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CHAPTER 11 "A Night of Horror and Murder" A Vietnam veteran who was staying in the Algiers Motel during the night of July 25, 1967, stated a week later that he had "lived through a night of horror and murder in Detroit," worse than anything he had experienced in Vietnam. What occurred during that "night of horror" and its aftermath came to symbolize for many "the riot, police action, [and] the administration of justice itself." Three young blacks were shot to death in the motel in the early morning hours of July 26, and law enforcement officers beat and terrorized other blacks and whites. It is difficult, however , to recreate precisely what happened because the officers involved tried to conceal their role in the night's events; and the witnesses to what had occurred were frightened, their opportunity to observe the killings was limited, at best, they gave conflicting and often contradictory accounts of events, and they found it difficult to identify their assailants. I The Algiers Motel was located on the west side of Woodward Avenue at Virginia Park. A three-story Manor House, a converted residence with fifteen kitchenette units, served as an annex to the motel. The annex, which fronted on Virginia Park on the south, could also be entered at the rear from Euclid Avenue. The motel, whose clientele was "almost one hundred percent" black, had become notorious as "a haven for pimps, prostitutes, drug pushers and addicts, gamblers, numbers operators and other criminal element[s]." The police made arrests at the motel for narcotics violations on five separate occasions from April 24 to July 17, 1967. There was also a police raid on the annex in the early morning hours of July 25 that turned up some weapons, according to one account, and two truckloads of loot from Twelfth Street, according to the FBL2 On the night of July 25 the Algiers Motel and the Manor House were occupied, among others, by six young Detroit blacks, Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard, Fred Temple, Michael Clark, Lee Forsythe, and James Sortor; five members of the "Dramatics," a rock group; Robert Lee 271 272 Violence in the Model City Green, a black veteran from Kentucky; and two white girls, Juli Hysell and Karen Malloy, both of whom were convicted for accosting and soliciting in September 1967. Cooper, who "managed to keep fairly steadily in trouble" in his short life, was a seventeen-year-old laid-off spot welder who had spent eighteen months in the Boys' Vocational Training School in Lansing as a juvenile offender and had later served time on a narcotics charge. Pollard, who had been laid off from his Ford Motor Company welding job, had served a fifteen-day prison term for assaulting a rehabilitation specialist teacher. Clark, who was eighteen, had been convicted for carrying a concealed weapon and larceny from a building. Like Pollard, the nineteen-year-old Forsythe and Sortor had served time in the Boys' Training School, Forsythe for car theft, Sortor for breaking and entering. Temple, a Ford worker and high school dropout , had made friends with the Dramatics, who had been performing in Detroit and had moved into the motel because of the riot. It is not clear why the twenty-six-year-old Green was in Detroit. Malloy and Hysell, both eighteen, had come to Detroit from Columbus at the end of 1966 and had moved into the Algiers Motel a few days before July 25. They knew Green, Clark, and Cooper and were reportedly under the protection of the "Pimp in Residence" at the motel. They professed not to know who had secured their rooms, but a black resident of the motel "looked after them and people had to contact them through him."3 Reports of sniping in the area brought Detroit police, State Police, Guardsmen, and paratroopers to the motel in the early hours of July 26. Theodore J. Thomas, a National Guard warrant officer, had been assigned with four men on the night of July 25 to guard the Great Lakes Mutual Life Insurance Building on the northwest corner of Woodward and Euclid. A private guard, Melvin Dismukes, a black, was at the same time guarding two buildings across the street from the Great Lakes Building. Thomas, who had had almost no sleep the previous two nights and was not, understandably, "mentally alert," thought he heard "about" three or five shots just before or after midnight coming from the direction of the Manor House. After...

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