On the night of May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a satchel bomb on the home of MOVE, a Black liberation group the department had been at odds with. Eleven people were killed, including five children and the founder of the organization. And not only was the MOVE home destroyed so were 61 other homes in the neighborhood, leaving more than 250 citizens were left homeless, according to Vox.
“MOVE is a Black liberation group founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by John Africa and Donald Glassey, a social worker from the University of Pennsylvania…The group lived in a communal setting in West Philadelphia, abiding by philosophies of anarcho-primitivism,” Wikepedia reported.
It was by all accounts, a horrific event. So why, asked NPR’s Gene Demby why has the MOVE bombing been all but forgotten? It’s not taught in school, it’s rarely mentioned in the media, and some people have never even heard about it.
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“I grew up in Philly during and after the bombing. My elementary school was the kind of place where we learned Afrocentric songs and teachers dressed in kente cloth, while my high school was overwhelmingly Black. We never discussed it in class, either,” Demby wrote.
It’s an event that, by all accounts, should be remembered. After all, American law enforcement actually bombed U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, resulting in death.
According to Robin Wagner-Pacifici, who teaches at the New School and has written books on MOVE and other fringe militant groups involved in deadly government standoffs, said there are a variety of reasons the MOVE bombing is fading in memory. The main reason is the group’s beliefs.
“She thinks the reason was ideological: MOVE’s quasi-Rastafarian, anti-technology, pro-animal-rights worldview doesn’t neatly fit on any part of the political spectrum, while other militant groups she has studied had some degree of overlap. And you can’t lump MOVE in with other Black power movements of the time, either; Black radical groups often bristled at their tactics,” Demby reported.
Also, MOVE’s final confrontation wasn’t with a big federal agency like the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms but with local Philly cops and some state police.
And, the event happened pre-social media age. The Ferguson protests went worldwide due to technology that was not available when MOVE happened in 1985.
“If MOVE happened today, it might be quickly folded into the classroom, as has happened with other recent incidents of police violence. Teachers have all the materials at their fingertips: clips from live streams, links to mainstream news articles and personal blogs, embeddable tweets, and so on. Back in the mid-80s, you’d have to wait around for the inevitable Frontline documentary or for an academic to publish a book. History gets commodified and redistributed much more quickly today,” Demby wrote.