The MOVE Bombing: Osage Avenue, May 13, 1985

The date was May thirteenth, nineteen eighty-five. The city of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on itself.

At approximately five thirty in the afternoon, a Philadelphia Police Department helicopter flew over a row house at sixty-two twenty-one Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia and dropped an explosive device onto the roof. The device, described in the nineteen eighty-six Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission report as a combination of military-grade material, detonated and ignited a fire. Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor and Managing Director Leo Brooks observed from a command post. Mayor Wilson Goode, who had authorized the operation, monitored it from a different location.

The fire burned for more than an hour before firefighters were ordered to suppress it. By then it had spread to the entire block. Sixty-one row houses were destroyed. Two hundred fifty residents, none of them affiliated with MOVE, were left homeless overnight.

Eleven people inside sixty-two twenty-one Osage Avenue died. Five of them were children. One survivor, Ramona Africa, was injured and later imprisoned. The children's names were Tomasa, Delicia, Netta, Tree, and Phil. They were between seven and thirteen years old.

MOVE was a Black liberationist collective founded in Philadelphia in the early nineteen seventies by John Africa, born Vincent Leaphart. The organization opposed technology, industrial society, and mainstream American institutions. They had been in prolonged conflict with the city since at least nineteen seventy-eight, when a confrontation at their Powelton Village house resulted in the shooting death of a police officer and prison sentences for nine MOVE members.

The nineteen eighty-five operation targeted the Osage Avenue house over complaints about noise, trash, and an armed rooftop bunker. City officials had spent months planning the confrontation. Warrants had been obtained. The decision to use an explosive device, and then to allow the resulting fire to burn, was made that afternoon by the chain of command.

The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, convened after the bombing, concluded that the city's actions were grossly negligent. The commission found no justification for the use of the explosive or for allowing the fire to burn unchecked.

No police officer was criminally charged. No city official was criminally charged. Wilson Goode was reelected mayor in November of nineteen eighty-five. The city paid civil settlements to survivors. The rebuilt homes on Osage Avenue were constructed with such severe deficiencies that residents filed suit again a decade later.

It is, by most accounts, the only time a government of the United States deliberately bombed a neighborhood it governed and allowed the resulting fire to destroy an entire city block.