Civil Rights Events

MLK and RFK -- Early 1968

… King saw, at least as early as the 1963 March on Washington, that the movement needed to expand beyond anti-discrimination and into areas like economic equality. That tied into his anger over Vietnam and the wasted resources he said would be of better use at home fighting poverty.

“He was trying to regain something. He was deeply concerned about the direction of the country and his movement,” said Joseph Rosenbloom, in his book, Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours. “He was trying to revitalize the movement. He thought the war was a huge mistake and was draining resources from far more important causes. He thought that the most critical issue facing the country was poverty.

The Vietnam speech and King’s efforts to address poverty was a stark shift in his thinking and marked a sharp contrast to the optimism of the “I Have a Dream” speech just four years earlier.

“He was trying to recruit thousands of poor people and convince them to come to Washington, possibly for months, to engage in a series of protests demanding a legislative response to the problems of poverty,” Rosenbloom said. “They would need to be brought to Washington. Housed in Washington. fed and organized. That would have to go on in a controlled fashion for an unpredictable long time. All that was an enormous task.”

About 60 people gathered in the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church in January 1968 for a party that would celebrate King’s last birthday. He would turn 39….

If the birthday party served as a reprieve, it was only briefly.

King immediately got back to work planning the Poor People’s Campaign while fighting with his own doubts.

“Over the last three months, Doc is in a shakier emotional state than he had ever been before,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Garrow. “It was a combination of exhaustion and the political pessimism.”

At that point, King had been under an intense spotlight for 12 years with nonstop travel and his mood had become increasingly despondent.

“But it was not just external pressures,” Rosenbloom said. “He suffered from chronic insomnia. He was on the road all the time and he was utterly exhausted. And physically, he wasn’t always in terrific shape.”

[Jesse] Jackson said at times King talked about giving it all up to spend his time writing, traveling and making speeches. Even perhaps being president of Morehouse College.

“He was trying to figure it out,” Jackson said. “He was preaching through his pain.”

But it was becoming painfully clear that the planning for the Poor People’s Campaign was not going well, even to the point where it was fracturing the already tender SCLC. Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and James Bevel all questioned some aspect of why they were doing it.

“It was not very well organized and it doesn’t seem that it is gonna draw folks to D.C.,” said Garrow, the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “He is very much behind the 8 ball because everything is running behind.”

On Feb. 1, two weeks after his birthday party, two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning compactor in a garbage truck where they were taking shelter from the rain. Their deaths led to a massive strike, peppered with spates of violence and police confrontations.

As the impasse tightened, almost in desperation, James Lawson, the pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, called King and asked him to help put pressure on the mayor (Suggs 6-7).

The rain was torrential, flooding streets and overflowing sewers. Still, the Memphis public works department required its sanitation workers — all black men — to continue to work in the downpour Feb. 1, 1968.

That day, two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, took shelter from the rain in the back of their garbage truck. As Cole and Walker rode in the back of the truck, an electrical switch malfunctioned. The compactor turned on.

Cole and Walker were crushed by the garbage truck compactor. The public works department refused to compensate their families.

Eleven days after their deaths, as many as 1,300 black sanitation workers in Memphis walked off the job, protesting horrible working conditions, abuse, racism and discrimination by the city …

…

The men …worked in filth, dragging heavy tubs of garbage onto trucks.

“Most of the tubs had holes in them,” sanitation worker Taylor Rogers, recalled in the documentary “At the River I Stand.” “Garbage would be leaking. When you went home, you had to stop at the door to pull off your clothes. Maggots would fall out on you.”

The men worked long hours for low wages, with no overtime pay and no paid sick leave. Injuries on the job could lead to their getting fired. If they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid. Most of them made 65 cents per hour.

“We felt we would have to let the city know that because we were sanitation workers, we were human beings. The signs we were carrying said ‘I Am a Man,’ ” James Douglas, a sanitation worker, recalled …. “And we were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has.”

Led by T.O. Jones, a sanitation worker who had attempted to organize the workers in a strike years earlier, and supported by the AFSCME, the men demanded the city recognize their union, increase wages and improve inhumane conditions for sanitation workers.

…

Memphis’s then-mayor, Henry Loeb III, refused the demands of the sanitation workers union, Local 1733, refusing to take malfunctioning trucks off routes, refusing to pay overtime and refusing to improve conditions.

“It has been held that all employees of a municipality may not strike for any purpose,” Loeb said in a 1968 news conference …. “Public employees cannot strike against your employer. I suggested to these men you go back to work.”

On Feb. 14, 1968, Loeb issued an ultimatum, telling the men to return to work by 7 a.m.

Some men returned to work under police escort. Negotiations between the majority of strikers and the city failed. More than 10,000 tons of garbage had piled up in Memphis….

The Rev. James Lawson, a King ally, said at a news conference: “When a public official orders a group of men to ‘get back to work and then we’ll talk’ and treats them as though they are not men, that is a racist point of view. And no matter how you dress it up in terms of whether or not a union can organize it, it is still racism. At the heart of racism is the idea ‘A man is not a man.’ ”

On Feb. 19, 1968, the NAACP and protesters organized an all-night sit-in at Memphis City Hall. The next day, the NAACP and the union called for a citywide boycott of downtown businesses.

…

On March 18, 1968, King, who was in the midst of working on the Poor People’s Campaign, flew into Memphis (Brown 1-4).

Robert F. Kennedy toured eastern Kentucky on February 13 and 14, 1968, landing at Lexington 's Bluegrass Airport and traveling over two hundred miles in those two days. At the same time, in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive was still underway - marking a major turning point in both the war and in attitudes toward it. Less than a month later, RFK would announce his candidacy for presidency.

Kennedy's purpose in touring eastern Kentucky was to examine the outcomes of the first wave of "war on poverty" legislation with the people it most affected - previous trips of inquiry were made to the San Joaquin Valley of California, the Mississippi Delta, northern New Mexico, and the hills of western Pennsylvania.

