Detroiters joined in an enormous grassroots movement to protect their segregated communities from black “invasions.” Angry white residents greeted black newcomers to their neighborhoods with pickets and protests, window breaking, and arson. Often police officers stood silently by during the sieges; blacks who happened to pass through white neighborhoods were regularly subjected to police stops and harassment. In the early and mid-1960s, white attacks on blacks were still alarmingly frequent, making clear the high costs of breaching the invisible color lines that divided the city. The consequence was that Detroit, like other northern cities, remained strictly segregated by race. The only familiar white faces in African American neighborhoods belonged to shopkeepers and police officers.
In the divided city, conflicts between blacks and the police became flashpoints of racial resentment. Before the riot, whites had a nearly complete monopoly over law enforcement jobs. In 1953, Detroit had only 117 black officers on its police force, all of whom served in a few predominantly black precincts. The situation had barely changed in the 1960s. The city’s black population had more than doubled between 1950 and 1970, but by the time of the riot, the number of black police officers had not kept pace. In a city that was more than one-third black, 95 percent of police officers were white.4
The racial isolation of the Detroit police force fostered intense racial antagonism and distrust. A federal survey taken just before the 1967 riot found that racial prejudice was endemic among white police officers. Investigators found that 45 percent of police working in black neighborhoods were “extremely anti-Negro” and another 34 percent were “prejudiced.” On the streets, the police often acted on racist impulses. The files of civil rights organizations are full of accounts of petty police brutality. From the 1940s through the 1960s, hundreds of blacks, prosperous and poor, men and women, complained to the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that they had been handled roughly, called names, or mocked by white police officers.5 As a consequence, surveys found that a sizeable segment of Detroit’s black population distrusted the police. One survey of Detroiters taken in 1967 found that 25 percent of black respondents, but only 11 percent of whites, had complaints against the police. A follow-up survey, conducted by University of Michigan political scientists Joel Aberbach and Jack Walker, found that 50 percent of blacks were dissatisfied with the city’s police, compared to only 20 percent of whites. More than one-third of black respondents believed that “policemen lack respect or use insulting language” in their neighborhoods, that “policemen search and frisk people without good reason,” and that “policemen use unnecessary force in making arrests.” Only about 10 percent of whites agreed with each statement.6
When the riot exploded in 1967, it surprised only those who were utterly unfamiliar with Detroit’s troubled past. Decades of racial conflict and economic inequality provided the tinder for the 1967 riot; a police action provided the spark. In this respect Detroit was not unusual. “Almost invariably,” wrote the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, “the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action.” In Chicago, rioting began on a hot summer day when police attempted to disperse youths cooling themselves off in the spray of fire hydrants. In Philadelphia, several days of looting and arson had been sparked by an altercation between police and the black owner of a stalled car; in Watts, violence began after a routine traffic stop led to squabbles between police and bystanders. In Detroit, the riot began when police raided a “blind pig”—an illegal after-hours bar. Most of these police incidents were, on the surface, minor events. But to many African Americans, the police came to “symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression.”7
Riot-torn Detroit was full of potential subjects for an engaged writer like Hersey: the broken dreams of the thousands of shopkeepers who lost their life investments; the tragedies of the forty-three people who died violent deaths during the riot (thirty-four of whom had been killed by armed officials); the shattered hopes of politicians and community leaders who tried in vain to stop the looting; the seething anger of black power advocates who believed that the uprising was the first stage of a black revolution; the bitterness and glee of youths who smashed store windows and carried away clothes, food, and appliances. Any of these stories would have provided rich material for a book.
As Hersey began interviewing Detroiters, however, he found himself drawn to the disturbing events that occurred in the early hours of July 26, 1967, at the Algiers Motel and Manor House, a seedy establishment a few miles north of downtown. Amidst reports of sniper attacks, police and national guardsmen raided the motel. Inside, armed officials lined up seven black men and two white women guests along the wall of the lobby, tortured them (beating one so forcefully with a rifle that the gun broke in two), stripped the women, and took the guests one by one into a nearby room for brutal interrogation sessions. At the end of the rampage, three black men had been shot dead. All three, ruled a medical investigator, were in “nonaggressive postures” when they had been killed. And in the final indignity, investigators found no evidence of wrongdoing at the motel. Despite rumors of sniping, the police did not find a single gun on the premises.
