Word: motel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...
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...
Charge of Harassment. What particularly seemed to enrage the police at the Algiers Motel, according to the Negroes Hersey interviewed, was the presence of two young white prostitutes. Senak, said a witness, ripped the clothes off one with the barrel of his shotgun and ordered the other to undress before the officers. He demanded to know why they preferred Negroes as clients. "What's wrong with us, you nigger lovers?" Another cop then chimed in: "We're going to fill up the Detroit River with all you pimps and whores...
...clearly enjoying himself is Director Lester, who has unabashedly used the story as a pretext to gleek, glom and glare at the Frisco scene with his cameras. "My apartment's only four blocks from here," says the doctor. He and Petulia go to a super de luxe motel instead, allowing Lester to display the automated checkin, the key that lights up when you reach your door, and the vibrating double bed. When a pal wants to have a serious talk with Scott about his marital problems, they go to lunch at a topless restaurant so that the camera...