No headstone marks William “Billy” Dalton’s gravesite. His childhood home on Fernwood Street, once part of a vibrant, working-class Black neighborhood, was razed to build the Jeffries Freeway. The former parking lot of Wild’s Cleaner’s on the corner of Grand River and Edmonton, where Detroit Police officer Ronald F. Karchefski shot and killed the 19-year-old African American on July 26, 1967, is now, like so many sites of historic violence, a vacant lot.
There is no marker indicating that Dalton was one of 43 people killed during that week’s violence. Or that his murder, witnessed by more than 30 neighbors, was part of an unpunished spate of killings that evening by Detroit police and National Guardsmen that left seven people dead, including four-year-old Tonia Blanding and three teenagers at the Algiers Motel. Or that his death, like others that week, forever changed the future of his family, friends, and neighborhood.
Each year, on the anniversary of the 1967 uprising, we further obscure Dalton’s history by remembering it through narratives of numbers: lives lost, people arrested, buildings burned, and damages in dollars. And we still blame shadowy “snipers” for many shootings we now know were committed by police and guardsmen. How can we fully understand what happened and properly memorialize the victims of that tumultuous week, if their lives and deaths are all but erased; if the sites of violence are made invisible; if whole communities are disappeared; and if the historical archive is limited or one-sided?
Dalton’s story can help us better understand what happened in 1967 and what needs to be done to make peace with our shared history.
According to witnesses and his mother, Billy Dalton, a handsome young man with a smooth singing voice, was talking with friends on a front porch on Fernwood until about 11:45 PM on Tuesday July 25, 1967. When he left, he walked between the homes into an alley where three Detroit police officers spotted him and ordered him to stop.
Neighbors say they saw police push Dalton against a tree, frisk him and then accused him of starting a fire. “I didn’t set no fire,” he said. “You don’t see no fire.”
Another witness heard an officer say “I’ll give you ten to run.” Dalton refused.
Neighbors then describe watching the police escort Dalton towards the parking lot of Wild’s Cleaners, where about 15-20 police officers and guardsmen were gathered.
“They had Dalton hemmed against a wall,” Charles Hall said, “and were goading him to run.” Hall shouted, “don’t shoot that boy” and an officer responded with an obscenity-laced threat.
William Jones watched the entire episode unfold from his window directly adjacent to Wild’s. He heard Dalton beg for mercy and finally heard an officer say, “run home you son-of-a-bitch.”
The minute Dalton turned his back to flee, Detroit patrolman, Ronald F. Karchefski, raised his 12-gauge shotgun and fired. Five shotgun pellets burst through Dalton’s back, penetrating his heart, liver and vertebrae. He stumbled and fell to the ground, blood coursing onto the sidewalk.
Mamie Willis remembers hearing an officer say, “let’s get out of here.” Karchefski and his partners immediately left.
None of the officers or guardsmen filed a report of the shooting.
About 45 minutes later, a Michigan State trooper followed by a convoy of National Guardsmen, Detroit Police and some Detroit News reporters arrived at the corner where Dalton’s body remained. A neighbor heard the trooper get on his car radio to report a “dead sniper, Edmonton and Grand River.”
Juanita Parks, who lived across the street, said she then saw police “kick [Dalton] and turn him over. Then they posed for pictures.” She nearly fainted.
Joe Clark, a photographer traveling with the reporters, snapped a photo of a state trooper standing over Dalton’s body; he was flat on his back, chest bared, and arms splayed wide. Blood stained the sidewalk. A month later, the gory image was published in Newsweek.
The photo did not identify Dalton as the victim, nor was there a story to contextualize or humanize him as a beloved son, sibling, cousin, neighbor or friend. The only way to know that it was him in the photo, since his head was turned away from the camera, was the presence of his signature white straw hat that remained slightly askew on his head until a wagon finally arrived to carry him to Northwest General Hospital. He was pronounced dead upon arrival at 2:20 AM, approximately two hours after he was shot.
Later that morning, two detectives from DPD’s Homicide Department arrived to investigate and take photographs of the scene. “Due to the lack of any reports, evidence or witnesses,” they wrote in their report, Dalton’s death was attributed to “heavy sniper fire….”
