A Moment Of Insanity

It is a grassy knoll on the west side of Woodward Avenue in Detroit, unobtrusively surrounded by gothic churches, party stores and blocks overrun with weeds and discarded automobile carcasses. To a passive observer, the park-like cul-de-sac looks out of place; a small center of rebirth fostering in the middle of an urban war zone.

The irony, of course, is that not so long ago the corner of Virginia Park and Woodward was the middle of a war zone: the 1967 Detroit riot. And the most notorious occurrence of the riot took place at this corner 45 years ago today: The Algiers Motel Incident.

It was just past midnight on July 26, 1967. Days before, a police raid on a "blind pig" after-hours club at 9125 12th Street near Clairmount - the heart of Detroit's black ghetto - had erupted into a riot. The violence resulted in death (43 people, mostly black, were killed), destruction (entire neighborhoods were torched or looted), and a "white flight" exodus to suburbia which led to Detroit having a black majority within five years.

Earlier that day, officers were told that Patrolman Jerome Olshove had been killed in the vicinity of the Algiers Motel. Reports of sniper fire were coming in. Tensions were high among law enforcement officials; when reports of sniper fire near the Algiers were received that night, a combined force of state and city police, national guardsmen and private security police responded. Among the officers: Ronald August, David Senak, Robert Paille and security guard Melvin Dismukes.

The motel annex was a three-story brick building, originally one of the big bourgeois houses of the Victoria Park neighborhood. It had been converted into apartments and rental rooms, and when police arrived they found 10 black men, two white women and no guns.

One hour later, three of the men - Aubrey Pollard, 19; Fred Temple, 18; and Carl Cooper, 17 - had been shot to death at close range. The others had been assaulted after being forced into spread-eagle positions against a lobby wall, then kicked out of the motel by officers.

The bodies were discovered three hours after the incident by a second patrol party. None of the initial party had reported the incident; it was not until after The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press broke the story several days later that August filed a report. After several hours passed, August revised his report, claiming he had shot Pollard by accident. According to the report, presented in The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey:

He says, "You are not going to shoot me, are you?" and I says, "No, I never shot a man in all my life and I have no reason to shoot you." He then grabbed my shotgun and pushed me to the bed and I screamed, "Get back." We both stood up from the bed and then he let go of the gun and I pulled the trigger. The safety was on and the gun did not fire. I released the safety and he reached for the shotgun again and I pushed him away and fired one shot that struck him ... I didn't want to shoot him. I wanted to put him back out there with the rest of them but he just wanted the gun and he wouldn't let go.

In a series of court cases - including a murder trial, federal conspiracy trial and federal civil rights violation trial - Wayne County prosecutors maintained the killings were the deadly result of a bizarre "game" played by police intended to frighten those inside the annex to confessing to the sniper fire that had been reported earlier.

According to witnesses, several of the black men were randomly removed from the lobby into one of the rooms and threatened at gunpoint to tell police the location of a gun they believed had been used in the reported sniper attack. August's shooting of Pollard was part of this "game."

Prosecutors maintained that three white officers - August, Senak and Paille - went out of control and executed the three victims.

August was charged with first-degree murder, but because of the publicity the trial was moved to the Lansing suburb of Mason. On June 10, 1969, August was found not guilty by an all-white jury. His attorney, Norman Lippitt, had told jurors that what happened in the Algiers was a defensible act in an undeclared war, and that Detroit officials had failed their police officers with indecision in the early hours of the riot. According to a July 23, 1977 Detroit News article:

Some call it a riot. It was not a riot. It was a war! A war - where every police officer, every Guardsman and every soldier was working in a battleground. Ronald August is guilty of working under these conditions. Guilty of working days and nights with little or no rest. Guilty of standing idle while looting and fire-bombing and sniping was going on. Guilty of being shot at in the street. Guilty for not being allowed to shoot criminals. This is what happened in those first days of that war in Detroit - while the mayor and the governor and the President were indecisive.

Senak said Temple was shot by other officers when he grabbed Senak's service revolver while handcuffing him. Two of Temple's friends, Roderick Davis and Larry Reed, testified under oath seeing Temple in the hallway when they were kicked out of the Algiers. Paille was charged with first-degree murder in Temple's death, but the charge was dismissed when a Detroit Recorder's Court judge ruled his statements inadmissible because he made the statements before he had been advised of his constitutional rights.

No one was ever charged with Cooper's death.

Dismukes, a black security guard employed by the motel, was acquitted of charges he clubbed one of the annex occupants during the raid.

There were no winners in the Algiers Motel incident. Three lives were erased, and while the families of Pollard and Temple were paid $62,500 each by the city of Detroit as restitution, money cannot make up for the loss of life.

While all of the officers were cleared of charges, none ever served on the force again.

The 1967 riot was the third racial uprising experienced in Detroit during the 20th century, and shattered the image that Detroit was a haven where poor people came to fulfill the American Dream. In 1925, racial animosity had boiled over when a black physician, Ossian Sweet, purchased a home in a white neighborhood on Detroit's east side. In 1943, racial tensions spilled over into a riot where 34 people were killed. The 1967 uprising was not only the third riot, but the third time federal forces had been deployed to Detroit; U.S. troops were in the Motor City in 1943 and 1863 as well.

According to Hersey's novel, there are four primary causes of racial violence: unequal justice; unequal employment opportunities; unequal housing; and unequal education. While all played a factor in the Detroit riot, it is the first - unequal justice - which resulted in the Algiers murders and, many believe, the acquittals. It is the prime cause of deep anger and resentment, experienced by the black population at two points: what happened with the cop on the street; and what happened with the prosecutor, attorney and judge in the courtroom.

The day after the August verdict, The Detroit News gave its opinion. In part, the editorial read: "Black fears that justice would not be done 'in this white man's court' -... will consider their fears confirmed." It is now 45 years after the Detroit riots, and when one looks at the public outcry surrounding high-profile court cases and racial incidents such as Rodney King, Malice Green, O.J. Simpson and Trayvon Martin, one wonders if things have changed.