Detroit's Algiers Motel site, where 3 teens were killed in 1967, to get historical marker

The private park where the Algiers Motel in Detroit once stood now has a Michigan historical marker, which will be introduced to the public Friday to acknowledge the police raid and tragedy that unfolded there.

The marker also recognizes the role journalists had in bringing to light what actually happened. The hope, organizers said, is that the plaque will be a record for posterity and a way to stand against police brutality and help a still racially divided America come closer together.

"It was an incredible injustice that happened right here in Detroit that no one was held accountable for, "civil rights historian Danielle McGuire, who is writing a new book about the incident, told the Free Press this week. "A lot of times when we tell the story of the 1967 uprising, we talk about it in terms of financial cost, buildings destroyed, and the people who died that week are on a list and we don’t know anything about them."

The incident at the Woodward Avenue motel — which has been documented in newspaper reports, books and even a Hollywood film drama, "Detroit" — led to the deaths of three Black teens, who were shot, and the injury of many others, who were beaten.

McGuire, a former Wayne State University professor, said she worked with neighborhood residents, who wanted to know more about what happened there, to do something that would memorialize the lives lost, and in the past two years, the group settled on adding a historical marker.

A marker dedication ceremony, which McGuire expects to be emotional for some, is scheduled from 1-2 p.m. at the site, 8301 Woodward, which is the incident's 57th anniversary.

In addition to McGuire, who now lives in Salt Lake City, event speakers include Michigan’s Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II, Detroit’s Mayor Mike Duggan, and, potentially, survivors and relatives, of the three slain young men: Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple.

"The marker, for me, is a great acknowledgement of the lives that were lost," said Fred Temple's nephew, Tyrone Temple, 62, of Detroit. "It gives acknowledgement for the wrongs that were done. Sometimes, in life when things happen, but it doesn't have an association with you, it's easy to overlook."

Temple said his late father, Ed Temple, would appreciate the marker too. Tyrone Temple said his dad, who died in 2017, did not become bitter or want to seek retribution for his younger brother's death, but still sought justice, urging the late U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. to investigate the shootings.

The pastor with Dunamis Outreach Ministries added that the marker helps people to know what happened to his uncle, who was unarmed, innocent, and "at the wrong place at the wrong time" when he was shot, and perhaps can educate and remind Detroiters of the inequality African Americans have faced — and still face.

'Long, hot summer'

To put the Algiers Motel shootings in context, they were just three of the tragic deaths amid the violence in Detroit that summer, in what was long described as a riot and, in more recent years, by historians as an uprising and a rebellion.

The Detroit police and fire departments, the State Police and National Guard and even the Army were involved, and during the five days it unfolded, there were, the Detroit Historical Society enumerated: 43 deaths, hundreds of injuries and nearly 1,700 fires and more than 7,000 arrests.

The property damage estimate: $42 million, which, in 2024 dollars would be closer to $400 million.

The historical society called it "the largest civil disturbance of 20th century America."

And more than just in Detroit, the violence, of which various civil rights leaders had warned, and resulting consequence of city residents — mostly white — moving to the suburbs, was playing out in metropolitan areas nationwide.

During the summer of 1967, sometimes referred to as the "long, hot summer," more than 150 riots erupted in urban communities, often triggered, according to History , formerly known as the History Channel, by the same thing: "a dispute between Black citizens and white police officers that escalated to violence."

In June, there were riots in Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati and Tampa, Florida, and in July, in addition to Detroit, more riots in Birmingham, Ala., Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., New York, Rochester, N.Y., and Toledo, Ohio.

Examining the past

The riot in Detroit was the bloodiest of that summer.

The violence was sparked by a police raid on an unlicensed bar, known as a blind pig, and quickly escalated as the then-Mayor Jerome Cavanagh called for help from then-Gov. George Romney, and President Lyndon B. Johnson ultimately deployed the Army's 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions.

The situation, the Detroit Historical Society later concluded, "was the culmination of decades of institutional racism and entrenched segregation."

