The Algiers Motel: Three Men, One Night

On the night of July twenty-fifth into July twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-seven, the third night of the Detroit uprising, Detroit police officers and Michigan National Guardsmen entered the Algiers Motel on Woodward Avenue. A report of sniper fire had brought them there. No sniper was ever found, and no sniper fire was confirmed.

Inside, officers found a group of Black men and two white women. They lined the occupants against walls and interrogated them through the night. By morning, three young Black men were dead inside the motel. Carl Cooper was seventeen years old. Fred Temple was eighteen. Aubrey Pollard was nineteen.

Three Detroit police officers were charged with murder and assault. All three were acquitted. The trials were moved out of Wayne County. Michigan's Attorney General investigated and declined further action. No one was ever held legally accountable for what happened inside the Algiers Motel.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Hersey spent months reconstructing the events based on survivor testimony and corroborated accounts from multiple people present that night. His nineteen sixty-eight book documented the sequence in detail. The conclusion Hersey reached, and which the evidence supported, was that the three young men were killed without justification by officers who faced no legal consequence.

The Algiers Motel was demolished in nineteen seventy-nine. The site is in the Virginia Park neighborhood. No formal marker stands there today. Carl Cooper, Fred Temple, and Aubrey Pollard are buried in Detroit. Their names are in the record. The accountability is not.