As a result, the first arrest didn't happen until 7 in the morning.īy mid-afternoon, a raging fire had broken out in a grocery store and the mob prevented firefighters from extinguishing it, causing it to spread uncontrollably. Since it was a Sunday, it took longer for Police Commissioner Ray Girardin to mobilize the Michigan National Guard, state police, and the Wayne County sheriffs. Initially, the police force was too small and did little but watch. ![]() It didn't take long for widespread looting to erupt throughout the neighborhood. ![]() When the police left the scene, the crowd (now a mob) began looting a clothing store next door. The riot is said to have started when Walter Scott III, the son of the unlicensed club's owner, threw a bottle at a police officer (at least that's what Scott later claimed in a memoir). While the police were inside waiting to haul off the revelers, a crowd began to form in the street outside. The Detroit police decided to arrest all those in attendance. Police expected only a few patrons inside but found 82 African-Americans celebrating the return of two local soldiers from Vietnam. The group's office was located on the upper floor of the empty Economy Printing building at 9125 12th Street. In the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, police raided an unlicensed after-hours drinking club in the office of the United Community League for Civic Action, a community civil rights group that backed local political candidates and helped to give the neighborhood a collective voice. As a screenwriter, I take the responsibility of being the creator of a tale, of transforming these raw materials into a drama." Boal commissioned a research team and scoured documents, police files, and historical record, including John Hersey's book The Algiers Motel Incident. "This script is built on a sturdy base of journalism and history, but it is not the same as journalism or history, nor does it aspire to be. "I employed poetic license, under a self-imposed rule to never stray from what I understood to be the underlying truth of a scene or an event," says Boal. Screenwriter Mark Boal admits that he took poetic license with a lot of what is unknown or disputed in the cases related to the Detroit riots and the Algiers Motel killings.
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