Hersey quickly began sifting through the muddled accounts of what had happened that night at the Algiers Motel. He conducted his own investigation of the case, poring through police and court records, combing newspaper accounts, and, most importantly, interviewing witnesses, the survivors, the victims’ families, and the three police officers suspected of wrongdoing. Using an approach characteristic of his earlier nonfiction writing, Hersey focused on a handful of characters: in this case, the three police officers accused of masterminding the massacre—Ronald August, Robert Paille, and David Senak—and one of the three murder victims, eighteen-year-old Auburey Pollard.
The result of Hersey’s investigation was a collage of facts, opinions, evidence, and hearsay, rather than a straightforward chronological narrative. Hersey’s unconventional methodology was to tell the story through fragments of interviews, public records, news reports, and testimony, most often presented verbatim. Lacing the manuscript are snippets of minute details, some of them freighted with import, others seemingly inconsequential. Hersey attempted to present all sides of an extraordinarily complicated case. “This account,” he wrote, “is too urgent, too complex, too dangerous to too many people to be told in a way that might leave doubts strewn along its path” (31). In occasional asides, Hersey highlighted what he believed to be the most revealing pieces of evidence.
Many of Hersey’s reviewers were frustrated by the fragmented style of the book. One called it “a profusion of details, surmise, hearsay, and murky recollection.” Another chided Hersey for writing “one of the more disorganized books of the last few years.”8 But Hersey’s assemblage of details and facts was deliberate, not disorganized.
The fractured structure of Hersey’s narrative served two purposes. One was to convey the intense state of confusion that surrounded the entire event. July 26 was, he wrote, a “night of hallucination” (162). What happened at the Algiers Motel could never fully be ascertained. Many witnesses in the case proved to be wholly unreliable. The Detroit police officers, national guardsmen, and state policemen who were on the scene offered different versions of who entered and left the motel and when. An unidentified man had been found lurking in the alley behind the hotel. At one of the trials, a surprise witness reported seeing a black man with a rifle at the hotel earlier that evening. The motel guests, beaten and traumatized by the police, had spent most of their ordeal lined up facing a wall, unable to see what was happening behind them. Many gunshots were fired, but it was not clear who shot whom and when. And after the fact, the crime scene was tainted by police oversights: detectives had not adequately secured the building, the county coroner had refused to take away the bodies for fear of entering the riot zone, and maids had begun cleaning the building before police detectives had completed their investigation. In a reflective moment, Hersey recalled “the thesis of Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace . . . that after a battle there are as many versions as there were participants in it” (231).9
Second, the book’s anecdotal and scattershot style conveys Hersey’s sense of urgency. Passionately, angrily written, The Algiers Motel Incident was, perhaps, compiled too hastily. The book was published less than a year after the incident, and Hersey’s publisher rushed the book to print only five weeks from the time that Hersey submitted the final manuscript. In addition, much of the book’s material was raw. Hersey gathered so much material so quickly that he was unable to consider fully its possible significance. Rather than distilling and reordering his evidence as a lawyer would do for a legal case or as a historian for a monograph, Hersey simply transcribed lengthy, undigested quotations right from his tape recorder.
