Philadelphia is holding an official day of remembrance on Tuesday marking the moment 40 years earlier when the city’s police department dropped a bomb on the headquarters of a Black liberation organisation, sparking an inferno that killed 11 people – including five children.
The police bombing of the home of the Move organization on 13 May 1985 was one of the worst atrocities carried out during the era of the 1970s and 1980s Black liberation struggle. It followed a prolonged siege in which the notoriously brutal Philadelphia police attempted to drive the group out of its premises at 6221 Osage Avenue.
Officers pummeled the house with more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition over a 90-minute period, even though children were known to be inside. When that failed to dislodge the Move activists, authorities ordered a police helicopter to drop an incendiary bomb made from C4 plastic explosives on to the roof of the house.
A fire was ignited and allowed to rage, killing all 11 people and turning to cinder 61 houses in the mainly Black neighborhood. About 250 people were left homeless.
Five children aged seven to 13 died in the inferno. They were named Tree, Netta, Deleisha, Little Phil and Tomasa.
Jamie Gauthier, a Philadelphia city council member who represents the area in which the bombing occurred, called the event “the darkest day in our city’s modern history”. Her motion calling for the 40th anniversary of the bombing to be marked with an official day of remembrance was adopted by the council last week.
“The story about the Move bombing is still being written, it is up to us to decide its ending,” Gauthier said. “If we take the easy way out and let this tragedy fade from memory, we doom ourselves to a future where those who come after us repeat the mistakes Philly’s leaders made 40 years ago.”
She added: “We must keep the infamy of the Move bombing alive and fight for reconciliation and justice so that none of our constituents hear the whistle of a bomb being dropped on their home ever again.”
Despite the devastation caused by the bombing, no Philadelphia official was ever criminally prosecuted for it. It took 35 years for the city to apologise for the violence it had inflicted on its own citizens.
On the 35th anniversary of the bombing, Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first Black mayor who approved the attack, expressed his desire for a formal apology in an article in the Guardian, saying: “Many in the city still feel the pain of that day – I know I will always feel the pain.”
Tuesday’s commemoration of the events that day is scheduled to be held at 6221 Osage Avenue – at 5.27pm, the precise moment the bomb was dropped. Mike Africa Jr, whose uncle and cousin both died in the bombing, has bought the now rebuilt house and plans to convert it into a memorial of the bombing.
He told the Guardian that the bombing, which occurred when he was six years old, was a “timestamp on our minds. It never goes away – you think of it every day. It’s haunting to know that your family was killed in such a brutal, senseless way.”
Africa Jr said that the bombing was a scar that would never heal. “The only thing we can do is keep moving forward and try to prevent this from happening again,” he said.