… Kennedy held field hearings for the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty in two locations during the tour, in Vortex and Fleming-Neon, taking testimony that would be entered into the Congressional Record. RFK also visited individual homes, schoolhouses, and county centers during his tour, focusing on the needs of children and young people, asking questions about what they had eaten that day, and viewing for himself the effects of both poverty and the federal efforts to combat it.

The schedule of the tour was grueling: Kennedy met dozens of people individually, spoke to thousands, and traveled over rough mountain roads, starting with a hearing in Vortex at a one room schoolhouse whose entire student body consisted of the children of one rural family; on to another one room school in Barwick, where the teacher, Bonnie Jean Carroll cooked a hot meal for her students on a pot-bellied stove everyday; on to Hazard, where he toured the African American neighborhood, Liberty Street; to a strip mining site where he viewed for himself the physical destruction produced by surface mining …

Advance man Peter Edelman would write: In nearly every place, especially rural communities, where we found a severe unwillingness to help the poor, we also found, and not always because of ethnic differences, a pocket of feudalism in America: a local power structure committed to perpetuating itself at all costs and unwilling to countenance the slightest improvement in the lives of the excluded, for fear they would gain the confidence and the wherewithal to overturn the status quo at the ballot box. Elected officials, judges, police officers and sheriffs, and local bankers and business people were always ready to use any tool necessary to quash dissidence whenever it appeared. This was true in Cesar Chavez's world in California, in the Rio Grande valley in south Texas, in Mississippi, and in Appalachia (About 1-3).

The boy was 11 years old and had never seen a man in the middle of winter with a suntan and such straight teeth in his corner of the United States, the small towns baked into the impoverished hills of eastern Kentucky.

But here was Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in February of 1968, in a gray coat and dark, narrow tie, his sandy brown hair falling over his forehead. The senator stood on the steps of the Letcher County courthouse, a horde of citizens gazing in wonder at him and the ungainly caravan of reporters documenting his every step in those days when everyone expected him to announce his candidacy for president.

“I stood really close to him — I was able to do that — and that was the first time I’d seen someone with a suntan in winter,” Benjamin Gish, now 61, said 50 years later. “I asked my mom how was that possible? And she said, ‘Only wealthy people can have suntans in February.’ It was like a big star had come to town. I was amazed just seeing him there.”

In those months before he ran for president, Kennedy commanded public attention opposing the Vietnam War and criticizing President Lyndon Johnson.

But he was also preoccupied with the scourge of poverty and hunger, a focus that had taken him to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn, and to the Mississippi Delta, where he was seen wiping away tears after venturing into a family’s shack and meeting a child with a distended stomach who was listless from malnourishment.

Now, a year later, Kennedy [had] traveled to eastern Kentucky’s coal country, a region that one local leader told him accounted for 20 of the nation’s 30 poorest counties; where a doctor told Kennedy that 18 percent of the population was underweight and 50 percent suffered from intestinal parasites; where one man, Clister Johnson of Partridge, Ky., told him that he, his wife and nine children survived on a monthly income of $60.

“They’re desperate and filled with despair,” Kennedy told a television reporter. “It seems to me that in this country, as wealthy as we are, this is an intolerable condition. It reflects on all of us. We can do things all over the rest of the world but I think we should do things for people in our own country.”

Over the course of two days, Kennedy traveled 300 miles in Appalachia, stopping in towns with names such as Neon and Hazard and Pippa Passes. He held two public hearings, one of them in a one-room schoolhouse, visited people in their beat-up homes and tapped into a “deep vein of disillusionment,” as described at the time by William Greider, then a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal.

“Don’t Give Us Anymore Promises,” read a banner at one stop. “We Can’t Eat Your Fancy Promises.”

…

Greider, who would later write for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and the Nation, said he was “put off by the theatrics and manipulation” as he approached the trip, a sense that Kennedy was stringing along the public and the press, which was awaiting word on whether he would run.

Yet Greider said he saw something during those two days in Kentucky that “captured me and changed my mind a little bit about Bobby Kennedy.” It occurred at a schoolhouse, where the senator and his entourage arrived to find six or eight students and their teacher “who were in shock when we stormed in. Terrified. They didn’t know what this was, they had never heard of Bobby Kennedy or national politics.”

“These kids were hunkered down at their desks, hoping that this storm would pass, and he grasped immediately that this was a horror show,” Greider said. “He went around, one by one, kneeling by their desks. He didn’t say very much. He nodded at them, talked to them in whispers, held their hands. It was such a human response. This was a side of the politician you don’t see very often” (Schwartzman 1-4).

Works cited:

“About RFK's 1968 Tour.” The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project. Web. http://rfkineky.org/1968-tour.htm

Brown, DaNeen L. “‘I Am a Man’: The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike that Led to MLK’s Assassination” The Washington Post. February 12, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/12/i-am-a-man-the-1968-memphis-sanitation-workers-strike-that-led-to-mlks-assassination/

Schwartzman, Paul. “They Were Kentucky’s Poorest, Most Desperate People. And He Was a Kennedy with an Entourage.” The Washington Post. February 212, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/21/they-were-kentuckys-poorest-most-desperate-people-and-he-was-a-kennedy-with-an-entourage-and-presidential-aspirations/?noredirect=on

Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/

Civil Rights Events

Urban Blacks and Law Enforcement

Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, 37, a social psychologist with Wayne State University’s Lafayette Clinic, conducted [between November 1967 and February 1968[ the study in which 286 Detroit policemen, including 36 Negro officers, were interviewed in their homes by 20 clinic staff members

The 4,800-man force is 92 per cent white, Mendelsohn noted, adding that the potential for racial conflict could not be exaggerated.

