Last Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. I had promised myself long before last Friday that I would write about it, that I would find a way to revisit that horror, to find flowers in those ashes.

If you are not from Philadelphia, or if you were not old enough to watch the news in 1985, you may not know what happened on Osage Avenue that Mother’s Day. If do know, you may understand why I missed my self-imposed deadline.

What happened in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985 made no sense. Then, the only response I could muster was tears. To speak now is an act of excavation.

The gist, for those who were not privy to this folie à famille, was this:

MOVE, a “radical back to nature” group, as the newspapers called them, had been clashing with the City of Philadelphia, the police and often their own neighbors since the early 1970s. There had been demos and blockades and routine police harassment of anyone in dreadlocks and routine MOVE hectoring of anyone whose politics was deemed unfit and in 1978, after a police siege and blockade that lasted for weeks, there was a gun battle at a house in West Philadelphia that left a police officer dead and then the police in a rage cornered a man named Delbert in the basement of the house and they kicked and stomped him in their rage and then Delbert had to be hospitalized and he and the eight other people in the house were imprisoned for the murder of the officer, James Ramp.

The MOVE members denied that they had fired on the police and there was little forensic evidence available at trial because the city had the house destroyed right after the gunfight — notwithstanding that it was a crime scene that would normally have been secured. And anyway MOVE said, did you see what they did to brother Delbert? Do you see how they treat us? 

And yes we all saw and many of us cared, but among journalists the one person who got entrée inside the world of MOVE was brother Mumia and he got in deep, so deep that he grew out his hair and got even more heavily into reporting on police brutality until he was convinced that the police were trying to finish him off in a way that they had not been able to do when he had been a Black Panther. He got so heavily into presenting MOVE’s point of view that his employers said he had lost his objectivity and they fired him, which is why he was out driving a cab on the night of Dec. 9, 1981 when he saw his brother Billy in a fight with a police officer and before it was over, the officer was shot dead, Mumia was bleeding half to death from his own belly wound and a chain of events had been set in motion that would land him on death row, where he sits to this day.

That is what happened, anyway, before 1985. What you should understand from it was that the city was really angry at MOVE and the police were really angry — so much so that to even have dreadlocks in Philadelphia between 1978 and 1985 was to invite police scrutiny and an occasional beatdown.

(This last is not hyperbole, even though a fact checker would be hard pressed to corroborate it. Here is a tip: See whether you can find news archives for WRTI-FM from late summer or fall, 1979 — there is an eyewitness account by a reporter named Nancy Lewis of a police attack on an unarmed dreadlocked man on Philadelphia subway train that escalated when riders on the train protested and a freelance newspaper photographer started taking pictures. According to Lewis’ report, the police officers took the man’s camera, exposed the film and beat him as well.) And yes, I believe the report. I know Nancy Lewis and the photographer, Jorge Shell. I will never forget that incident, even though it got scant attention in the newspaper, because I was listening to RTI’s jazz programming that night and I was shocked when Nancy’s voice broke into the music. But I digress.)

What happened on Osage Avenue in 1985 was that the neighbors were upset about the folks from MOVE who had moved in on their block. The MOVE folk were living a kind of farm life in the city and the neighbors on Osage weren’t having it. They had animals that they let roam free. It was said that they ate their meat raw and didn’t dispose of it properly. Some folk felt that their children were ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and unschooled. They were building something on top of the house — was it a bunker? — without the necessary permits.

And then there was the yelling from bullhorns. MOVE thought it was an effective way to spread their ideology, to challenge the status quo. The neighbors thought it was just foolishness and noise, and they wanted it to stop.

And truthfully, if you have ever been at an event that MOVE decided to disrupt, you might have understood why the neighbors were mad. MOVE yelled. MOVE cussed. MOVE would call you names and call you out for being a counterrevolutionary hypocrite without you having a clue what they were talking about. I had seen it for myself and I had heard it from others. They busted up Rev. Melvin Floyd’s anti-gangs rallies back in ’73, and I saw them picketing Julian Bond in 1975. 

We shook our heads and wondered why. We knew these were not stupid people. They were dreamers, and they were convinced of the rightness of her cause. Ramona Afrika was known to many of us from her days at Girls High. In quiet moments, it was sometimes possible to have a conversation, to find out why they thought it had to be this way, why they thought their beloved John Africa had the answers we had all been seeking, what with Malcolm and Martin dead, the Panthers destroyed, the Nation of Islam in turmoil and all the black united fronts in disarray.

