Forty years after the city bombed the MOVE compound on Osage Avenue, killing five children and six adults, impassioned debates continue over what exactly happened that day and what broader social and political meanings should be drawn from the tragic event.
A symposium held on Tuesday, the 40th anniversary, brought together MOVE members, journalists who covered the 1985 siege, scholars, archivists and museum leaders who study and teach about the organization, and activists focused on the politics of telling Black community histories.
“I’m against subjugated storytelling. If we’re going to free ourselves, and we’re going to talk about liberation organizing, we got to free the stories, because memory is political,” said Eric Grimes, known as Brother Shomari, a WURD radio host and anti-racism activist. “So this conversation is political. It’s not academic. Memory is political. People will act on what the memory tells them they’re worthy of.”
The symposium at the Community College of Philadelphia was one of several recent commemorations of the anniversary. Others include an exhibit at the college’s library, a MOVE rally on Tuesday in Cobbs Creek, a City Council resolution, a podcast, and numerous articles about MOVE, the bombing, and how to remember it.
The day-long event at CCP was in part a space for recollection by people who were there and are still shaken by the mayhem and destruction of that day, and in part a chance to ruminate and argue over how the story of MOVE is shaped and used.
MOVE supporters also took the opportunity to argue that the group should be remembered for its role as a Black liberation organization that pushed back against racist government oppression, rather than primarily as a militant cult that mistreated its children, made life intolerable for its neighbors and fought with the police.
“People say, ‘Mike, you know, your people was crazy, man. They did some crazy things. You wouldn’t even want to live next to them,’” said Mike Africa Jr., a son of original MOVE members who has written a book about the group. “Yeah, that’s true. I really wouldn’t want to live next to the way things were, either. But I do understand why they were mad.”
“You just couldn’t believe it”
The retired journalists at the symposium recalled the chaos and violence of May 13, 1985, and described their work to keep the community informed while avoiding constant gunfire from MOVE and the police.
Pete Kane, a longtime photojournalist at NBC10, said he holed up in a home near the MOVE house and phoned in updates as bullets rained down and the police tried to figure out where he was.
“The bullets were whizzing by my head. I never thought I would get to go see my 3-week-old son again. But as a journalist, I decided to get into the business to tell the story. If I had lost my life that day, at least I was telling the story,” he said.
Barbara Grant, then the news director at WDAS, a radio station focused on the Black community, spent hours on the scene before returning to her office to file her stories and watch the siege play out on TV.
“I was sitting in the studio … and watched that bomb fall, and you really couldn’t believe it. You just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “You almost thought that somebody took a break and sent you to some, you know, some drama that was on the air. It just was incredible.”
Asked what part of the MOVE story people are still missing, she said it was essential to remember the events that led up to the bombing. They include a 1976 police confrontation that resulted in the death of a baby, Life Africa, and a 1978 standoff at the group’s previous home in Powelton Village, in which police officer James Ramp was shot and died.
“By 1978, the MOVE people were regularly rousted in the street, arrested, beaten up. They got so many beatings that they got tired of getting beaten up,” she said.
Grant and Larry Eichel, a former Inquirer reporter and editor, said a number of questions about the Osage Avenue siege remain unclear, such as whether police shot at MOVE members who were trying to leave the house through an alley. Eichel said it’s also been something of a mystery why the police pushed to end the standoff so quickly.
“I think there are a number of reasons, one of which was they’d evacuated all these people and told them they were only going for one night, and they weren’t sure what they were going to do with them,” Eichel said. “All this seems very petty, in retrospect, compared to what happened.” Another concern was that MOVE members might escape through suspected tunnels under the house, he said.
The angry version of MOVE
Mike Africa Jr. gave a keynote speech recounting MOVE’s history, from its founding by John Africa as an anti-technology, anti-government, pro-animal welfare, Black revolutionary group, through the police confrontations and the imprisonment of nine members in connection with Ramp’s death.
He described the siege and bombing, which happened when he was 6 years old, his gradually learning about the group’s history, the botched rebuilding of Osage Avenue, and his work to free his parents and the other surviving jailed members. He also noted the city’s $1.5 million settlement with a MOVE survivor and relatives, and the revelation that the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University both had kept bones of MOVE children killed on Osage Avenue.
Africa defended the group’s militant resistance to harsh police tactics under Mayor Frank Rizzo in the 1970s, and recalled what he described as his enjoyable early childhood with the group.
“A lot of people didn’t meet MOVE when MOVE was down at headquarters, washing cars and just paying their bills and playing chess and riding bikes in the neighborhood,” he said.
“They met an angry version of MOVE. They met the version that was so radical that they strapped a bullhorn to their house, built a bunker, and said, ‘We are willing to die because you’re killing us anyway. They’re killing the babies, they’re killing the men and the women, and then pretending that it didn’t happen,’” he said.
Africa also defended MOVE’s core anti-government, pro-self-reliance, quasi-environmentalist message.
“We’ve given our allegiance to a system that doesn’t care anything about us. We’re breathing in air that is polluted. We’re drinking water out of bottles, because you can’t out of the tap,” he said. “This system don’t care about us. They never have and they never will. When people say, we got to fix the system, they’re confused, because they think the system is broken. It’s created to do this to you.”
Africa has purchased the Osage Avenue home built on the site of the former MOVE house and is raising money to pay off the mortgage and make it into a memorial site. Earnings from sales of his book, “On a Move,” go toward that project.
Working to disrupt racist traditions
Other symposium panels focused on archiving and storytelling about MOVE and Black communities, and on “memory-making” by museums and schools.
Josué Hurtado, a coordinator at Temple University’s Special Collections Research Center, described the school’s work to preserve and expand public access to materials from the MOVE Commission, which did an exhaustive investigation of the 1985 bombing.
Jason Osder, a George Washington University professor who directed the 2013 documentary “Let the Fire Burn” about the bombing, discussed the essential role of the Temple archive in making his project possible. He also noted the importance of thinking deeply about the complex origins of the practice of collecting historical and social artifacts about Black communities.
“It’s not just archiving that should be thought about that way, but image-making itself, that photography and documentary and all these things have deep roots in a colonial project,” he said. “Any of us who do that work need to try to be aware, and what are we doing to disrupt or deconstruct traditions, whole traditions that are deeply embedded in a colonial or racist project?”
Dr. Krystal Strong, a Rutgers assistant professor who is archive director at The MOVE Activist Archive, described a government or institutional archive as a “a form of state violence” and a “gatekeeper” that in some cases steals a community’s artifacts, and controls access to and interpretation of those materials.
She cited the Penn Museum’s holding of the MOVE children’s remains as an example, and noted that Temple is a state-sponsored university.
“The archive of MOVE is one that was created by the state, quite literally. How do we tell an authentic story, one that honors the people who were murdered by the state, one that provides an authentic accounting of how we get to a moment where a bomb is dropped onto a house?” she asked.
By contrast, activist archives admit a wider range of materials valued by community members, help them tell their stories, and facilitate ongoing political protests or “disruptions” of official institutions and narratives, Strong said.
“It’s grandma, it’s the uncle, it’s the community members I’ve met who kept newspapers over 30 years because they couldn’t believe that this happened, right? Or the person who kept the bulletins and the flyers from the action,” she said, referring to the bombing.
“They have a story to tell as well, and most especially, we have to tell the story of the folks who were the drivers, who were directly impacted, who suffered the most,” she said. “And if we’re not doing that, what are we doing?”