His study concludes:

--Most white policemen reject the idea that Negroes are victims of social injustice.

--Few white officers believe that good will come of the 1967 Detroit riot, and those who do believe so say it will be a form of appeasement.

--Most white patrolmen have little knowledge of the law-abiding Negro community in Detroit, although their superiors have a “higher evaluation” of the black community, possibly because they come into contact with all its elements, “not just persons involved with possible criminal offenses.”

To many white patrolmen, Mendelsohn says, an upheaval like the riot is proof that Negroes as anti-social and lawless people is correct. And so some, he says, disturbances represent justification for “taking revenge” against Negroes.

White and Negro officers, Mendelsohn said, disagree only on questions involving race. They were in substantial agreement, he said on issues limited to police work – the need for more money, the fact that Detroit police did a good job in policing the riot and that looters, not innocent bystanders, were arrested.

Among lower echelon white officers, the study says Negroes are considered a “privileged minority, susceptible to the influence of agitators,” who, the white police believe, are capable of galvanizing blacks into violent action even though the Negroes “are without grievances.”

The study reveals that the majority of white policemen feel blacks are treated either the same as whites or favored by schools, welfare agencies, stores and law enforcement agencies and in the area of jobs. Housing is the only area where a substantial number of white patrolmen see discrimination.

Nearly 25 per cent of the white officers interviewed said rioters should be shot, which 8.3 per cent of the Negro men on the force believed so.

Close to 90 per cent of Negro officers said they felt blacks were treated unfairly by the police, compared with the 16 per cent of white inspectors and 7 per cent of white patrolmen who felt this is the case.

Mendelsohn says the views held by the officers tend to correspond with those held by the society from which they come – generally, the working class.

Police officers’ attitudes are formed well before they become police officers, Mendelsohn says, adding that the attitudes of the societies from which they come “remain of considerable influence through the rest of their lives” (Psychologist’s Study 13).

There were positive signs on the racial front in 1967. Congress had recently passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. On June 12, the Supreme Court ended state bans on interracial marriage. On Aug. 30, Thurgood Marshall was confirmed by the Senate as the first African-American on the Supreme Court. In the fall, Carl Stokes won election as the first African-American mayor of a major U.S. city, in Cleveland.

Yet the rioting of '67 showed with vivid clarity how far America had to go and how dangerous the racial climate had become. In this sense, '67 was a harbinger, marked by riots July 12-17 in Newark, New Jersey, where 26 people died, July 14 in Plainfield, New Jersey, July 19 in Minneapolis, July 23-27 in Detroit, July 20-Aug. 3 in Milwaukee, just to name a few (Walsh 2).

In her new book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” …, Harvard historian Elizabeth Hinton pinpoints the moment when things started to go sour.

…

Demographic forces were in part to blame …. After World War II, black migration out of the South accelerated — between 1940 and 1980, roughly 5 million black Southerners moved to cities in the North and West. Places like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Harlem grew into major black metropolises. Economists Robert Fairlie and William Sundstrom estimate that the South lost about 17 percent of its workforce between 1940 and 1960 alone.

But as they arrived in the North starting in the 1940s, black workers learned that jobs weren’t as plentiful as they had hoped. Fairlie and Sundstrom say that between 1880 and 1940, the unemployment rate for black and white men was more or less the same. After 1940, their fates began to diverge. In 1950, the white unemployment rate was around 4 percent, but the black unemployment rate was around 7 percent. That inequality has persisted to this day.

In the early 1960s, politicians began to describe the concentration of black urban poverty as “social dynamite.” …

… As Hinton writes, Johnson’s War on Poverty “is best understood not as an effort to broadly uplift communities or as a moral crusade to transform society by combating inequality or want, but as a manifestation of fear about urban disorder and about the behavior of young people, particularly young African Americans.”

…

… For urban African Americans, the War on Poverty could better be described as a war on the culture of poverty. Politicians did see the connection between poverty and crime. They recognized how one fed the other, and vice versa. But instead of trying to create jobs or substantially increase welfare payments to families, they fixated on what the influential Moynihan report, echoing the views of many social scientists, called in 1965 the “social pathologies” of black urban life.

“In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure,” concluded the report. “The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.” For all its good intentions, the Moynihan report reinforced the idea that there was something particularly wrong with black America — that centuries of slavery and oppression had inculcated dangerous habits.

…

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” Johnson said. “Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences — deep, corrosive, obstinate differences — radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual.”

Johnson’s War on Poverty had a fatal fixation with reforming individuals instead of addressing the larger economic problems, Hinton says. In the book, she describes it as a short-sighted approach, “committing to vocational training and remedial education programs in the absence of job creation measures or an overhaul of urban public schools.” …

… Starting in the summer of 1964, race riots ripped through Northern cities including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Rochester, N.Y. Hundreds of people were injured, and thousands were arrested. The riots began with clashes between police and black citizens. In New York City, for instance, 15-year-old James Powell was killed by an off-duty white police officer, which led to six violent days of marching, looting and vandalism in Harlem. “The ‘social dynamite’ that had worried policymakers and officials at the outset of the decade had finally exploded, despite the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ prevention efforts,” Hinton writes.

By 1965, Johnson had formulated a new initiative, what he called a “War on Crime.” He sent to Congress a sweeping new bill that would bulk up police forces with federal money and intensify patrols in urban areas. This would be the first significant intrusion of the federal government into local law enforcement, and it was the beginning of a long saga of escalating surveillance and control in urban areas.

In particular, Johnson played up the military flavor of the reforms. “We are today fighting a war within our own boundaries,” he said in 1966, likening the black urban unrest to a domestic Vietnam. His initiatives provided money for police to arm themselves with military equipment — “military-grade rifles, tanks, riot gear, walkie-talkies, helicopters, and bulletproof vests,” Hinton writes. As the riots intensified through the rest of the ’60s — some estimate over 700 incidents occurred between 1964 and 1971 — the administration increasingly began to shift money away from the War on Poverty and toward the War on Crime. “Policy makers really feared a large-scale urban rebellion,” Hinton says. “They were really worried about black youth, and had a number of racist notions about their propensities for crime and drug addiction.”

