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REMEMBERING THE ALGIERS: How police brutalities of our past inform our present

Welcome, this site  is dedicated to the Algiers Motel Incident, an act of heinous police Brutality that occurred July 25th, 1967. The Algiers Motel Incident left three men, Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard, and Fred Temple dead with several others at the Algiers unjustly mistreated and beaten.

The events at the Algiers Motel in July of 1967 are representative of the systemic police oppression and racial discrimination of the times. Occurring at the height of the Detroit Uprising, the Algiers Motel Incident serves as one of the most egregious abuses of power by police forces in the United States. Shockingly though, the history of the Algiers Motel Incident is often overlooked, misunderstood, or altogether forgotten. As we sift through history books or news articles published during the Detroit Uprising, there is little mention of the Algiers case, its implications, or what we can learn from the horrific events at the Algiers.

The purpose of this site is to dig into the truth of the Algiers Motel Incident. While texts like John Hersey’s “The Algiers Motel Incident” and others discuss the Algiers incident and the deaths of Pollard, Cooper, and Temple to a certain degree, most come to the consensus that pieces of the Algiers puzzle are precariously missing. As a scholar of historical implications of the future, public memory, and social constructions of the past, I intend to fill in the gaps of the motel incident that have been forgotten in many cases.

This site will be constructed in seven “Chapters,” each leading you down the story of the Algiers case and seeing how the events of that night still reverberate in our  community today. I will begin by first illustrating what was occurring in Detroit in 1967, specifically as it pertains to the black community. Following, we will se the details of the Algiers, the legal fallout of the incident, and the manner in which much of the story of the Algiers has been relegated to the margins of history. Finally, I will illustrate how these events are remembered (or not) today, and how they can inform us on issues of police brutality that exist in contemporary America. As you take this walk with me down the story of the Algiers, I invite you to add your own insights and stories of the Algiers so that ultimately, we can finally have a more complete picture of the Algiers Motel Incident.

To begin viewing each chapter of this site, move your cursor over the “more” tab in the top-left corner and view each page from chapter 1-7. Thank you and for any comments, questions, or remarks on this project, please email me at scott.mitchell@wayne.edu