The Algiers Motel Incident is a 1968 true crime book by John Hersey. The book describes an incident which occurred in 1967 in Detroit, Michigan, at about the same time as the racially charged 12th Street Riot. At the Algiers Motel, approximately one mile southeast of where the riots began, three young black men were killed, and two white women and seven other black men brutally beaten, either by Detroit police or members of the United States National Guard after a report was received that a gunman or group of gunmen had been seen at or near the motel.
Hersey interviewed survivors, members of the victims' families, and some of the law enforcement personnel who participated in the raid, and also consulted forensic reports, in identifying the law enforcement personnel most likely to have been directly involved in the killings. However, none of those actually charged were convicted in subsequent state and federal trials.
Hersey's findings suggest that one of men was probably killed when law enforcement personnel were first entering the building, and may have been mistaken for an armed rioter in the confusion, but that the other two were selected after the building had been secured and then taken away from the group into separate rooms and murdered.
The now demolished Algiers Motel once stood at the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Virginia Park in the geographic center of Detroit.
Famous quotes containing the words motel and/or incident:
“The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.”
—William Least Heat Moon [William Trogdon] (b. 1939)
““It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.... I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)