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 …

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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/