Volume 11, Number 2 · August 1, 1968
Motown Justice
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
The Algiers Motel Incident
by John Hersey
Knopf, 394 pp., $5.95
The Torture of Mothers
by Truman Nelson
Beacon, 121 pp., $4.95
About midnight of July 25, 1967, during the period of racial tension in Detroit usually referred to as a summer riot, three young men—Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard, and Fred Temple, were shot to death at close range in the Algiers Motel, on Woodward Avenue—a modern place with TV, swimming pool, and room phones too plastic to seem an appropriate scene for tragedy. All three victims were, of course, Negro. They were among a group of friends who were being interrogated—if the word may be used in so broad a sense—by an aggregate of Detroit police, Michigan State Troopers, National Guardsmen, and private guards who had been directed to the scene. The commander of the National Guard detachment who had been instructed to 'protect the building' of the Great Lakes Mutual Life Insurance Company a block north of the Algiers 'from any kind of disturbance' had heard shots, and immediately telephoned his 'high commander' that 'we were being fired upon.' According to two of the policemen present in the motel, their dispatcher had announced 'Army under heavy fire' as he gave them their orders.
Review, 4828 words
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