These same ideas permeated Johnson’s anti-poverty efforts. … Both programs were propelled by concerns about civil unrest in black communities, and both were influenced by the administration’s opinion that poor urban black people suffered from a cultural deficit, even if it wasn’t of their own making.

Subsequent administrations expanded and intensified the crime-fighting programs that Johnson had created. They sent undercover officers to go into black neighborhoods and ensnare criminals. They camped out in black communities waiting for crime to happen. They funded the creation of special-tactics forces — SWAT teams — in part out of fear of race riots and the Black Panthers. The War on Drugs, which began under Nixon but reached its height under Reagan, added hundreds of thousands of people to the correctional system. Intensified policing created a growing population of prisoners, which set off a boom in prison construction.

…

… Both the left and the right were unwilling … to make the drastic investments in jobs, housing and human development that black urban communities demanded and needed.

In 1967, Johnson set up a mostly liberal task force to investigate the race riots. The Kerner Commission, as it was called, handed back a white-hot report that blamed the uprisings on the dearth of economic opportunity in poor black neighborhoods. Johnson’s War on Poverty, they said, was hardly doing enough. “To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values,” the report warned.

The commission argued for “national action on an unprecedented scale”: among other things, the immediate creation of 2 million jobs, the establishment of a basic minimum income and the allocation of 6 million units of affordable housing within five years. Essentially, Hinton says, it was a Marshall Plan for black America — a mind-bogglingly huge investment in a distressed community.

Obviously, those economic reforms didn’t happen. Instead, the Johnson administration continued to treat urban black poverty and urban black unrest as a problem of discipline, not a problem of denied opportunity (Guo 1-10).

Black supporters … did not envision that their short-term calls for law enforcement solutions to crime and violence would become the sole response, while the long-term solution of addressing the social problems that gave rise to the problems in the first place would not follow. …

African Americans wanted more law enforcement, but they didn’t want only law enforcement. Many adopted what we might think of as an all-of-the-above strategy. ... But because African Americans are a minority nationally, they needed help to win national action against poverty, joblessness, segregation, and other root causes of crime. The help never arrived. .... So African Americans never got the Marshall Plan — just the tough-on-crime laws.

… One of the major goals of the civil rights movement was to enlist black police officers. The purpose was twofold: to end discrimination in the police force and to curb police brutality against the black community. However, neither goal was realized. …

Professor James Forman, author of Locking Up Our Own, wrote: “The case for black police had always been premised on the unquestioned assumption of racial solidarity between black citizens and black officers.” However, Forman’s account reveals that the “blacks who joined police departments had a far more complicated set of attitudes, motivations, and incentives than those pushing for black police had assumed. The reality of employment discrimination meant that many black officers signed up to obtain a good job that was stable, secure, and offered good benefits. These officers did not conceive of their role within the police departments as an extension of the civil rights movement. Indeed, according to Forman, some did not view their work as racially significant.

Forman also highlights the racism that many black officers faced in the department. … Both the racism that limited the job prospects of blacks and the racism that existed within police forces “made it less likely that [black officers] would do what many reformers hoped they would: buck the famously powerful police culture. The few who tried paid a high price.” “Even those black officers inclined to use their political capital to fight police brutality would often find themselves in the minority. Most of their colleagues — black or white — wanted to fight for wages, benefits, and an equal shot at promotions.”

… Forman illuminates the influence of class differences within black communities. He argues that middle-class blacks would often advocate for more policing against the lower-class blacks who were engaged in crime. Citing a handful of studies showing that black police were just as physically abusive as their white colleagues and sometimes even harsher, Forman concludes that “[i]t turned out that a surprising number of black officers simply didn’t like other black people — at least not the poor blacks they tended to police.” … He notes that “[w]hen some blacks (usually middle class) demanded action against others (usually poor), many ‘pro-black’ officers responded with special enthusiasm.” … Forman is entirely right to note that black-on-black policing was not characterized by intraracial harmony. The end result was that while many police forces eventually integrated, the goal of reducing police violence against black communities was largely unattained (Carbado and Richardson 8-10).

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, otherwise known as the Black Panther Party (BPP), was established in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The two leading revolutionary men created the national organization as a way to collectively combat white oppression. After constantly seeing black people suffer from the torturous practices of police officers around the nation, Newton and Seale helped to form the pioneering black liberation group to help build community and confront corrupt systems of power.

The Black Panthers established a unified platform and their goals for the party were outlined in a 10-point plan that included demands for freedom, land, housing, employment and education, among other important objectives.

In 1966, police violence ran rampant in Los Angeles and the need to protect black men and women from state-sanctioned violence was crucial. Armed Black Panther members would show up during police arrests of black men and women, stand at a legal distance and surveil their interactions. It was “to make sure there was no brutality,” Newton said in archival footage …. Both Black Panther members and officers would stand facing one another armed with guns, an act that agreed with the open carry law in California at the time. These confrontations, in many ways, allowed the Panthers to protect their communities and police the police.

The party’s goal in increasing membership wasn’t aimed at recruiting churchgoers … but to recruit the everyday black person who faced police brutality. When black people across the nation saw the Panthers’ efforts in the media, especially after they stormed the state capitol with guns in Sacramento in 1967, more men and women became interested in joining. The group also took on issues like housing, welfare and health, which made it relatable to black people everywhere. The party grew rapidly — and didn’t instill a screening process because a priority, at the time, was to recruit as many people as possible.

