Follow full coverage of MOVE Bombing’s 40th anniversary here.
At the intersection of Osage Avenue and the Cobbs Creek Parkway, in West Philadelphia, a historical marker stands. It’s blue with yellow letters, as is any other marker of this kind in the city. But this one is special.
First, because it commemorates a tragedy: the MOVE bombing, which killed six adults and five children and destroyed dozens of homes on May 13, 1985, when a State Police helicopter dropped a bomb on one of the block’s houses. It was one of the darkest days in Philadelphia’s history. This year marks its 40th anniversary.
Second, because the proposal for this marker was championed not by activists or historians, but by a group of passionate 13- and 14-year-old students from a local school.
The marker, unveiled in 2017, is more than just a sign; it is a testament to the power of young people determined to keep the past alive and a school that encourages them to do so.
A school that nurtures creativity
The school behind the historical marker is Jubilee School, a small, community-focused institution in West Philly, founded by history teacher Karen Falcon, 75.
Falcon started Jubilee out of a small room in the back of a thrift store on 42nd and Chestnut streets, soon after she moved to Philly in 1977. “I had started a reading program when I was in college and I realized how much children love to read and write in journals, so when I moved here, I started one in my neighborhood,” Falcon said on a sunny Wednesday afternoon.
She was only 27 and had no plans to start a school. “But I had so many children that wanted to come after school to read and write,” she recalled. “It was just such a joyous experience, and I thought, ‘Why are children failing in school if they start out loving to learn?’ ”
“I went to a progressive school in New York where I loved school, and I thought everybody should love school and you shouldn’t have to go to expensive private school [to do so]. So, between the inspiration from the students and the fact that I couldn’t find a [private] school that any of the students in my neighborhood could even afford to go to, I decided to open a preschool kindergarten.”
Jubilee School, the preschool kindergarten Falcon founded in West Philly, became an alternative option for children to continue learning through the arts and creativity.
In the first year, Jubilee had around 10 kindergarten students who came for half a day. By the second year, parents decided to send their children full-time. Nowadays, 48 years later, Jubilee has expanded through sixth grade.
“My mission really was to have students continue to love learning, and to build on their ideas, to respect their ideas, and have them know that their voices are powerful. And that the arts is where you can express yourself,” she said. “When they’re writing books, they’re learning history, they’re learning language arts, they’re learning how to write essays, they’re learning how to structure pieces, they’re illustrating, they’re writing poetry. It’s not taking away from learning. If anything, it’s making them more invested in it.”
According to Falcon, an important part of respecting her students’ ideas and encouraging them to use their voices is giving them full support when they have an idea. This culture of respect for creativity laid the foundation for the students’ determination to bring the MOVE bombing story to light.
The seeds of an idea
The inspiration for the historical marker began in 2015 with the response of Falcon’s fifth- and sixth-grade history class students to a series of instances of police brutality and gun violence, both nationally and locally.
“We had a discussion with older students about when Freddie Gray was killed. We started talking about police brutality and one of the students said, ‘You know, adults are doing all these protests and nothing’s changing. It keeps happening. Maybe they’ll listen to the children.’ The students liked the idea, but I said, ‘If you’re serious, you got to show me you’re serious.’ And they did,” Falcon said.
With the support of their teacher, the students wrote a petition and went to other schools to talk about gun violence. They planned the Children’s March Against Gun Violence and invited other schools to support it. They met with lawmakers and Pennsylvania’s governor and presented their petition to City Council.
“It was a powerful experience,” Falcon said. Some of the students graduated, but the ones who didn’t decided they wanted to continue learning this way. “They wanted to have a campaign. They wanted to make it bigger than just a march.”
The students came up with the name for the campaign, Songs of the Children. “Because they wanted to use poetry as their language of resistance, and I was just so inspired,” Falcon said. “And again, I had plans for teaching history that year, [but] I scrapped everything and said, ‘OK, we’re going to go with this.’ ”
The next task Falcon assigned them was to learn about youth-led movements around the world. They would also begin to learn more about social movements and police brutality in Philadelphia.
This is how the students learned about MOVE — a group that emerged in the 1970s as a back-to-nature movement, but transformed into a Black liberation group that later sparked controversy and tension with law enforcement — and the bombing.
The campaign
On May 13, 2016, just a few weeks before Falcon’s students graduated from sixth grade, the history class decided to visit the bombing site together. They would bring flowers and read poetry to pay tribute.
“We had made some poems about the MOVE bombing, so we went down there,” Ella Adams, a Jubilee sixth-grader, told WHYY’s Dave Davies at the time. “We decided to read them in honor of the people who died there, and we took a little walk around to see how it was.”