To view The Algiers Motel Incident as merely a compendium of raw data would, however, be misreading the author’s careful control of the material. Hersey believed that the task of the author was to exhort and provoke. His story was unabashedly moralistic. Optimistic about the redemptive role of journalism, Hersey targeted a white readership who, he hoped, would take action to heal America’s racial divide. An advocate of racial justice, Hersey drew inspiration from the works of mid-twentieth-century racial liberals, most notably Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma. “The Negro problem,” wrote Myrdal, “is a problem in the heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.” Like Myrdal, Hersey saw the problem of race as a personal one. Racism was at root an individual pathology that needed to be solved at the individual level through reasoned debate and education. “If real progress is to be made,” Hersey argued, “it cannot be made simply by expenditures of funds, even in great sums, on ‘programs’; racism must be educated or coaxed or wrenched or stamped out of the centers of injustice and grievance. . . . The remedy is in the minds of men” (37). Above all, Hersey saw his writing as didactic—he hoped to inform, appeal, and persuade.10
Although he was clearly sympathetic to the black victims and hoped that his story would provoke outrage at racial injustice, Hersey drew complicated portraits of the three police officers as well as the victims, carefully avoiding the temptation to demonize the white police and lionize the black victims. Officers August, Paille, and particularly Senak were portrayed as racially prejudiced and quick to judge, but also tragically limited by circumstances beyond their control. Each had been hardened by regular encounters with seemingly incorrigible criminals. Their frustration mounted during the riot. Officer Robert Paille told Hersey bitterly: “I saw more crime transpire (the first day of the riot) than I saw all two years I been on the force. And there was nothing I could do about it, because I didn’t have the orders” (75–76). After three days of near sleeplessness and almost constant siege, the three officers were nervous, angry, and jumpy. They began taking the law into their own hands. Their combination of adrenaline and racism, particularly in the case of Senak, proved deadly (Senak had been involved in two other fatal shootings during the week of the riot).11
Auburey Pollard was likewise a complicated character, his life options constrained by his poor education and economic hardship. A teenager at “the fork in the road,” he faced an unhappy choice between the hardscrabble, insecure, working-class world of his childhood and the dangerously appealing underground life of crime and drugs that seemingly provided the only way out of poverty. A sensitive artist and a ruthless fighter, Pollard was torn between the steady life of his clean-living friend Fred Temple (also murdered at the motel) and the violent life of his fellow victim Carl Cooper, who was in constant brushes with the law before his death at the Algiers. By sympathetically recounting the troubled life of Auburey Pollard, Hersey hoped that his book would “narrow that distance” between black and white, appealing to his readers’ consciences.
By the late 1960s, however, Hersey’s racial liberalism was fading in fashion. Blacks grew increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of racial harmony. Whites professed to be more open to the idea of racial integration, but racial divisions remained deep, particularly in housing and education. Impatient with the slow pace of change, a vocal minority of black activists and their white allies demanded that blacks take power into their own hands. True racial justice, argued one left-wing critic of Hersey, would not come through the conversion of whites to notions of racial equality but “through the massed political power of blacks.”12 At the same time, the white majority, who had never been particularly sympathetic to calls for racial equality, lurched rightward. A growing segment of the electorate demanded “law and order” politics and repudiated what they believed were the excesses of the civil rights movement. Only a few months after the publication of The Algiers Motel Incident, nearly 60 percent of American voters supported conservative Richard Nixon or segregationist George Wallace; many blamed Democrats for capitulating to the demands of “angry” African Americans.13
In the tense, racially charged atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the victims of the gruesome events at the Algiers Motel found little vindication in the courts. In August 1967, murder charges against Officer Robert Paille were dismissed because he had not been properly informed of his Miranda rights—a particularly ironic twist, since only a few years earlier, police officers had fiercely opposed the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision. Shortly after Hersey’s book came out, Officer Ronald August was charged with murder. Detroit Recorder’s Court Judge Thomas Poindexter (a former anti–civil rights activist) ruled that the publicity surrounding Hersey’s book made a fair trial in Detroit impossible and sent the case to a notoriously conservative suburban judge, William Beer, who promptly moved the trial to rural lily-white Mason, Michigan (the town in which Malcolm X’s father had been murdered in 1931). Beer allowed the defense to show televised footage of the riot that was unrelated to the events at the Algiers Motel. Although the prosecution asked that the charges include manslaughter, Beer instructed jurors to consider an “all or nothing” charge—either August had committed first degree murder or was not guilty. After a brief deliberation, the jury acquitted August.
