Cast members from the movie 'Detroit' Joseph David-Jones, left, Algee Smith and Leon Thomas, III, stop by the Motown Museum Studio A in Detroit for an interview with the Detroit Free Press. Video by Mandi Wright Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press


"I don't have a gun, stop shooting!" – The reported last words of Michael Brown, 18, who was killed by a police officer in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo.

"Don't shoot." – The reported last words of Aubrey Pollard, 19, who was killed by a police officer in 1967 at the Algiers Motel annex in Detroit.

"On August 4, discover the truth behind one of the most terrifying events in American history," tease the previews for the movie "Detroit."

There’s an air of mystery to the ad campaign, and also to the clip of two bullying white detectives interrogating a black security guard (played by John Boyega of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens").

“What happened at the motel?” one of them asks him.

It’s the question at the heart of the film about a horrific event that occurred during Detroit's turbulent summer of 1967. The answer is extremely painful. And the film's dramatization of real-life events from 50 years ago could start a conversation about contemporary America.

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (the Oscar-winning team behind "The Hurt Locker"), Boyega and much of the talented young cast of “Detroit” are set to appear Tuesday at the movie's world premiere at the Fox Theatre.

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'Detroit' world premiere event at the Fox Theatre will be invitation-only

The invitation-only event at the 5,000-capacity former movie palace, now a popular venue for concerts and stage shows, is for a project that kept its specific focus under wraps until filming was completed.  

Throughout its production in 2016 in Massachusetts and, briefly, in Detroit and Mason, the movie was described only as a true-crime drama exploring the systemic racism that sparked five days of violence in Detroit.

Finally, in  April 2017, the first preview revealed the focus. Using artistic license in a narrative based on real life, “Detroit” examines what happened in the early hours of July 26, 1967, inside the annex building of the Algiers Motel on Woodward Avenue.

Not long after midnight, three African-American teenagers — Carl Cooper, 17, Aubrey Pollard, 19, and Fred Temple, 18 — were killed. Several other people were beaten and terrorized. Three white Detroit police officers were charged in the events related to the deaths. None of them was convicted.

The story is seared in the memories of those who lost someone they loved that night, and those who've studied the history of Detroit's racial injustice. But for many current and younger residents of metro Detroit, the name Algiers Motel may not ring a bell. Those who do recognize it sometimes recall just the title of a 1968 book, "The Algiers Motel Incident," by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey.

"Detroit" devotes roughly 40 minutes of its running time to re-creating what happened at the motel. That portion of the narrative feels like a real-time immersion in the tension, horror and despair of an interrogation gone terribly wrong. 

Cooper, Pollard and Temple, didn't become  names in a national discussion, not like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Philando Castile and other contemporary African-American men who've been killed by law enforcement (or, in the case of Martin, a neighborhood watch volunteer) or while in police custody. 

"Detroit" soon will be reviewed by critics, scrutinized by scholars and potentially seen by a wide number of moviegoers. Could it become a meaningful part of attempts to confront  the persisting problem of why justice may differ for blacks and whites? 

Will the tragic deaths of Cooper, Pollard and Temple teach us something important about systemic racism half a century later?

“We’re talking about their lives 50 years later,” says Detroit’s Rev. Lonnie Peek, a longtime member of New Detroit, the coalition founded after 1967 to address the city's social ills, and one of the organizers of a people's tribunal in 1967 on the Algiers Motel killings.

“If we try to bury it, then we are disgracing and diminishing their lives. They did not deserve to be murdered, but they were. So what are we going to do about that situation? We are going to continue to talk about it and we’re going to continue to learn from it, because if you don’t learn from history, then you repeat it.”

'Detroit' and the national conversation

The “Detroit” world premiere arrives in the midst of a concerted, carefully thought-out effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the summer of 1967.