In 1967, Newton was charged in the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old police officer, John Frey, during a traffic stop. After the shooting, Newton was hospitalized with critical injuries while handcuffed to a gurney in a room that was heavily guarded by cops. As a result of his hospitalization and arrest, Eldrige Cleaver took leadership of the Panthers and demanded that “Huey must be set free.” The phrase was eventually shortened to “Free Huey,” two words which galvanized a movement demanding for Huey’s release.

The sight of black men and women unapologetically sporting their afros, berets and leather jackets had a special appeal to many black Americans at the time. It reflected a new portrayal of self for black people in the 1960s in a way that attracted many young black kids to want to join the party — some even wrote letters to Newton asking to join. …

The Black Panthers furthered their agenda by appealing to what they believed journalists and photographers sought after to cover in the news. “They were able to establish their legitimacy as a voice of protest,” journalist Jim Dunbar said [in a documentary]. They leveraged their voices and imprinted their images in newspapers, magazines and television programs.

The party saw a serious need to nurture black kids in disenfranchised communities, so they spent about two hours each morning cooking breakfast for children in poor neighborhoods before school. “Studies came out saying that children who didn’t have a good breakfast in the morning were less attentive in school and less inclined to do well and suffered from fatigue,” former party member David Lemieux said in the documentary. “We just simply took that information and a program was developed to serve breakfast to children,” he added. “We were showing love for our people.” The party served about 20,000 meals a week and it became the party’s most successful program of their 35 survival programs.

Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the rise of the Black Panther Party so he created COINTELPRO, a secret operation, to discredit black nationalists groups. The Counterintelligence Program’s purpose was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” black nationalists’ activities. “We were followed everyday, we were harassed, our phones were tapped, our families were harassed,” former Black Panther member Ericka Huggins, whose parents were visited by the FBI, said in the film. Hoover regularly sent police officers letters encouraging them to come up with new ways to cripple the Black Panther Party. Though COINTELPRO didn’t make the party their only targets, 245 out of 290 of their actions were directed at the Black Panthers.

Hoover feared any growth of the movement and especially feared young white allies who united with black activists to support the movement. Through COINTELPRO, Hoover found ways to track, stalk and dig up information on the party, including planting FBI Informants throughout the party (Workneh and Finley 1-4).

Works cited:

Carbado, Devon W. and Richardson, L. Song. “The Black Police: Policing Our Own.” Harvard Law Review. May 10, 2018. Web. https://harvardlawreview.org/2018/05/the-black-police-policing-our-own/

Guo, Jeff. “America’s Tough Approach to Policing Black Communities Began as a Liberal Idea.” The Washington Post. May 2, 2016. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/02/americas-tough-approach-to-policing-black-communities-began-as-a-liberal-idea/

“Psychologist’s Study Show Needs of the Black Community.” Hillsdale Daily News. February 24, 1969. Web. https://newspaperarchive.com/hillsdale-daily-news-feb-24-1969-p-13/

Walsh, Kenneth T. “50 Years after Race Riots, Issues Remain the Same.” U. S. News. July 12, 2017. Web. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-07-12/50-years-later-causes-of-1967-summer-riots-remain-largely-the-same

Workneh, Lilly, and Finley, Taryn. “27 Important Facts Everyone Should Know about the Black Panthers.” HUFFPOST. February 19, 2018. Web. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/27-important-facts-everyone-should-know-about-the-black-panthers_n_56c4d853e4b08ffac1276462

Civil Rights Events

Detroit Riots, 1967

Algiers Motel Murders

The Algiers Motel, despite its mystical sounding name, was a far cry from the palm trees and tropical fronds that adorned its rustic sign off Woodward. Built in 1952 when Detroit was at its apex, the clientele were initially weary business men in need of a roof before jetting home. As Detroit began to suffer the sting of economic decline, the Algiers slowly drifted into disrepair and with it came a shady reputation.

The Algiers had indeed gained a dubious reputation. By the time of the riot, Detroit police referred to the Algiers as “flypaper for dope dealers, prostitutes and petty hoods.” The now outmoded Algiers had become primarily a home for transients with no place else to go. Located at 8301 Woodward Ave., the Algiers backs up to the Virginia Park subdivision which sported cavernous three story homes from the early 1900s. When the house at 51 Virginia Park, i.e. directly behind the Algiers Motel, went up for sale, the owners of the Algiers bought it and turned it into an annex to the motel.

When the riot started a number of individuals, desperate to get off the street and thus out of harms way, took up residence in the annex of the Algiers. All total there were nine people, seven black males and two white females …

…

Detroit police officer Jerome Olshove, the only Detroit police officer to die during the riot, was shot to death by a looter only hours before the Algiers incident. Olshove was well respected throughout the department. His father was career DPD, as was his brother. After seven years on the job, he had planned on leaving the department and pursue a career at IBM. His last day was to be Thursday. He was killed on Tuesday. His death was announced at roll call. The room was full of ominous groans and open weeping. (Anarchy 1-2, 3).

On July 26, 1967, the third day of one of the worst riots of the 20th century, Detroit police, the National Guard and Michigan State Police responded to a report of a sniper at the Algiers Motel and Manor House annex (Brown 1). The Detroit officers in charge of the raid were David Senak, Ronald August, and Robert Paille. Aubrey Pollard, 19, Carl Cooper, 17, and Fred Temple, 18, were shot to death inside the motel (Ausgood 1).

They, four black youths, and two 18-year-old white girls had been staying inside the motel waiting out the course of the riot. According to testimony, black youths Cooper, Michael Clark, 21, and Lee Forsythe, 20, and the two white females, Julie Ann Hysell and Karen Malloy had been listening to music in a third-floor room of the annex. Apparently wanting to show off, 17-year-old Cooper had pulled out a starter pistol and, with possibly a friend or two, had shot blanks in the air, drawing attention from law enforcement personnel who had been already dealing with the sound of gunfire throughout the area. One of the Algiers Motel windows had then been shot at and shattered—from the outside. Alarmed and frightened, the occupants had fled to other rooms as law enforcement personnel had rushed into the annex.

