Nobody is going to bother me,” he said, with the certainty of a teenager whose future seemed to stretch beyond the horizon.Her mother lived through the 1943 Detroit race riot, which left 34 dead. Shortly after the killings, local papers picked up the story, and the three officers were charged with murder. On July 25, 1967, three young black men were killed by Detroit police at the long-demolished Algiers Motel. Then, she scooped up a small handful and let them fall softly back into the box one by one.Thelma Pollard Gardner, a retired science teacher with beautiful gray and silver hair, remembers exactly when her older brother Aubrey gave her the coins.It was a half-century ago today, July 25, 1967. Thelma walked the phone into her mother’s bedroom and handed it to her.“She just wailed,” Thelma recalled. Paille would make statements implicating him in the murders. A second trial of all three officers, for conspiracy, also ended in an acquittal. She chose science because nobody thought she –  as a black woman –  could do it. It became clear in our class that my students’ timeline—of police killings, prisons, and impunity—felt like the most tangible legacy of the Algiers.

Rebecca Pollard died of complications related to Alzheimer’s in 1997. He is smiling, a distinctive, bright, sly, almost sarcastic grin. Robert Paille died on September 9, 2011, while David Senak and Ronald August were arrested and remain in prison and never return.

The Wayne County medical examiner agreed that Temple and Pollard were shot while kneeling or lying down.
We met because I’m writing a book about the death of her brother and two other teens in the summer of 1967.


“They’ll come back and kill you. (Photo courtesy Thelma Pollard Gardner)Police stand outside an annex of the Algiers Motel after three teenage bodies are found inside during the Detroit violence of July 1967.

The Pollards and Temples filed a civil suit in Wayne County Circuit Court and settled it in 1976 when the city agreed to pay each family $62,500. “Those black son-of-a bitches.

It calls together the radicalism of Black Power, when H. Rap Brown visited Detroit and demanded revolutionary justice if the state acquitted the police; the long hot summers in cities across the country; the notoriety of Detroit’s Jim Crow police that awaited southern migrants like Cooper, Temple, and Pollard’s parents. On July 25, a Tuesday, three Detroit Police officers—David Senak, Ronald August, and Robert Paille—were were called to the motel after reports of “sniper fire” coming from one of its rooms. (Photo courtesy Thelma Pollard Gardner)Thelma Pollard Gardner, shown here in the late 1960s, has kept a jar of pennies from her brother for 50 years. In a final attempt to hold the three officers and Dismukes accountable, the U.S. Department of Justice charged them with conspiring to violate the civil rights of the young men and women who were beaten and killed.On February 25, 1970, an all-white jury acquitted them of that charge as well.Rebecca Pollard knew justice was unlikely, but she did not expect the extent of the injustice she encountered.

Melvin Dismukes, played by John Boyega in Bigelow’s film, was universally described in the press as “a Negro security guard,” at work at a nearby supermarket that night. The officers—Ronald August, Robert Paille and David Senak—were charged with murder, conspiracy and federal civil rights violations, according to … Criticizing comments or ideas is welcome, but Bridge won’t tolerate comments that are false or defamatory or that demean, personally attack, spread hate or harmful stereotypes.