"Looking back to move forward" is the slogan of "Detroit 67," an impressive effort now underway with crowded schedule of museum exhibits, panel discussions, film screenings and music concerts. Launched by the Detroit Historical Society with the collaboration of major participants like the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Detroit Institute of Arts, "Detroit 67" has been willing to tackle the hard questions.

Was it a riot? A rebellion? An uprising? Fifty years later, the conversations being encouraged by cultural and civic groups involved are deep enough to include the very fact that when you use a word, you're choosing a political and moral outlook.

Much of Detroit's current civic and cultural leadership is embracing "Detroit" as a way to be truthful about the past. The Wright Museum and the DIA are partnering with Annapurna Pictures on the world premiere. The filmmakers and actors are appearing at local landmarks and participating in several community events that started Sunday and continue today.

The Detroit of today is far different from the city of 1967. One sign of just how vast the changes are is that the head of 2,400-plus Detroit Police Department, Chief James Craig, wants his officers to see the movie.

 "I attended the film with several other police officers," Craig told Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley. "I’ve asked the producers if we could host a series of pre-screenings before the release date. It’s my hope that we get (as) many Detroit officers to see the film as possible."

Craig, who was a fifth-grader in Detroit 50 years ago, says it's important to understand the past, "It’s a part of Detroit’s history, and while this film is focused squarely on the Detroit Police Department, it’s not about the other socioeconomic issues of the day. We have to understand where we’ve come from. That’s why it’s important for police officers and others, so people will take away an appreciation of our evolution, and this (film) in no way defines who we are today."

"Detroit" also could play a role in driving national media coverage of the anniversary.

"We live in the age of theater right now, so everybody wants to be able to see things visually. I believe as long as the story is true to form and they don't switch it up too much and put in things that weren't fact, it's going to have a huge impact," says Zeek, the 32-year-old president (who prefers to go by one name) of New Era Detroit, an activist community group founded in 2014.

The relevance of the Algiers Motel killings, according to Zeek, is clear. "Although it was 50 years ago, we're still dealing with these same issues," he says. "These things are still in our face, so it's not like, 'Oh, those were the old days.' We're still living it."

Bigelow, who became the first woman to win a directing Oscar with 2008's "The Hurt Locker" and followed that success with 2012's "Zero Dark Thirty," is used to tackling gritty, uncomfortable material drawn from real headlines. In a phone interview with the Free Press, she said the link between "Detroit" and what continues to occur today in America was a big part of what drew her to the project.

Bigelow says that screenwriter Boal came to her with the idea of an Algiers Motel project, around the time, coincidentally, that she and the rest of the country were thinking about the shooting death of Michael Brown. The 2014 killing of the unarmed teenager spurred months of protest and fueled national debate over policing tactics in the black community. The officer involved was not charged by a grand jury.

"I thought, OK, that's 50 years ago and yet it obviously underscores the severity of the situation (now), and how far we have yet to go in order for this country to heal or to come out from under the shadow of this constant inequity," says Bigelow.

While "Detroit" is obviously grounded in a specific time and place, it's her hope that the movie speaks to a persisting American problem.

"This is a story that needs to be extrapolated across the country," says Bigelow, reciting the names of  Martin, Philando Castile (whose girlfriend shared Facebook video of him dying inside his vehicle after being pulled over and shot) and others whose deaths led to protest and outrage.

"I mean, the list, sadly, is frighteningly long ... I'd like it to be extrapolated to a conversation about an inequity that needs to be addressed." 

Historian and Detroit native Thomas Sugrue, author of "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit," says the parallels are obvious between the Algiers Motel killings and subsequent contemporary police shootings and lack of charges or convictions in such cases.

"Given the context of the last few years, it's going to be impossible to see 'Detroit,' the film, outside the lens of incidents like Ferguson ... to not see it without thinking about Black Lives Matter," he says, referring to the movement born of grassroots protest. 

Sugrue says he hopes "Detroit" takes a sophisticated, sensitive approach to the material instead of a sensationalist one. Is he worried about the movie ripping off the scab of whatever healing has occurred since 1967 regarding police brutality?