On May 13, 1985, the city blocked off the street and evacuated neighboring homes on order of the Mayor — the city’s first black mayor, W.Wilson Goode. Then the shooting began. 

The police commissioner and the fire commissioner decided that they needed to drop a small bomb on the roof of the MOVE house. Their goal was to knock the bunker off the roof, they later said. The Mayor approved it and the deed was done. Before long, the neighborhood was in flames. Even so, the Mayor and the police and fire commissioner waited before turning on a hose or spraying some foam. The fire would kill 11 people — six of them children — and destroy 61 homes. 

And when the fires finally cooled, the structures that remained were razed and the block was quickly cleared. Once again, any forensic evidence from the scene was lost.

Only Ramona Afrika, 29, and Michael “Birdie” Africa, 13, survived. 
A blue chip Commission deliberated and found the City mostly at fault. 

Ramona was treated and sent to prison, where she filed suit against the city and its officials and won a token settlement. She continues to speak out on behalf of the group’s remaining imprisoned members.

Birdie Africa went to live with his father, who won a $1.5 million settlement on his behalf and used it to change his name and help him start a new life. Birdie, it was said, was malnourished, below grade level in school, and understandably traumatized. Ten years later, Birdie, now Michael Ward, would tell interviewers that he and the other members of MOVE lived in terror of John Afrika and his deputy Frank, that the children were poorly cared for, and that his mother, Rhonda, wanted to leave, but never found a way out. His mother died in the flames that Mother’s Day. However, other young people raised by MOVE say they were never endangered by the adults in their lives.

I stood in my New Jersey living room that night, staring at my television with tears streaming down my face. I talked to my Philadelphia relatives, to my old friends. We cried together for what was disintegrating in front of us, and what was disintegrating inside of us. At work that Monday, friends confronted me. I had raised money for Wilson Goode’s election two years before, and they wanted to know what was wrong with my boy. How could he have allowed this? And I had no answer. Still, today, I have no answer.

I meant to write MOVE about last week. One is supposed to write about such things in a timely manner. Twenty years later, there is supposed to be some lesson in the ashes, in the still-boarded homes on Osage Avenue, the flimsy prefabs that were supposed to have replace the sturdy Victorian rowhomes that lined the streets of a once-proud neighborhood, mostly black.

Twenty years later, what happened on Osage, makes no sense. The remaining members of MOVE are still angry as are the neighbors. Twenty years later, MOVE members remained convinced of their cause. Some of their former neighbors are still fighting the city to get their homes restored. Their current neighbors say that everybody gets along much better now. The police force gets marks for improvement, too. But it’s said that the police officers who brought Ramona and Birdie out of the inferno still walk with ghosts, their lives forever changed.

Wilson Goode is in the ministry now, working with childrem. We have lost our innocence about the difference a black mayor can make. Goode had won his mayoralty because he seemed able to bring people together, but in the end, be became the instrument of an unspeakable cruelty. 

To those of us in or trying to be middle-class, the members of MOVE were like that one crazy cousin Cholly or Leroy that everybody has — the one that showed so much promise in childhood and then something happened that made him go bat fool and still nobody can figure it out, but you knew that when he showed out in front of the white folks, it was goin’ to be bad for everybody. And so it has been.

Twenty years later, I don’t know how I can write about this. The pain is duller now; layered below the many, many instances of senselessness that have happened from that day to this. There is no analysis that will bring order to this memory of madness. There is only the reminder that life is a choice, and love, an act of will in the face of absurdity. It may not seem like much to go on, but in the final analysis, it is all we have. Posted 16th May 2005 by Professor Kim

Postscript: This was originally published on my old blog, Professor Kim’s News Notes. (You can see the comments on the original post here.) I’m reposting here because it continues to feel relevant, and because the Blogger interface makes it difficult to edit typos I occasionally come across. Apart from those corrections, this is as I published it in 2005. It is also worth noting that in May, 2020, former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode apologized for his part in the 1985 MOVE bombing and called upon current and former city officials to do the same.

I meant to write about this by Kim Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.