The 20th Anniversary of MOVE

Friday, May 13th marked the 20th anniversary of the burning of the MOVE crisis. For those of you who are not from the Philadelphia area, this is liable to mean nothing at all. For those of you from Philadelphia, this is probably a half-remembered incident from your childhood. I grew up across the park from the West Philadelphia neighborhood where Osage Ave. stands, however, and so it remains one of the searing images of my past.

MOVE was a radical, African-American "back-to-nature" group whose members were known mostly for their long, matted dreadlocks and their insistence on eating all foods "raw," that is, without cooking.

If they'd just stuck to the wacky, granola-crunchy side of things, we might not ever have heard of them. Instead, they advocated violent revolution, and a society without technology, police or government. They also hoarded piles and piles of weapons and ammunition.

In the '70's, a confrontation with the original group, in a neighborhood called Powellton Village by the University of Pennsylvania, ended with a police officer shot and killed, but by 1985 the group had moved to the edge of West Philadelphia, to a block of working-class rowhomes.

The neighbors on the mixed-race block complained repeatedly about the MOVE compound -- the members built a bunker on the roof of their house to store weaponry; their house was filled with trash; their children ran wild; they screamed obscenities at their neighbors, often through bullhorns, night and day -- for over two years, but on May 13, then-mayor W. Wilson Goode ordered the city's police and fire commissioners to evict the group from their fortress-like home.
What happened next haunts the city to this day. The MOVE members refused to emerge from their boarded-up house. The police claimed to have heard gunshots. They opened fire on the house, and an hours-long gun battle erupted. The entire block was evacuated, and the mayor decided, as twilight descended, that the best way to end the confrontation was to drop a bomb on the bunker on top of house, which was filled with ammunition and explosives.

The resultant fire was allowed to burn for over an hour before the fire department was permitted to fight it, and the results were devastating. Eleven MOVE members were killed, including five children under the age of 13. Sixty-one homes were burned to the ground -- an entire city block leveled. And the recriminations started to fly.

In a city sharply divided by race and class, this was more than a tragedy, it was a fiasco. The black mayor of a majority-black city ordered a bomb dropped on a radical back group by the white police and fire commissioners. Fingers were pointed. The police and fire commissioners claimed they had been ordered not to fight the fire. The mayor claimed there was "snow" on his t.v. at City Hall, and he had mistaken that for water from firefighters' hoses. The one surviving adult MOVE member -- Ramona Africa --claimed that they had tried to evacuate the children out of the house by a back door, but were pinned in by police gunfire. And the city wept.

Fast-forward twenty years. In the ensuing free-for-all, the Mayor promised to rebuild the block of Osage Ave. And he did, using rigged bids and a corrupt contractor who built homes that were, in many cases, declared unfit for habitation only a year or two after they were completed. Again, allegations of bribery and corruption flew, and the race card was played again, as residents and politicians divided themselves along party and race lines and the city fell into notorious disrepair.

When Ed Rendell was elected Mayor, one of the many problems that he tackled as he revived the city was the aftermath of MOVE. He tried to fix or repair the shoddy houses, but his administration passed the buck into the lap of our current mayor, John Street.

The Street administration decided that the homes were too expensive to repair, and offered residents a one-time buyout of $150,000 per home. The majority of the Osage Ave. residents took the buyout and left, heartsick, the neighborhood where they had raised families and built a community.

At least twenty families, though -- the majority over sixty years of age and unwilling to leave their lifelong homes -- sued the city and won much-larger payouts. Which the city is now appealing, on the grounds that it shouldn't have to pay for the mistakes of past administrations. You know, like killing babies and destroying a neighborhood.

Here's what I remember about the MOVE confrontation: I remember that we were kept inside school for the day, as our teachers feared we would caught by a stray bullet, and we weren't allowed to leave until someone collected us in a car, so we wouldn't walk home in the midst of the confrontation. Our baseball and softball games were canceled for weeks, until the Athletic Association could sweep the fields for spent rounds and unspent ordinance. We sat on my front steps as the night fell, watching the rolling, black clouds of smoke punctuated by columns of flame from over the trees, hearing the distant sound of explosions. We thought someone was setting off firecrackers, and couldn't understand why my mother and our neighbors were all crying. We were hearing gunfire, and watching a neighborhood burn to the ground.

The sun never rose the next day, and we were ferried back to school in a dim, hazy, twilight, coughing and gasping at the smoky aftermath. We might as well have spent the day at home, however, as all we did that day was watch the unrelenting local tv coverage, and pray, over and over, for "the souls of the faithful departed."

Later, there were sick jokes and we learned the words to "The Roof is on Fire" as "The MOVE is on fire" ("We don't need no water let the M----F--- burn!"), but we continued to be oddly subdued about it. Or maybe not so odd. It's hard not to take it seriously when your classmates lost houses, or their grandparents did. When your best friend's father, a cop, gets spit on and called a "baby killer" at the mall. When your teachers, priests and nuns, spend a week explaining why limbo doesn't exist anymore, and why the "pagan babies" that were killed in the fire will still go to heaven.

Twenty years later, the city has still never dealt with, or answered for, its part in this larger tragedy. The 6100 block of Osage Ave. is an eyesore -- filled with boarded-up and decaying homes. The larger neighborhood has never fully recovered -- the commercial strip is filled with "out-of-business" signs, even as the rest of West Philadelphia revives, the Catholic Church and its school are closed, the Baptist church imports its members from the surrounding suburbs. The families of Osage Avenue are scattered, and in many cases have never bounced back, emotionally or financially, from the devastation of that day.

And the surviving members of MOVE? Using the settlement from their wrongful-death suits against the city in the deaths of the five children, MOVE purchased a beautiful Victorian home on the outskirts of the University of Pennsylvania, where they are said to be ideal neighbors.