Not only was Dalton labeled a “dead sniper;” his death was also blamed upon snipers. As far as the DPD was concerned, the case was essentially closed.
And it would have remained that way had scores of witnesses not told a totally different story; one that put the police instead of imaginary snipers at the center of Dalton’s killing.
The truth began with an anonymous call to the Detroit News, a week and a half after Dalton’s death. The caller claimed Detroit police shot and killed Dalton, and there were many witnesses. Staff reporter Allan Blanchard reached out to Dalton’s grieving mother, who introduced him to community members. They told Blanchard everything they saw and heard, including one witness who overheard a police radio asking for the location of “Scout 6-3.”
Blanchard turned the witness statements over to the Detroit Police Homicide Bureau and published the story on August 9th, 1967 under the headline: “Teen Riot Death is Investigated: Police Accused.”
That story–similar to the investigative work by the Detroit Free Press on the murders at the Algiers Motel–forced the DPD to launch an investigation into Dalton’s death, something they claimed they had been too busy to do.
The final report, signed by Detective Lieutenant Edward Rohn on August 13, said that the multiple, corroborating witness statements were, in his opinion, “contradictory” and appeared to be “complete fabrications.” Rohn offered no proof to substantiate that analysis. Worse, he blamed the witnesses for not being able to identify the officers and guardsmen at the scene.
But it was witness testimony about Scout 6-3 that forced Patrolman Ronald F. Karshefski to finally admit he was there. His statement, made alongside his union attorney nearly three weeks after the shooting, was exculpatory.
Karshefski claimed Dalton “suddenly broke and ran,” and that he and other officers repeatedly yelled “halt” or “don’t run.” Karshefski said he only fired “one shot” at Dalton and had “no reason to believe” it “took effect” since he never saw a dead body.
On October 26, 1967, a DPD Homicide Bureau Inter-Office Memo noted that Dalton’s case was closed after the Wayne County Prosecutor ruled it was a “justifiable homicide.” The final police archival record–what we too often confuse with the truth–stated that Dalton was “apprehended at the scene of an arson,” then “attempted to flee the police.” He was shot, the report said, “after ignoring orders to halt.”
For Dalton’s family, the case is far from closed. That single shot did more than kill Billy. It devastated his family, destroyed his community’s trust in the law and was the catalyst for decades of heartache that continue to resonate to this day.
Harold Hogan was fifteen when his cousin Billy was killed. We first spoke last year, when he called to talk about my research. He said Billy was part of a “beautiful household that may have been in semi-poverty, but no one knew it.” There was a “joy” in the Dalton home; and when Billy entered the room, “the world came to life.” His mother “adored him,” Hogan said, and they loved to tease him with the Marvelette’s song, “Don’t Mess With Bill.”
Hogan can still remember the horror of seeing Billy’s sister run out of his funeral. She “grabbed hold of me like she was falling off a cliff. I felt her trauma move into my body.” The rest of the family looked like they “literally had their hearts torn out.” It was excruciating. “All I remembered of them [before that] was laughing and joking.”
Afterwards, Hogan said, it was like “a light dimmed.” He can’t quite explain how the Dalton household was different, but it was. The family scattered. Dalton’s parents parted ways, and his siblings struggled for a long time with the trauma of their brother’s murder. Dalton’s mother was the “sweetest person” Hogan recalled. But after Billy’s death, “something happened to her; something bad.”
When I asked Hogan what justice might look like fifty-four years after Dalton’s death, he said he wasn’t sure it was possible.
But the absence of justice–in Dalton’s case and so many others–has done real harm. Unable to truly understand the past, we remain tangled in its web.
How do we go about the work of recovery and reconciliation when there are still so many silences in the archive and the physical landscape where racial violence occurred has been erased? We cannot repair what we cannot see and what we refuse to name. We cannot change the past. But we can change how we remember it, how we talk about it, whose narratives we privilege, and whose lives we make matter.
–published in the Detroit Free Press on July 25, 2021
You must be logged in to post a comment.