Officers …appeared outside. Upon seeing occupants at the windows, police warnings were given to stay back. One or more shots were fired at the house. Panic ensued. Carl Cooper, hopelessly trapped on the main floor in a no-mans-land between the front door and the rear, was the first person the authorities encountered as the back doors on the northeast part of the annex were kicked in. Crucial decisions were made in the milliseconds which followed. Was Cooper a sniper? Did he have a weapon or look like he was reaching for one? … Multiple shot guns blasts killed him instantly (Anarchy 4).

[Michael] Clark, [Lee] Forsythe, [Julie] Hysell and [Karen] Molloy, and other guests including 19-year-old Aubrey Pollard, a 26-year-old Vietnam veteran Robert Greene, 18-year-old Larry Reed, lead singer for the Rhythm and Blues group the Dramatics, [James Sortor], and band road manager, 18-year-old Fred Temple, were rounded up by Detroit police officers and faced against a downstairs hall wall. Hysell and Molloy were pulled out of the lineup and stripped naked. At some point Melvin Dismukes, a black security guard for a nearby store, entered the annex while the police held the guests against the wall (Momodu 1).

Aubrey Pollard had gone home from the motel the day before, Tuesday morning. His sister, Thelma, said later, “… my mom noticed that he had been in some sort of confrontation. So he explained to her that he had gotten into a confrontation with the police officers at some sort of motel that he was hanging in.”

Thelma Pollard says Aubrey had been beaten up pretty badly. He had bruises on his face and arms. And his mother warned him not to go back to that motel. “She said, ‘If they beat you up the night before, they’ll come back tonight and kill you.’” But Aubrey Pollard did go back. And it cost him his life (Ausgood 2).

Thelma recalled later:

“I was 16. The riots had gone on for several days and the police were out of control. From the front porch, I could see the National Guard and the army ride up and down the street in tanks and the smoke from the fires. There was a curfew, so I didn’t go out. Racial tensions had always been high in Detroit. My oldest brother used to say the police used to pull him over and tell him, “Run, nigger”.

…

“I never knew anything about the Algiers Motel before that,” Pollard-Gardner recalls. “It was a place for my brother and his friends to go…a hangout. Proximity wise, they could walk there. There was gambling and drinking. My brother did not drink and did not have weed. That part of the movie [“Detroit”] was embellished, but he did gamble and for me, he was a protector, but if you said something he didn’t like, he might hit you” (Family 2-3).

An aggressive interrogation began about the reported sniper shots with the lifeless body of Carl Cooper only feet away in the next room. When no answers were forthcoming, a pistol whipping of the suspects began. Still no answers. With the atmosphere growing thick with anger, police began to turn the screws harder (Anarchy 5).

Julie Hysell Delaney was 18 when she traveled from her home in Ohio to Detroit "to follow a band, basically, an R&B group we had met in Columbus."

She recalls that she and the friend who accompanied her, Karen Malloy, had about $12 for the trip, but "$2 worth of gas would take you 500 miles back then," says Delaney. They were staying at the Algiers Motel because it didn't cost much. With a curfew in place, they couldn't go out in the evening.

"The house where the murders took place had kitchens, you know, like an extended-stay (motel), so to speak," she says, describing the annex where the tragedy unfolded. "We went back ... to the pool, and some of the guys were there. They said, 'Well, Carl's got food. We'll go up there.' "

Reports of sniper fire prompted members of the Detroit Police Department, the State Police, the National Guard and a private security guard to raid the motel annex. By the time the confrontation was over, Carl Cooper, 17; Aubrey Pollard, 19, and Fred Temple, 18, had been shot at close range and killed.

The other men, Delaney and Malloy made it out alive, but not before being forced to line up against a hallway wall by the police and [be] hit and terrorized with slurs and threats. The … interrogation tactic [used] … involved taking the men, one at a time, inside a room and firing a weapon near them in order to pretend they had been shot and killed for refusing to talk.

As Delaney told the Los Angeles Times in one of several interviews she has done with the media, “People were begging for their lives. I just kept thinking, ‘They killed three people, and there’s one person they haven’t taken, then I’m next.’ I remember the voices of the cops yelling, again and again and again” (Hinds 3-4).

Karen Malloy recounted that the hell began with the officers beating and pistol-whipping the men down the line, repeatedly hitting them and making them get up. One of the cops then threw a knife and told the men, “here, defend yourself…pick it up so I can blow your goddamn head off.” None of the men would pick the knife up, knowing full well that if they had, they would be killed on a trumped up charge of self-defense. While the men were wise not to take the bait on the knife, they endured severe beatings for their refusal. Lee Forsythe was noted by Cooper’s mother as having wounds so deep in his head, she could see his skull.

“They were going to shoot us one at a time” Michael Clark would later testify. After the efforts to get the men to pick up the knife so the officers could have a reason to murder them in cold blood, they amped up the interrogation tactics. Officer Senak began the show of cruelty by first taking the two white women out of the line and tearing their clothes off. “Why you got to fuck them? what’s wrong with us, you nigger lovers!” Senak yelled. Senak made the women pull each other’s clothes off of one another, tearing at them himself as he got frustrated with their stalling. Before moving on, the women were left tattered in nothing but their underwear.

As Senak, Paille and August continued their abuse of the women, more officers from the national guard began spilling into the motel. [James] Sortor testified that the men in uniform were not only stripping women down and beating the men, “some of them were just standing back. Laughing at us.” After the women were stripped down and denigrated, the officers began what was known as the “death game.” Lee Forsythe stated, “They started killing us, one by one.” Officer Senak began with Roderick Davis, dragging him into one of the rooms and closed the door behind them. Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas followed Senak in. Thomas testified “Senak told the man to lay on the floor and he fired a round through the wall…he didn’t shoot him, he scared him…then he winked at me.” Davis was then told not to move or they would kill him, leaving him alone in the room afterward. As Warrant Officer Thomas walked out of the room, he was asked if Senak killed the man; “yes,” he replied.