"It's not a matter of peeling off the scab. The wound is still open," he says. "There's a lot more healing to do before we can talk about something as benign as a scab."

A deep and wide problem

Harassment of black residents by predominantly white police forces played an important role in riots in numerous cities in the late 1960s. Here in Detroit, as Free Press contributor Bill McGraw wrote in July, "A massive amount of evidence from surveys, media reports and city documents shows the Detroit Police Department was black Detroiters' biggest grievance in 1967. Complaints ranged from lack of politeness on the part of officers to outright brutality."

It was a problem that had plagued the city through the post-World War II years. While researching the records of Detroit's civil rights organizations for his work, Sugrue says he found how commonplace reports of profiling and abuse were.

"Folks wrote describing being pulled over, hauled out of the car and beaten, or having police cars driving by and officers shouting racial epithets, or the increasingly common practice, especially in Detroit in the years leading up to 1967, of stopping and frisking black men who happened to be in, quote-unquote, the wrong neighborhood, who happened to be driving through or walking through a neighborhood that was predominantly white. That was almost a guarantee that you would be stopped."

A combined force of 17,000 was brought to Detroit to quell the violence, a group that included U.S. Army troops from airborne units, the state's National Guard, the State Police and Detroit police. In the end, 43 people were dead (mostly African Americans) and nearly 1,200 were injured. 

As Wayne State University adjunct associate professor Danielle McGuire writes in her contribution to the "Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies" anthology, a companion book to the "Detroit 67" project, the pressure cooker of violence grew worse as the week unfolded.

"What began as an outburst of long-simmering anger and resentment by African Americans against racial discrimination and police violence began to feel more like a state-sanctioned police riot against African Americans."

McGuire is working on a book about the Algiers Motel killings that she plans to title "Murder in the Motor City: The 1967 Detroit Uprising and American Injustice." It will use the case to take a specific look at the events and a more sweeping look at the context and aftermath.

"It's looking at the Algiers case as a close-up, but then it's zooming out, seeing the ways in which the history of police violence in Detroit, of inequality and racial discrimination and injustice led to what happened at the Algiers and then those same threads spool out afterwards in the trials and more current events."

McGuire says she thinks one reason the Algiers Motel killings aren't more widely known today is that they don't fit the reality-ignoring perception that the North was free of the racism and racial violence of the South. "It contradicts the narrative of the North as a better place, a place without that stigma and history," she says.

The truth of the Algiers Motel killings was clouded in some people's minds by their opinions on the wider chaos that was happening. Those who defended the actions of law enforcement considered the deaths as casualties of war.

 Even now, the convoluted nature of the story makes it difficult to sort out the exact circumstances. "You can't actually tell exactly what happened, except that it was an atrocity," says McGuire, who has pored over the first-hand accounts and legal documents. 

As McGuire writes in an essay for the "Detroit 1967" anthology, "The details of exactly what happened next are complicated and convoluted; clear memories forever lost to the chaos of the moment, the tricks of time, and the disparate recollections of the survivors traumatized by violence and terror."

The basic facts are that members of the Detroit police, the State Police and National Guard raided the annex building of the Algiers Motel in response to reports of sniper fire. A group of people who had sought refuge at the motel, several black men and two white women, were forced to line up in a hallway. They were beaten, berated with racial epithets and called pimps and whores during an interrogation gone terribly wrong.

One by one, some of the men were taken separately into rooms. Shots were fired near them and they were told to keep quiet, to create the impression they had been killed. Hersey called it "the death game" and raised the scenario that at least one of the victims was killed because one of the cops didn't realize it was a interrogation tactic.

No gun was ever found. There just were accounts from survivors that a starter pistol using blanks was fired as a prank in the annex before the raid.

The initial reports by homicide detectives indicated there had been an exchange of gunfire. As McGuire writes, "But witnesses told nearly anyone who would listen that there was no shootout. The police, they said, committed murder."

