“Eyewitness to horrific night depicted in ‘Detroit’ movie shares story”, Detroit Free Press
Julie Hinds, Aug. 4, 2017
It has been 50 years since Julie Delaney survived the terrifying events portrayed in “Detroit,” the new movie about the 1967 Algiers Motel killings.
Few people besides her family and high school friends know that she was there on that night. When she came back to Detroit in 2010 as part of the crew of ABC’s “Detroit 1-8-7,” she didn’t tell her coworkers.
“I almost told one actor,” says Delaney, who was head of the hair department for the one-season TV series. “The ironic thing of it was, one of our episodes was about the (Detroit) riot. … James McDaniel, who I became (friends) with, I almost told him. And then I thought, ‘No, keep your mouth shut,’ and just did the episode.”
Sitting in the elegant second-floor lobby of the Westin Book Cadillac hotel in Detroit, Delaney projects a certain resilience and a sense that, once she decides to open up about something, she’ll tell it to you straight.
More: ‘Detroit’ the movie: Everything you need to know about Bigelow’s new film
Her story is one of many woven into the painful fabric of “Detroit,” which is now in wide release across the country.
Starring an ensemble cast that includes John Boyega, Anthony Mackie, Jason Mitchell, Will Poulter and Algee Smith, the film from Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow focuses on the brutal raid and interrogation that left three unarmed African-American teens dead and more than a half-dozen black men and two white women physically beaten and psychologically tortured.
The complex legal aftermath resulted in acquittals for the three Detroit cops implicated in the events that unfolded during the early hours of July 26, 1967, when the city was in the midst of civil unrest.
Delaney, 68, appeared last week at a panel discussion on the movie at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. She also walked the red carpet at the Fox Theatre world premiere.
Riley: ‘Detroit’ film leaves a disturbing feeling of grief, nothing to celebrate
During the 2016 filming of “Detroit” in Massachusetts and Michigan, she served as one of the accuracy barometers for the drama. The mother of four and grandmother of five spent more than two months on the set at the invitation of Bigelow.
“Kathryn said, ‘I want you there. You tell me if I’m doing it right or wrong.’ I’m telling you that she listened,” she explains. “She’d do something and she’d go, ‘How was it?’ And if I saw something that wasn’t right, I’d tap her on the shoulder and go, ‘It’s not right.’ “
Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of “The Hurt Locker,” and her frequent collaborator, Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal, were able to get firsthand recollections of what happened inside the Algiers Motel annex from Delaney, Melvin Dismukes (the private security guard played by Boyega) and Larry Reed (the co-founder of the Dramatics portrayed by Smith).
“The eyewitness accounts were extremely vital to the writer, myself, but as well (as) to the cast,” Bigelow told the Free Press. “They were kind of the cornerstone of understanding this event.”
Delaney (who’s identified in the movie as Julie Hysell, her maiden name) was 18 when she traveled from her home in Ohio to Detroit “to follow a band, basically, an R&B group we had met in Columbus.”
She recalls that she and the friend who accompanied her, Karen Malloy, had about $12 for the trip, but “$2 worth of gas would take you 500 miles back then,” says Delaney. They were staying at the Algiers Motel because it didn’t cost much. With a curfew in place, they couldn’t go out in the evening.
“The house where the murders took place had kitchens, you know, like an extended-stay (motel), so to speak,” she says, describing the annex where the tragedy unfolded. “We went back … to the pool, and some of the guys were there. They said, ‘Well, Carl’s got food. We’ll go up there.’ “
Reports of sniper fire prompted members of the Detroit Police Department, the State Police, the National Guard and a private security guard to raid the motel annex. By the time the confrontation was over, Carl Cooper, 17; Aubrey Pollard, 19, and Fred Temple, 18, had been shot at close range and killed.
The other men, Delaney and Malloy made it out alive, but not before being forced to line up against a hallway wall by the police and hit and terrorized with slurs and threats.The film unblinkingly dramatizes the extent of the cruelty, including an interrogation tactic that involved taking the men, one at a time, inside a room and firing a weapon near them in order to pretend they had been shot and killed for refusing to talk.