“Want to kill one?” an officer then asked Warrant Officer Thomas. “Yes” Thomas stated, as he knew the point of the game was to scare the people left in line in the hallway behind them. Michael Clark was next. “Let’s see, (Ronald) August told the officer to take me in the room and shoot me.” Thomas took Clark into the room, laid him down, and fired a shot out the window, telling him if he moved, he would be killed. After Clark, Pollard would be the next target and the “death game” would become a cruel execution for men and women left with the officers.

Senak then handed a pistol to August, saying “Do you want to kill one now?” Ronald August grabbed hold of the gun and then dragged Aubrey Pollard into a rear room of the Motel. “I can’t recall what was said (between Senak and August) as he gave him the gun…this was supposed to scare them” Officer Thomas later testified. Officer August apparently did not understand the ‘game’ with Pollard though. After tossing Pollard to the ground, Pollard screamed out “Don’t shoot!” A shot was heard. Pollard was dead (Mitchell 3-5).

[Survivor] Lee Forsythe was staying at the motel when the police stormed the building. He says he ducked into a room and hollered out to let officers know he was there. What happened next, he says, was terrifying.

“I could see him [a police officer] kicking the door open and firing shots” Forsythe says. “And all of a sudden, he got to me, and he opened the door, and he pointed the shotgun at me, and…it..it just didn’t fire. He was…it didn’t have a shell.”

Forsythe says he was taken out of the room and led down the stairs where he saw the body of 17-year-old Carl Cooper.

“This was my friend, this was my best friend,” Forsythe says. “So I break over to see Carl, and like I was telling you, I heard his last breath.”

Forsythe remembers being lined up against the wall with some other people, taunted and tortured by the police. He says an officer took him inside a room and told him to scream like he was being beaten badly. Forsythe was sent out of the room. Then it was Aubrey Pollard’s turn. He was taken into the room, but he didn’t come out.

“Aubrey was saying, ‘Mister, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ because he had broke his rifle hitting Aubrey,” Forsythe says. “And he say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ But…then we heard a boom. And then we didn’t hear Aubrey no more.”

Forsythe says the police came out of the room and whispered to one another before telling everybody to leave. Forsythe says, Fred Temple, 18, asked to go back to his room and get his shoes. Officers told him he could and Temple walked off. It was the last time anyone would see him alive. (Ausgood 1-3).

According to later testimony, Detroit police officers most likely shot and killed Cooper who ran downstairs with his pistol when they entered the building. Detroit police later would claim that they found Cooper already dead in a first-floor room when they entered the building. No one was ever charged with the death of Carl Cooper, the youngest victim, who was 17.

The next youth to be killed, Pollard, was shot and killed by officer Ronald August after he took him into Annex Room A-3. August later admitted to the killing but claimed it was in self-defense. [“Guardsman Ted Thomas testified that he heard no words or signs of a struggle between Officer August and Pollard before seeing "a flash of clothing, heard a shotgun blast and saw Pollard's body fall" (Detroit 8).] The third person to die, Temple, was shot by Detroit Police Officer Robert Paille who also claimed he killed him in self-defense. Despite the three deceased bodies in the Motel Annex, the Detroit police officers on the scene, Paille, August, and David Senak, did not report any of the deaths to the Detroit Police Homicide Bureau as required. Instead they left the annex after demanding that the survivors keep quiet about the incident.

The next day Charles Hendrix, who provided security for the motel, found the bodies and reported the deaths to the Wayne County Morgue which in turn called the Detroit Police Homicide Bureau. … (Momodu 1-2).

Author John Hersey conducted numerous interviews before writing his enlightening book The Algiers Motel Incident. From the transcripts of Hersey's interviews with each of the participants, only one of the three Detroit policemen involved in the affair, Patrolman David Senak, would seem capable of the kind of thinking which could produce the savage beatings and indiscriminate killing that resulted from the discovery of eleven black men and two white women in the same part of a motel.

The 24-year-old Senak, nicknamed "Snake," had been working on the vice squad for two months in July, 1967. He was devoted to police work, but the nature of his job had had an effect on him.

"I think one bad aspect of my life as far as the Police Department goes is that I never really fell in love with any girls up to the point where I joined the Police Department. And then afterward, the type of work I did on the force reflected a sort of bad attitude toward w-o men in general.

"... I know all women aren't prostitutes,... but I think subconsciously it affects me."

"Do you think," I [Hersey] asked him, "that this has made you think of women as essentially evil, or more apt to be criminal than men?"

His answer was: "Who gave who the apple?"

Senak had shot and killed two men that Tuesday before being called to the Algiers Motel.

The two other policemen seemed to be typical normal products--young, competent, with fairly strong controls on the latent racism which is bred into most white Americans from birth. Ronald August had always seemed "quiet and respectable" to his fellow policemen.

…

Yet it was August who confessed to the murder of one of the blacks, Auburey Pollard Jr.--the only one of the murders which can be ascribed to a definite killer. … [Eventually] one of the other officers then asked August, "Do you want to kill one now?" August answered, "Yes," and, not being aware of the nature of the "game," took Aubury Pollard into one of the motel rooms and killed him with a shotgun blast at close range.

Why did Patrolman August say "Yes"? What destroyed the controls August had carefully built up? Was he just especially susceptible to the heady power granted by a gun and a badge, or would most whites react in the same fashion in a similar situation (Hagen 2-3)?

Hersey was able to elicit from Patrolman Paille this comment: “these people here, a good part of them are immoral. Any policeman knows that, in those areas” (Leary 4).