The legal aftermath for the three Detroit police officers who faced charges in connection with the killings is also complex, a years-long legal process of motions, appeals and delays.

A judge dismissed a murder charge against Robert Paille in 1967. Ronald August was acquitted of a first-degree murder charge in 1968 by an all-white jury in Mason, a city chosen as a change of venue for the trial.

In a 1970 trial held in Flint, police officers Paille, August and David Senak, and security guard Melvin Dismukes were charged "under an 1871 federal law for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three slain men and the other members of the infamous lineup," as Sugrue wrote in his 1998 introduction to a reissue of Hersey's book. All four men were acquitted.

The only convictions regarding the Algiers Motel deaths came in August 1967 at a mock trial called the People's Tribunal, which was held at the church now known as the Shrine of the Black Madonna.

Peek, who helped the Rev. Daniel Aldridge organize the event, says Detroit legends like Kenneth Cockrel participated in the proceedings, as did international civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who was on the jury.

"The night of the event, we didn't know what to expect," he recalls. "It was just so hot. The church was not air-conditioned. But the church was packed. Packed! There were literally hundreds of people in the streets that could not get into that church."

Peek went on to found the Association of Black Students at Wayne State University and became an educator, political analyst and minister deeply active in Detroit's civic and religious life. But he's realistic about the fact that some things haven't changed.

"That situation of the police and black men, that has not gone away. That has been a historical presence in our community, in our lives," Peek, 75, says. "As an African-American man, whenever I'm stopped by the police, I have to understand that I might not have done anything wrong in my mind, but it's how I face them, it's where I place my hands, it's what I say.

Peek will be appearing with Aldridge and McGuire on Tuesday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. They'll be panelists at a program called "The Algiers Motel Teenage Murders By Racist Police."

The museum is remembering the killings as part of its mission to tell the truth about the events of 1967, according to Charles Ferrell, the director of public programs at the museum. 

"To examine the 1967 rebellion without speaking about the Algiers Motel would be really remiss to any true history of what occurred," says Ferrell.

The title of the program reflects a conscious decision not to use gentler euphemisms, but to address the realities of then and now.

"It's like when you go to a doctor and say you have pain in your leg. They want to know what's going on. You have to tell the truth," says Ferrell. "If you go to an attorney, in order to provide you with a good case, you have to tell them what happened. You can't not say something because, oh, everything is great. No, everything is not great."

To understand the current state of race relations in America, say historians, you must confront the legacy of the past.

"It didn't start with Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, and African Americans have been saying this for a long, long time," says McGuire. "There is a longstanding legacy in the history of this country of police targeting people of color, particularly African Americans, particularly young black men. That's a history and legacy that goes all the way back to slavery."

Says McGuire of how to frame the issue today, "It's not about being for or against the police. It's about being for human rights."

Speaking last week in the lead-up to Tuesday's "Detroit" premiere, Bigelow contemplated on the fact that the movie, which will be released in 2,000 theaters, will put a national spotlight on the Algiers Motel killings.

It could make the names of Cooper, Pollard and Temple known by a wide audience today.

"That would be a true move in the right direction," says Bigelow, her words measured and thoughtful, "if the victims could gain a kind of posthumous respect that they deserve."

Editor's note: At the top of this story, the Michael Brown quote was drawn from media reports of an eyewitness account. The last words of Aubrey Pollard are as reported by accounts in John Hersey's book "The Algiers Motel Incident." 


'Detroit' world premiere


7:30 p.m. Tue.,

Fox Theatre

Screening preceded by red carpet arrivals that are expected to include John Boyega, Anthony Mackie, Jason Mitchell and other cast members along with director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal. 

"Detroit" will open to the public July 28 at limited theaters (including the Bel Air Luxury in Detroit and the Star John R 15 in Madison Heights) and expand to 4,000-plus theaters Aug. 4

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