A historical marker and a memorial to the victims of police violence
Survivors and victims’ family members gathered together on July 26, 2024 for the dedication of the Algiers Motel historical marker.
57 years earlier, on July 26, 1967, three Detroit policemen and a private guard raided the Algiers Motel on the third night of the one of the worst urban uprisings in American history. They not only beat and brutalized a group of Black teenagers and two white women there that night, they also murdered three young Black men: Auburey Pollard, Fred Temple and Carl Cooper.
It took many years and a coalition of dedicated individuals to bring the Michigan State Historical Marker to fruition. It was an honor to speak at the dedication ceremony alongside Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Michigan Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist II, Maureen Stapleton, Jamon Jordan, and Pastor Tyrone Temple.
Here is a transcript of what I said:
Dedication of Algiers Motel Historical Marker
Good afternoon. Before I talk about what we hope to accomplish with this marker, I’d like to offer my sincere gratitude to everyone who helped make it possible. Thank you, Lt. Governor Gilchrist and Mayor Duggan, for being here with us today. Thank you to Maureen Stapleton, Sue Mosey and Midtown Detroit Inc for your support for this project and your incredible follow-through. I’d like to thank State Representative Abraham Aiyash for his support for a historical marker. His intervention at a crucial time made a difference. A special thanks goes to Heather Anger and Cordula Ditz, who helped spearhead this project many years ago and built neighborhood and community support through the Virginia Avenue Block Club.
Thank you to my husband, Adam Rosh, and my children Ruby and Rhys Rosh and the Rosh Family Foundation for their generous donation funding the marker.
Finally, thank you to the Pollard, Temple and Cooper families and to Lee Forsythe for being so generous with your time and so open with your hearts. I know that none of this is easy. You have our enduring gratitude and support.
We are here today because we have a moral duty to tell the truth about the past and work toward a future that is rooted in equality and justice.
Moving toward justice requires an honest reckoning with the past. While we are here to unveil and dedicate a new state historical marker that tells part of the story of what happened at the Algiers Motel 57 years ago, it is also important that we memorialize the victims and acknowledge all of those who were harmed.
Fred Temple, Aubrey Pollard and Carl Cooper were not just victims. They were sons, brothers, grandsons, uncles, nephews, cousins, neighbors and friends. They all grew up in large families and vibrant neighborhoods here in Detroit, where they were nurtured and fortified by loving relationships. They were talented, handsome and charming young men who had ideas, hopes, fears and dreams. They were each on the precipice of manhood… and like many of the young people here today, they had their eyes set on the future. A future cradled and supported by a strong web of family and friends.
But their hopes and dreams for the future were cut short by three Detroit Police officers who shot and killed them on July 26 1967, for no reason at all, right over there where the Algiers Motel once stood. Despite at least three trials—only one of which was for murder–no one was ever held accountable for their deaths.
It’s important to remember that though their names are the only victims listed in the history books, they were not the only people who suffered serious harm.
There were six others–Lee Forsythe, James Sortor, Roderick Davis, Larry Reed, Julie Hysell, and Karen Malloy who were beaten and brutalized by the police and watched their friends die. They may have escaped death, but they have lived with the trauma and terror inflicted upon them since that night. Nothing could ever truly be the same for them. But they endured.
The families of the victims were also forever scarred. Imagine one day you beam as you watch a smile form on your child’s face; have a laugh or share a secret with your brother and the next day your son, your brother, your friend—is gone. Disappeared. Taken from you forever. Auburey Pollard’s father put it simply, but powerfully in 1967 when he said, “I lost a son. I lost a son.”
These are holes that can never be filled. The grief may dim, but the pangs of loss never go away. 
The aftermaths of that single night of violence at the Algiers Motel in 1967 rippled out, causing further harm to the victims and their families even as time marched forward. Some people can hold it together after terror cuts through their lives; others fall apart. Some find a way to muddle through life, alive but dead or dull inside. Robert Kennedy, as he told a crowd the sudden news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, who wrote two thousand years ago, “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Harm does not only settle on primary victims and survivors. Everyone in a community where there is impunity for police violence; where the courts apply laws unequally; and where justice is delayed or denied–are harmed. The very fabric of our humanity is frayed. This is why some activists in 1967 like Dan Aldridge and Lonnie Peek called for a People’s Tribunal. Because they didn’t trust the courts to hold the police accountable.
The slow, grinding distrust of the leaders, officials and institutions that are supposed to protect us leaves hopelessness and division in its wake. And hopelessness fuels silence and often more violence.
And when that violence is made invisible; when those harms are silenced or erased or removed–like the way the city tore down the Algiers Motel in the 1970s–it does further damage to the community and to the victims and their descendants. Because erasure says “there is nothing to see here; nothing important happened here.” The empty lot that remained after the Algiers was demolished is just another kind of violent disappearance—a denial of the lives that were taken and forever changed here.
A historical marker cannot change the past. It cannot make the victims and their families whole again. It is no substitute for justice.
But it can help us remember. Remembrance restores presence where there is absence; it acknowledges instead of denies; and it promotes truth-telling over silence.
This marker—this memorial—is a bond between the living and the dead; between those who can tell the truth about the past and those who cannot. By remembering the lives of Auburey Pollard, Fred Temple and Carl Cooper and everyone who was harmed by the violence that occurred here, we combat the dangers of forgetting and work together to build a world where this kind of brutality and violence is not repeated.
Novelist Milan Kundera reminds us, “The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory over forgetting.”
That is what we hope to begin to do with this marker. 