More Than a Riot Going On: A ‘Detroit’-Inspired Reading List

Reactions to Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film Detroit have been polarized, and the considerable backlash may have caused its opening weekend box office to suffer. Bigelow’s films are known for their tightly-choreographed combat scenes and their fictionalization of brutal historical events. In Detroit, Bigelow takes on the story of the Algiers Motel incident, where three young black men—Carl Cooper, Fred Temple, and Aubrey Pollard—were tortured and killed by police officers in the motel’s annex. In the early morning hours of July 26, 1967, a few days into the unrest that would eventually become known as the Detroit rebellion, the three young men, along with many others, took refuge at the motel amid a city-wide curfew. Police forces received reports of sniper fire and raided the Algiers, finding a group of black men socializing with white women. There were interrogations, humiliations, assaults, and eventually murder. No gun was ever found on the grounds of the Algiers, and the police involved were found not guilty on all charges associated with the incident.

Conversation about the film has touched on questions about who has the authority to tell what stories. Bigelow is a white woman from the West Coast who said she knew herself not to be the “ideal person” to make the movie. But she and former journalist Mark Boal, the film’s screenwriter, worked with black academics, historians, and eyewitnesses to ensure a certain level of accuracy in the story. Jelani Cobb, a historian and staff writer at The New Yorker, Michael Eric Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., head of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard were among those reportedly consulted.

Still, many critics bristled about the lack of depth of Detroit’s portrayal of the human beings involved in the incident. There are no black women featured prominently in the film: Though not among the casualties of the Algiers incident, black women have been agitators and organizers in every movement of black resistance in the US, and were critical participants in the community response to what happened that night.

Another point of criticism is that the film doesn’t go far enough in acknowledging that there was, in fact, a community response to the murders. Understandably outraged at the unwarranted deaths of the three teenagers, the black community hosted a tribunal at the Shrine of Black Madonna church when the police officers were acquitted and eventually got a black mayor elected. The uprisings of the last half of the 20th century—Watts, Newark, Detroit, and others-—were community responses to unjust police treatment, economic injustice, a lack of full participation in civic life. There were years of intentional struggle in Detroit, and everywhere else there were uprisings, before, during, and after the summer of ’67.

Perhaps a black filmmaker would have tackled some of this. The recent film Whose Streets takes on the uprising in Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder, and the lives of the activists seem central to its story. But it is a documentary. Perhaps Bigelow’s style does not allow for the depth many would have liked to see. She spends a full 40 minutes on the torture scenes and relies on vérité-inspired methods. I believe that it’s a delicate task to depict a kind of pain that is unresolved, that still lives. Between leaving the wound alone or staring right at it from multiple angles, I do not yet know what is best.

I am not from Detroit. One of my aunts moved there shortly after World War II following her new husband who went to look for work. She left town when their marriage ended. There is a photo of her in a Detroit restaurant that I love. It’s black and white, and she’s wearing her hair in a pageboy and a dress with softly cascading ruffles. There are four other black men and women sitting with her at a table with opulent plates cocktail and wine glasses. In that moment, they are serious and regal and glamorous black people whose resistance is embedded in their elegance.