Never
could one imagine the police doing this in a
white neighborhood.
On
May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia police engaged
in a race riot when they dropped a bomb on the
roof of a row house in a Black section of West
Philadelphia. It was Mother’s Day, and
Black mothers and children were killed that
day, intentionally burned and shot to death by
police. Eleven people, including five
children ages 7 to 13—all members of the
radical Black liberation group MOVE—died.
In
the end, 61 homes in this Black residential
neighborhood were burned to the ground.
Most of all, all of it was done on
purpose, because the officials in charge said
their intent was to let the fire burn.
It
had all the makings of a race riot, a
lynching. Claiming the MOVE members were
a terrorist threat to the community, with
automatic weapons and shotguns that did not
exist, police with warrant in hand attempted
to arrest the MOVE members. Residents of
the entire block had been evacuated and told
not to return in 24 hours. The water and
gas lines were shut off. SWAT teams came
rolling in with massive fire power.
After
firing a barrage of teargas and water cannons
at the MOVE house, police, claiming they had
been fired upon by automatic weapons, unloaded
10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house.
Finally, police used a state police
helicopter to drop four pounds of
military-grade C-4 explosive on the roof of
the house.
The
MOVE Commission, established to investigate
the bombing, called the conduct of city
officials and the police that day “criminal
evil,” and reported that the entire incident
would not have occurred “had the MOVE house and its occupants been
situated in a comparable white neighborhood.”
Further, as attorney Michael Coard wrote
in Philadelphia
Magazine, although the FBI had stopped
sending C-4 to local police departments in
1979, documented records showed that 30 blocks
of C-4 was delivered to Philadelphia by an FBI
agent in connection with “an anticipated
confrontation with MOVE.”
Moreover, the report from the city
medical examiner provided proof that six of
the eleven people died as a result of gunfire
outside the house rather than from the fire
inside. There
were two survivors, an adult, Ramona Africa,
and a child named Birdie Africa, who received
a $1.5 million judgment from a federal court.
No officials were prosecuted for their
misdeeds that day.
As
journalist Linn Washington reported, a number
of MOVE members tried to escape, and were met
with gunfire. “And
it was later determined that the police fired
on the escaping MOVE members,
driving some of them back into the house,”
Washington told Democracy
Now! Washington
echoes the finding of the commission that
police gunfire in the rear alley prevented
some occupants of the MOVE house from
escaping. “But in the convoluted logic
that many of us have seen over the last year
from grand juries in St. Louis County and in
New York and in southern Ohio, where the guy
was shot in a Wal-Mart, the grand jury, under
the control of Philadelphia prosecutors,
determined that MOVE members
ran back into the house not because police
were firing at them, but because they
mistakenly believed that police were firing at
them and/or they ran back to intentionally
commit suicide,” Washington added.
The bombing of the 6200 block on Osage
Avenue in West Philly was the culmination of
years of police brutality and corruption in
the so-called City of Brotherly Love and
Sisterly Affection, which has shown little of
either to Black people over the years.
Communities of color, and groups such as
the Black Panther Party, had endured years of
harassment, monitoring and over-policing from
law enforcement. As for MOVE, the group
had faced a police barricade in 1978, which
resulted in the death of a police
officer—reportedly by police gunfire—and
murder and conspiracy convictions for nine
MOVE members. They received sentences
ranging between 30 and 100 years, and remain
in prison to this day. Some police
officers involved in the 1978 incident,
including the beating of a MOVE member,
purportedly participated in the 1985 operation
as an act of revenge.
In this twenty-first century reality of
police violence emanating from Ferguson,
Baltimore, North Charleston and everywhere
else, the 1985 police burning of West Philly
demands our attention, and reminds us of the
intractability of the problems the Black
community faces.
And yet, we know this was not the first
time a Black community was destroyed by an
aerial bombing.
In
1921, amid rumors that a Black elevator
attacked a white woman, a white lynch mob led
by the Klan descended upon the
African-American community of Tulsa,
Oklahoma-- known as Greenwood, or Black
Wall Street—and destroyed
everything.
World War I airplanes dropped bombs on
the prosperous Black community.
Hundreds, perhaps more, were killed,
while 10,000 were left homeless, and 35 square
blocks and 600 businesses were destroyed. The
Oklahoma National Guard was called in, and
Black people were placed in detention camps.
This was the heyday of race riots and
lynchings, when whites were resentful of Black
progress, and responded with ethnic cleansing.
So,
when we look at the MOVE bombing and ask how
this happened, how the murder of innocent
women, children and men was allowed to occur
without punishment, we must understand that
the nation has had a great deal of practice
with these things.
As Martin Luther King reminds us even in
death, America is plagued by the evil triplets
of racism, militarism and economic
exploitation. Further, as we bear
witness to the protest and unrest which unfold
with each subsequent act of police violence,
detractors will focus on rioters and looters
rather than the systemic conditions which led
to the unrest. We can look back to a day
40 years ago, when police waged a race riot
against a Black neighborhood and burned it
down.
