Novelist and Journalist John Hersey has dealt with lofty subjects: death by holocaust (Hiroshima), extremes of heroism (The Wall), a man against the sea (Under the Eye of the Storm). So, at first glance, a sordid shooting in a seedy motel during last summer's Detroit riots hardly seems potential material for him. Yet out of these unpromising ingredients, Hersey has fashioned a book, The Algiers Motel Incident (Knopf; $5.95) that measures up to his better work. "This episode," he writes, "contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the U.S.: 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 so many young black men have been driven ever since slavery; ambiguous justice in the courts; the devastation in both black and white lives that follows violence."
The case centered on the killing of three Negro youths. By the time Hersey arrived in Detroit last September, the affair had become something of a local cause celèbre. Both the Detroit News and the Free Press had published accounts, and three policemen involved had been suspended from the force. Hersey had planned to write on the riots in general, but he found them too diffuse to handle and decided to focus on the single incident. Even so, the episode, as he describes it, "is so complex, the cast of characters so huge, that I simply could not assume the author's usual stance of divine omni science." So he tells the story mostly in the words of the witnesses and makes his own observations in the form of ironic subheads. It took him about six weeks to win the confidence of the participants. The time was well spent, for the subjects ultimately revealed to Hersey much more about what happened —and about themselves — than they probably intended.
Overwrought Message. The Algiers Motel shooting occurred at the height of the rioting of July on Detroit's central thoroughfare. Police had been subjected to sniper firing, and one cop had already been killed. Consequently, nerves were strained when an overwrought National Guardsman sent word of shots being fired from the area of the motel with its largely Negro clientele. The police dispatcher relayed the message: "Army under heavy fire." Actually, only a few shots had been heard, and Negro witnesses later claimed that these had come from a blank-cartridge pistol; no gun of any kind was ever found at the motel.
Nevertheless, some 16 state and local police and National Guardsmen converged on the motel. A Negro youth, Carl Cooper, was shot to death just inside the door. Police then dragged seven or more occupants from their rooms and lined them up against a wall. After that, accounts diverge. The Negroes, whose stories shifted rather erratically, reported they were all beaten. A policeman, said one Negro, "pointed to the body and asked me what did I see, and I told him I seen a dead man. And he hit me with a pistol and told me I didn't see anything." Later during the incident two more Negroes were killed, Auburey Pollard and Fred Temple.