Moreover, the deaths, which the police attempted to cover up, were exposed by Free Press journalists as more than just casualties in a firefight. Witnesses, the Free Press reported, said white officers interrogated at least two of the Black teens, then shot them at close range — and brutalized others.

In 1968, an account of the violence by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hershey, " The Algiers Motel Incident ," brought even more public attention and scrutiny to what unfolded.

Adding to the trauma, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. — who had preached nonviolence, but predicted that violence was coming, explaining that "a riot is the language of the unheard" — was slain that year while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

And a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, often called the Kerner Commission after its chair, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, examined what happened, releasing a 426-page report that concluded that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white — separate and unequal."

The report concluded that "what the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens," and suggested that "this deepening racial division is not inevitable" and "can be reversed."

In the past few years, as reports of Detroit’s bankruptcy and resurgence have emerged, more accounts of the 1967 events have been publicized, including the production and release of the movie "Detroit." The film, by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow , was released in 2017, the riot’s 50th anniversary.

It focused on the motel raid and police interrogation that killed the three unarmed teens.

The marker inscription

The Algiers Motel, which was razed in 1979, has been replaced by a manicured park.

And since then, like an unmarked grave, there has been nothing at the scene to signify what happened there.

Still, in 2020, when George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, police-brutality protesters gathered at the spot, symbolically connecting the tragic events there in 1967 to what demonstrators said was still going on.

More: From 1967 to George Floyd: Detroit activists connect the dots to fight inequality

The new marker, which was recently erected and visible from Woodward, reads:

"This was the location of the Algiers Motel and its Manor House annex at the time of the 1967 Detroit Uprising," and describes, how, just after midnight on July 26, a National Guardsman "heard what he believed to be gunshots coming from behind the motel."

The Guardsman called in the gunshots, and "police stormed the motel."

The next morning, Cooper, 17; Temple, 18, and Pollard, 19, were "found dead in the Manor House," but the 13 police officers "did not file a police report until five days later," and the Detroit Free Press reported that contrary to authorities' claims of a firefight the teens "were shot at close range."

Police officers David Senak, Ronald August, and Robert Paille, were charged with murder, and in a separate federal case, the trio, along with a Black security guard, Melvin Dismukes, were accused of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the motel guests.

The accused were acquitted by all-white juries.

Filling a void

McGuire — who credits neighborhood residents, like Heather Anger, with inspiring her to study the incident — dug deeper into the history there and eventually underwrote much of the cost of the marker through her family’s foundation.

Anger, who was born after the incident and grew up in Shelby Township, said she moved to the neighborhood in 2014 and started researching the area, and read about the "horrific things that took place place there," but found few remnants of the motel, mostly green space.

A few neighbors, she said, recalled the incident. There also are news accounts and, she added, at least one physical subtle clue of the intensity of what unfolded: still, rough patches of pavement, which were torn up by tank treads.

"But, I felt like there needed to be something there to acknowledge it," said the 46-year-old sculptor, who can see the new marker from her driveway. "As someone from the suburbs, I feel like there's a historical amnesia of what actually took place in '67."

McGuire said she has invited at least one survivor from the incident, whose memories are still raw, to attend Friday's ceremony. She also hopes that the marker will fill a void, not just a physical one, but an emotional one, too.

"The marker is important," she said, "because in the 1970s the city tore down the Algiers Motel, like so many other sites where people were killed during the 1967 uprising, and those are kind of ghost landscapes. People know that something awful happened there, but whatever happened there is met with silence — as an empty space and memory silence."

Memories of the slayings, she said, are painful to those who lived through it, but those who did not, have little to connect that history to the present. She added that she hopes the historical marker can help preserve the past — and the truth about it — and give the city a way to heal and, perhaps, overcome the legacy of racism.

"Not knowing that information has made it harder for Detroit, as a city, and the people in it, to move past it," the historian said. "And, in larger terms, impunity for the police officers who murdered three Black teenagers that night in 1967, in lots of ways, are the taproots of today’s problems with police violence and brutality."

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit's Algiers Motel site, where 3 teens were killed in 1967, to get historical marker