After the murder charges had been dismissed, federal prosecutors filed charges against the three police officers and a security guard under an 1871 federal law for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three slain men and the other members of the infamous line-up. In the federal trial, held in Flint, Michigan, another all-white jury also acquitted the defendants, after days of inconsistent and contradictory testimony from prosecution witnesses. In the end, Officers August, Paille, and Senak were never convicted for their role in the sordid events at the Algiers Motel.14
Ultimately, the most important contribution of Hersey’s book was that it chronicled the enormous gap between blacks and whites regarding issues of law and order. For many black observers, the events at the Algiers Motel offered a particularly graphic example of the random, regular brutality that black people had been facing at the hands of the police for decades. That the deaths of three African American men and the torture of several others went unpunished fueled the black community’s conviction that the criminal justice system was deeply corrupt. White advocates of “law and order,” on the other hand, hailed the decisions. Carl Parsell, president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, discounted “charges of police brutality” as “part of a nefarious plot by those who would like our form of government overthrown. The blueprint for anarchy calls for the destruction of the effectiveness of the police. Certainly, it must be obvious that every incident is magnified and exploited with only one purpose.”15 The Algiers Motel incident was a graphic reminder of two versions of justice that had prevailed in the American past, separate and unequal.
From the infamous 1930s-era trials of the Scottsboro Boys to the hasty acquittal of the murderers of Emmett Till and civil rights activist Medgar Evers, African Americans have chafed against the injustices of the American judicial system. The profound distrust that many blacks continue to feel toward the police and toward the court system—reflected in the cases of Rodney King and O. J. Simpson and in the angry, antipolice lyrics of gangsta rap—is a legacy of the unresolved issues that John Hersey so powerfully documented. In the end, Hersey’s story of three white police officers and three dead black men is an American tragedy of power, inequality, and injustice, a tragedy whose consequences continue to poison race relations in America today.
1. See below, 31–32.
2. For overviews of Hersey’s career, see David Sanders, John Hersey (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967); Sanders, John Hersey Revisited (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991); and Nancy L. Huse, The Survival Tales of John Hersey (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1983).
3. The material in this and the following two paragraphs draws from Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). See also Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) and Robert Conot, American Odyssey (New York: William Morrow, 1974).
4. Detroit Police Department, Office of Director of Personnel, “Tabulation of Non-White Personnel,” March 24, 1953, in the Donald S. Leonard Papers, Michigan Historical Collection, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Box 21. For 1967 figures, see Fine, Violence in the Model City, 104, 109.
5. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings Held in Detroit, Michigan, December 14–15, 1960 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 302–21. For examples of police brutality complaints, see Detroit Branch, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Part II, Box 31, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan.
6. Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker, Race in the City: Political Trust and Public Policy in the New Urban System (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), 49, 52.
7. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 37, 38–39, 206; see also Robert Fogelson, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettoes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 53–78.
8. Stephen Schlesinger, “Shoot-up in Detroit,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1968, 124; Robert Conot, “One Night in Detroit,” New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1968, 3.
9. The most comprehensive and persuasive account of the details of the case can be found in Fine, Violence in the Model City, 271–90.
10. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944), 60–61. For a superb discussion of Myrdal and the course of racial liberalism in mid-twentieth-century America, see Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). For a discussion of Hersey’s didactic approach, see Huse, Survival Tales, 153–60.
11. If Senak was indeed involved in the three murders at the Algiers Motel, he was present at a total of five violent deaths during the week of the riot (one considered to be a non-riot-related death). Sidney Fine suggests—drawing from a close reading of evidence presented in the three court cases and other accounts—that one of the dead men at the Algiers Motel, Carl Cooper, had died before police arrived, possibly murdered by an intruder. See Fine, Violence in the Model City, 273–77.
12. Nat Hentoff, “Waking Up the White Folks Again,” New Republic, July 20, 1968, 37–39.
13. Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’ ” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 243–68; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 551–78.
14. Yale Kasimar, “Was Justice Done in the Algiers Motel Incident?” New York Times, March 1, 1970; Fine, Violence in the Model City, 285–90. On Poindexter’s earlier career, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 209–10, 227–28.
15. Quoted in Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 191.