Melvin [Dismukes] says that he went to the police station to share his side of the story, but he got everything turned around on him and was charged with first-degree murder. In the end, the police tried to pin a felonious assault charge on Melvin in connection with the beating of two of the motel's occupants, Michael Clark and James Sortor, in the first-floor hallway. Melvin had been guarding a store across the street from the Algiers before he entered the motel to help. According to Melvin, he tried to play peacemaker. "I just hoped to calm the situation down that was going on in the lobby," says Melvin. "I wanted to help people stay alive, so I did my best to do what I thought would protect them." He was the first to be tried and was acquitted of the charge. It took only 13 minutes for the all-white jury to come back with a verdict of not guilty (Detroit 11).

The Wayne County medical examiner agreed that Temple and Pollard were shot while kneeling or lying down. All three of the black youths had been shot dead with buckshot, at close range. … first-degree murder charges were filed against Detroit Police officers Ronald August and Robert Paille. August originally lied about what happened, but would later claim he killed Aubrey Pollard in self-defense. Paille would make statements implicating him in the murders. Those statements were eventually thrown out as inadmissible, because the homicide detectives had failed to read him his rights. The charges against Paille were dropped. No one would ever be charged in the deaths of Carl Cooper and Fred Temple. It was never determined who killed them. The National Guard, state troopers, and Detroit Police gave conflicting statements as to who was at the motel first and who did what. The Ronald August case received so much attention in the black community that defense attorneys filed a motion for a change of venue. The state supreme court appointed Oakland County Circuit Court Judge William Beer to the case. Beer filed a motion to try the case in Mason, Michigan, a town with a mostly white population. The trial lasted nearly six weeks. [Judge William Beer … told the all-white jury that their options were to either convict Ronald August of first-degree murder or acquit him, never instructing them that verdicts of second-degree murder or manslaughter were options too (Detroit 12)] The jury found Ronald August not guilty. The Algiers Motel Incident helped change the city of Detroit. It galvanized the black community and spearheaded a political activism that would result in the election of Coleman Young as Detroit’s first black mayor in 1973 (Ausgood 5).

But the guilt and fear remains. To this day she [Julie Hysell] freezes up when seeing the lights of a police car. Hysell has found other ways to cope.

“I wonder: Is this why I drank and have been in AA for 22 years?” says Hysell. “Is this why I’ve been married three times? Did I have PTSD?” She also struggled with coming to terms with what role her race played in enraging the police officers. Did they turn violent at the sight of white women hanging out with black men? “I felt guilty because I was a white person and the black people were the ones who got killed,” she says. “If we’d been two black girls, maybe none of this would have happened.”

…

… Each time there’s a shooting of an unarmed black man, be it Trayvon Martin or Freddie Gray, it stirs up her frustrations that the racial tensions that exploded in a Detroit motel five decades ago are still being sparked across America’s cities and towns (Lang 2).

What greater – or more bitter – irony could there be then that the three boys at the Algiers may have been executed as snipers because one of them, satirizing the uniformed men who had made them all laugh in the midst of their fear during the search that morning, had been playing with a pistol designed to start foot races, from which it was not even possible to shoot bullets?

Except, of course, that as it turned out the boys were not executed as snipers at all. They were executed for being thought to be pimps, for being considered punks, for making out with white girls, for being in some vague way killers of a white cop named Jerry Olshove, for running riot – for being, after all and all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time (Hersey 195).

Works cited:

“Anarchy at the Algiers.” Detroit’s Great Rebellion. Web. http://www.detroits-great-rebellion.com/Algiers-Motel.html

Ausgood, Heidi. “Detroit Police Officers Charged in 1967 after Algiers Motel Incident.” Wdet: Detroit’s NPR Station. July 24, 2017. Web. https://wdet.org/posts/2017/07/24/85460-detroit-police-officers-charged-in-1967-after-algiers-motel-incident/

Brown, DeNeen L. ‘Detroit’ and the Police Brutality that Left Three Black Teens Dead at the Algiers Motel.” The Washington Post. August 4, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/04/detroit-and-the-police-brutality-that-left-three-black-teens-dead-at-the-algiers-motel/?noredirect=on

“Detroit Movie vs. the True Story of the Algiers Motel Killings.” History Hollywood. Web. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/detroit/

“Family Survivor Recalls Tragic Algiers Motel Story Retold in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit.” L. A. Focus on the Word.” August 7, 2017. Web. https://lafocusnewspaper.com/item/family-survivor-recalls-tragic-algiers-motel-story-retold-in-kathryn-bigelow-s-detroit

Hagen, Charles M. “The Algiers Motel: The Algiers Motel Incident.” The Harvard Crimson. July 12, 1968. Web. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1968/7/12/the-algiers-motel-pbsbhortly-after-midnight/

Hersey, John. The Algiers Motel Incident. Bantam Books, New York, July 1968. Print.

Hinds, Julie. “Eyewitness to Horrific Night Depicted in ‘Detroit’ Movie Shares Story.” Detroit Free Press. August 4, 2017. Web. https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/2017/08/04/survivor-detroit-movie-kathryn-bigelow-algiers-motel/532497001/

Lang, Brent. “How Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ Helped Police Attack Victim Julie Hysell Heal.” Variety. August 1, 2017. Web. https://variety.com/2017/film/news/detroit-julie-hysell-kathryn-bigelow-1202511177/

Leary, John Patrick. “Not Tragedy, but Atrocity.” Guernica. July 25, 2017. Web. https://www.guernicamag.com/not-tragedy-but-atrocity/

Mitchell, Scott. “The Algiers Motel Incident. II: Hell in the Algiers.” Show. Web. https://algiersmemory.wordpress.com/hell-at-the-algiers/

Momodu, Samuel. “Algiers Motel Incident (1967).” BLACKPAST. August 7, 2017. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/algiers-motel-incident-1967/