As Delaney told the Los Angeles Times in one of several interviews she has done with the media, “People were begging for their lives. I just kept thinking, ‘They killed three people, and there’s one person they haven’t taken, then I’m next.’ I remember the voices of the cops yelling, again and again and again.”
The emotional toll of that night is something she still ponders. “I’ve thought about that a lot and talked to a lot of people, because I probably was suffering from PTSD. But I don’t know that I ever really dealt with it. It was always in the back of my head, but I just kind of plugged along and forged along with my life, basically.”
Delaney found a career niche working as a hairstylist for films like 2005’s acclaimed indie “Junebug” and multiple TV shows, from the CW’s “One Tree Hill” to CBS’s “Under the Dome.” She says she was on a path toward finally telling her Algiers Motel story before the Bigelow project. A few years ago, she talked to her son, a writer and producer in Los Angeles, about the possibility of doing a project, maybe a movie of the week, timed for the Detroit riot’s 50th anniversary in 2017.
“I felt it was (a) really important story to tell, more, I think, for the families of the boys that died,” she says.
Then, in April 2015, a high school classmate contacted her. “She said, ‘There’s a reporter looking for you, and it’s about Detroit.’ ” It was David Zeman, senior editor for Bridge magazine and a former Free Press reporter and editor, who was doing research for Boal’s production company.
Recalls Delaney, “I sat on it for six weeks, called my son, we discussed it. ” After her son talked to Zeman, she spoke to Boal and continued to talk to him regularly for his research.
In spring 2016, Delaney, who lives in the South, came to Detroit to meet with Bigelow for several days. During the filming in Massachusetts (and, briefly, in Michigan), she was a fixture on the set.
Bigelow encouraged her to interact with the young cast, including Hannah Murray of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” who plays her in the movie.
“A lot of directors don’t want you to talk to the talent. But right from the get-go, (Bigelow) said, ‘Nope, you get in there. These kids have questions.’ They picked my brain.”
At the world premiere of “Detroit,” Murray praised Delaney for her help. “She was on set with us every day. She was incredibly generous and available with her time. For me, I just wanted to spend as much time with her as I could and feel as connected to her as I could. … She’s an amazing human being, and it was just an honor to get to know her.”
Delaney says the memories flooded back as she observed the filming. “Right back. Right back,” she admits. “(Production designer) Jeremy (Hindle) did such a great job with the sets. The sets were so accurate, it was frightening.”
She was able to keep her emotions in check most of the time. What really affected her was the courtroom scene, a condensation of various real-life trials. Seeing the scene that reveals there would be no convictions for the deaths of the three innocent young men was the toughest part for Delaney.
“The thing that hit me was when they read the not-guilty verdict,” she says. “I lost it. I had to leave the courthouse. I had a producer coming out (asking) ‘Are you alright?’ That was the really difficult one.”
While Delaney is speaking publicly about “Detroit,” she also is trying to maintain some privacy for her four children and five grandchildren. She proudly calls her family “a study in cultural diversity.” Several of her grandkids are either biracial or have a blended ethnicity.
When she hears about contemporary cases of African-American men being mistreated or killed by the police, she understands how their families feel. She says she worries about her 21-year-old grandson, a biracial former all-American football player, being pulled over by a bad cop.
“I cringe when he goes out,” says Delaney. “I am scared to death that he’ll get stopped.”
Becoming involved in the making of “Detroit” hasn’t been an ending chapter to Delaney’s story as an Algiers Motel survivor. Rather, it has opened possibilities of what she can do to promote less hatred in the world.
“It’s given me more to think about, maybe, to see where I can, in my golden years, lend a hand to try to make things better or change things.”
And, says Delaney, much work remains to address racial injustice. “It’s amazingly sad that things haven’t changed. I thought things would change in 50 years. I really did. I guess that’s my looking through rose-colored glasses.”