John Hersey - The Algiers Motel Incident

The Algiers Motel Incident

1968 by John Hersey. Copyright renewed 1996 by Brook Hersey.

Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf

Introduction 1998, 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press

Foreword 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hersey, John, 19141993, author. | McGuire, Danielle L., writer of foreword.

Title: The Algiers Motel incident / John Hersey ; foreword by Danielle L. McGuire.

Description: Revised edition. | Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019007942 | ISBN 9781421432977 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421432984 (electronic) | ISBN 1421432978 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421432986 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: RiotsMichiganDetroit. | African AmericansViolence againstMichiganDetroit. | Detroit (Mich.)Race relations20th century. | African AmericansMichiganDetroitSocial conditions20th century. | Detroit (Mich.)History20th century.

Classification: LCC F574.D4 H4 2019 | DDC 305.896/073077434dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007942

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To the students of Pierson College

Danielle L. McGuire

In August of 1967, as the remains of buildings and neighborhoods smoldered in Detroit, Michigan, John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist, got a call from David Ginsburg, the executive director of President Lyndon Johnsons newly minted National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. He invited Hersey to write part of the commissions report on the causes and potential cures for the wave of unrest that had roiled the nation from the Watts, California, uprising in 1965 to the deadly destruction in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit a month earlier. Hersey declined, fearing that he would have no control at all over the final report (31). But he felt compelled to write something about the unfettered violence, looting, and racial animosity set loose by these riots, which he considered to be the most intransigent and fear-ridden issue in American life. He quickly made plans to visit Detroit, where he was determined to write about one of the countrys most destructive and deadly uprisings (3132).

Herseys experience as a war correspondent for Time and Life magazines during World War II had taught him to search for ordinary people affected by the war and to bear witness to their experiences, rather than focus on the damage done to material infrastructure. When he set out to write about the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima for the New Yorker, for example, he told assistant editor William Shawn that he believed all the coverage in the year since the United States dropped the atomic bomb had been about its destructive power and not its effects on ordinary people. He wanted to add faces and names to the narrative and trace the horror of the bomb across peoples everyday lives. Shawn agreed and sent Hersey to Japan, where he spent

Shawn devoted the entire issue of the New Yorkerfor the first and last timeto Herseys intimate portrayal of the effects of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Published on August 31, 1946, when Hersey was just thirty-two years old, Hiroshima was an immediate blockbuster that electrified and shocked Americans and propelled Hersey into the elite echelons of journalism. For the first time, Americans confronted the consequencesthe human destruction and individual horrorsof our countrys decision to drop an atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945. By focusing on secretaries, mothers, doctors, and priests, Hersey insisted that readers consider those who had been, up to that point, viewed as our mortal enemies to be, instead, our fellow human beings, individuals who were just like us. That issue of the New Yorker sold out immediately, and parts of the thirty-thousand-word essay were reprinted in newspapers and read aloud on radio stations in the United States and Great Britain. Albert Einstein purchased one thousand copies to distribute to his network of scientists, policy makers, and intellectuals, and Alfred Knopf published the essay as a book two months later, selling millions of copies. It has been in print ever since.

Hiroshima was groundbreaking in many ways, not least of which was Herseys decision to use the tools of fiction to humanize and breathe life into journalism. John Herseys son, Baird, told a reporter in 2015 that his father believed that with journalism, the reader is always conscious of whos writing it and explaining whats taken place. Hersey wanted the reader to be directly confronted by the characters so that his mediation By purposefully removing his authorial voice from the narrative and employing a novelists tools, Hersey developed a style that became a catalyst for the New Journalism of the 1950s and 1960s. But it was also successful because he made visible ordinary individuals caught by the powerful forces of history; he let readers see them as they were and, in seeing them, make a human connection that fostered change.

Hersey expected to undertake a style of reportage similar to Hiroshima when he made his way to Detroit in the fall of 1967. Like his first foray into Japan, he wasnt sure what or whose story he would tell. He arrived on Sunday evenings throughout the fall and conducted interviews on Mondays and Tuesdays before returning to his duties as Master of Pierson College at Yale. He let the narratives of native Detroiters unfurl, listening carefully as individuals talked about their experiences living through the unrest. As he explored Detroit in those first few visits, speaking with city officials and African American community leaders, one storythe brutal murder of three black teenagers just after midnight at the Algiers Motel by Detroit police and National Guardsmen on July 26, 1967kept insisting upon attention (32). It had, he said, all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by decent men who deny that they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven... ; ambiguous justice in the courts; and devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence (32).

It took weeks of pounding the pavement and working connections to get access to the victims families and survivors of the assault at the Algiers. Finally, Hersey met Dorothy Dewberry, a young activist of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who was related to the mother of seventeen-year-old Carl Cooper, shot dead at close range in the initial assault on the motel. Once Hersey made that initial connection with Coopers mother, Margaret Gill, and his stepfather, Omar Gill, he was able to slowly build trust with the family members of the other victims: Auburey Pollard, who was killed two days before his twenty-first birthday, and Fred Temple, an eighteen-year-old who had never before been to the Algiers Motel. Hersey also gained access to and interviewed the Detroit police officers who were implicated in their deaths, the young men and women who made it out of the Algiers Motel alive, the black activists who fought for justice, the local reporters who initially investigated the story, and city and state officials who worked the case.