The students recounted the experience in an essay they wrote, which Falcon shared with Billy Penn:
“On May 13th, we decided to take a trip to Osage Avenue as a way to commemorate the MOVE bombing and see the damage done for ourselves. We had written a paper about MOVE because their story involved police brutality and we felt that the MOVE bombing was one of the worst cases of police brutality in America.
As we were visiting Osage Avenue, we saw how poorly rebuilt the houses were. They looked uninhabitable. We thought that there needed to be a historical marker, because we noticed that there wasn’t one, and the story of what the police did wasn’t being acknowledged. So we applied for a State historical marker.”
“We were there, and they were looking around and one of the students said, ‘There’s nothing here that says what happened,’ “ Falcon recalled. “They realized that the neighborhood was destroyed. It had been rebuilt by then in some ways, but it was not the same.”
It was mid-May, and school ended in early June, so some of the students most invested in applying for the historical marker graduated. Five of them were Nigel Carter, David Banister, Hanna Roemer-Block, Ella Adams and Ishtar El.
“Because they weren’t in the school anymore, we met after school. This was not a school project. It was after school. We would meet in the afternoon. A lot of times we met right here,” Falcon said while sitting at a coffee shop near Clark Park.
The students themselves wrote about their research process and application in an essay they produced after the project.
“We interviewed John Africa’s sister, Louise James; a reporter who was on site, Heshimu Jaramogi; and Ramona Africa, who was one of the two people who escaped from the MOVE bombing. We also interviewed Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell, because she saw the MOVE baby who was killed by the police; Walter D. Palmer, who was trying to protect MOVE by negotiating with the police; and Louis Massiah, who did a documentary of the MOVE bombing. We took that information and put it into the historical marker application.”
The application was due in December. “They were told by the Historical Society that it was unlikely they’d get it, because they only like to sort of do celebratory things, not tell the truth about awful things that happened,” Falcon said.
Instead of feeling discouraged, the students persisted.
“We sent in our application and waited three months to get a response that we were approved for the historical marker.”
They received a letter with the confirmation. “We were very excited,” Falcon remembered. “Our first feeling was ‘This is so powerful.’ And the second feeling, when we heard what they wanted to put on the marker, was, ‘Forget it. The whole point of this is to tell the truth. If you’re not going to tell the truth then don’t bother,’ you know.”
The students remembered this moment similarly.
“The first time we sent in wording for the marker, the historical commission said it was too long. So, we wrote another one that was shorter, and they changed the wording. We sent feedback saying that there wasn’t a ‘gun battle’ because there weren’t equal weapons on both sides. Eventually they changed the wording to what we wanted.”
“It made it sound like it was two-sided, when whether they shot guns at all or not, it wasn’t two-sided. It was absolutely not balanced. Ten thousand rounds and a bomb?” Falcon said. “I’m still not happy with it. It’s the best we could do.”
A day of remembrance
On June 24, 2017, the students led a ceremony to unveil the historical marker, which was still the subject of some tension around where it would reside permanently. It became a vibrant community event. “It was amazing. I got up once for about 3 minutes and just introduced the students and said all of them were under the age of 13 when they did this. And then, they basically ran the show,” Falcon said.
They shared the story, invited people to the stage, and included poetry and music, making it a celebratory and powerful occasion. Neighbors, students, families, and several MOVE children attended, with Ramona Africa speaking as well. The block captain and some MOVE children participated in unveiling the marker.
Falcon remembers the moment with pride and affection. “I remember that night because we went out for dinner with some friends, and I was sort of not even there. I was so proud of my students,” she said.
Falcon was proud of what her students had accomplished, but even more of their attitude in achieving it. Later, the students were invited to speak at the African American Museum and received a standing ovation.
“I remember one of them, his mother asked, ‘How did it go?’ and he said, ‘I was tired.’ He didn’t even bother to say they got a standing ovation!” Falcon said. “I love it that they think they can do something this big — and, of course, they can. That was their attitude. I think they felt, ‘We’re powerful’. It wasn’t a surprise to them that they could do something that powerful, and that made me really happy.”
What’s true of the students is true of the teacher. When asked how she feels about her decades of teaching, Falcon said, “I feel excited about each project, and sometimes I don’t focus on what we’ve done in the past as much as what we’re doing. Like today, my whole world is that my students wrote an amazing poem.”
A poem that she carried in her bag, mixed in with the documents she wanted to show Billy Penn about her students of a decade ago.
