“The Blood of Innocent Children”: Race, Respectability, and “True” Victimhood in the 1985 MOVE Police Bombing

Abstract

In 1985, Philadelphia police responded to a stand-off with Afrocentric environmental group MOVE* by dropping a firebomb on their home, killing eleven MOVE members, five of them children. Highly critical of the bombing, the media and the Investigative Commission grieved for the “true victims,” the children who perished alongside adults whose radicalism seemingly made them unworthy of grief. Yet the focus on the children functioned to deflect larger ethical questions—chiefly, if there were no children present, should the state be permitted to bomb its own citizens? Such questions about race, policing, racialized understandings of innocence, and the meaning of childhood, continue to resonate today.

Keywords:

• #M4BL
• African American history
• children
• memory
• militarization
• Philadelphia
• police brutality
• policing
• race
• urban

Notes

1 Kate Sheehy, “George Floyd Had ‘Violent Criminal History’: Minneapolis Police Union Chief,” The New York Post, June 2, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/06/02/george-floyd-had-violent-criminal-history-minneapolis-union-chief/

2 There is a vast and ever-expanding literature on police abolition. A small sample of notable examples include Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds. Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (New York: Verso, 2016); Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform,” https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/ (accessed August 1, 2020); and Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (New York: Verso, 2018).

3 See in particular Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond (New York: Atria, 2016) and Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

4 The following MOVE members perished on May 13^th: Raymond Foster Africa, Conrad Hampton Africa, Frank James Africa, Rhonda Harris Ward Africa, Theresa Brooks Africa, and founder John Africa (adults), as well as Tree Africa, Netta Africa, Phil Africa, Delisha Africa, and Tomaso Africa (children).

5 On the militarization of the police, see for example Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014). On the rates of incidents police brutality more recently, as well as public perceptions of law enforcement, see Cassandra Chaney and Ray V. Robertson, “Racism and Police Brutality in America,” Journal of African American Studies 17, no. 4 (December 2013): 480–505. On police brutality in historical context, see for example Jill Nelson, ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2000); Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2019); and Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).

6 Erica R. Meiners, For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 3.

7 See for example, Barbara Hoberock, “Senate Passes Bill Requiring Teaching of Tulsa Race Riot History,” Tulsa World, March 16, 2012. https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/senate-passes-bill-requiring-teaching-of-tulsa-race-riot-history/article_a50233b4-64b8-5520-ab81-6472c493a2c1.html, and A.G. Sulzberger, “As Survivors Dwindle, Tulsa Confronts Past,” New York Times, June 20, 2011, A16. The Tulsa massacre also serves as the backdrop for the recent HBO mini-series The Watchmen (2019), bringing this history to an even broader audience. On the history of the Tulsa race riots, see Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002); and Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

8 Meanwhile, the relative lacunae around MOVE has extended to the academy as well; up until recently, there has been little scholarship about such a noteworthy act of racial violence. Four books on the MOVE disaster were published in the years immediately following the bombing and were primarily descriptive and journalistic in style (three by professional journalists and one, Let the Bunker Burn, by an attorney who served on the MOVE special investigation commission): Margot Harry, 'Attention, Move! This Is America' (Chicago: Banner Press, 1987); Michael Boyette and Randi Boyette, Let It Burn: MOVE, the Philadelphia Police Department, and the Confrontation that Changed a City (San Diego, CA: Quadrant Books/Endpapers Press, 1989); Charles Bowser, Let the Bunker Burn: The Final Battle With MOVE (Philadelphia: Camino Books Inc, 1989), and John Anderson and Hilary Hevenor, Burning Down the House: MOVE and the Tragedy of Philadelphia (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987). And the MOVE bombing served as the backdrop for John Edgar Wideman’s award-winning novel, Philadelphia Fire published in 1990. Two more scholarly books followed shortly after: Hizkias Assefa and Paul Wahrhaftig, The MOVE Crisis in Philadelphia: Extremist Groups and Conflict Resolution (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1990) and Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia Versus MOVE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), which primarily examines the ways in which competing narratives about what MOVE was as an organization and its aims, and the breakdown in communication between MOVE and the city, led to the disaster in 1985. It is worth noting that Wagner-Pacifici in particular takes note of the centrality of discussions of children, family, and domesticity in accounts of MOVE before and after the bombing, as I do here, but reads these themes through the lens of sentimentality and melodrama. Published in 1994, as intersectionality was just beginning its scholarly ascent following black feminist theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s coining of the word in 1989, Wagner-Pacifici draws on theorists such as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault in her discussion of domesticity and family and reads these themes in primarily race-neutral terms. In contrast, building on the work of intersectional scholars such as Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, I analyze childhood, innocence, family, and domesticity as profoundly racialized concepts that bolster anti-blackness in the United States. The relative dearth in scholarly analysis of MOVE in the interim has begun to change, particularly following the release of the documentary, Let the Fire Burn (Zeitgeist Films; directed by Jason Osder) in 2013 and media coverage around the 30^th anniversary of the bombing in 2015. See for example, Karen Beckman, “Black Media Matters: Remembering The Bombing of Osage Avenue,” Film Quarterly 68, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 8–23; Kimberly Sanders and Judson L. Jeffries, “Framing MOVE: A Press' Complicity in the Murder of Women and Children in the City of (Un) Brotherly Love,” Journal of African American Studies 17, no. 4 (December 2013): 566–86; and most recently, Richard Kent Evans, MOVE: An American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines the MOVE organization and philosophy through a religious studies framework.

9 Boyette and Boyette, Let It Burn, 111–50. Although the surviving members of MOVE continuously advocated for their release, the MOVE 9 remained imprisoned for decades. Two died in prison, Merle Africa and Phil Africa, in 1998 and 2015 respectively. Starting in 2018, the remaining seven (Debbie, Michael, Janine, Janet, Eddie, Delbert, and Chuck Africa) were gradually released. Notably, Delbert Africa–whose televised beating in 1978 itself sparked debates about police brutality–was released in January 2020, and died of cancer five months later.

10 Anti-black policing and violence in Philadelphia in this period is the subject of copious amounts of scholarship and investigative journalism. A small sample includes Timothy Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Frank Donner, “Rizzo’s Philadelphia: Police City,” in Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Nicole Maurantonio, “‘That Photo’: Journalism and Bearing Witness to History,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 4 (2014): 500–21; Joseph Daughen and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977); and Eric Schneider, Christopher Agee, and Themis Chronopoulos, “Dirty Work: Police and Community Relations and the Limits of Liberalism in Postwar Philadelphia,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 5 (2020):961–79. Two journalists even won a Pulitzer Prize for a four-part expose about police brutality and coercion, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer. See William K. Marimow and Jonathan Neuman, “The Homicide Files,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24–27, 1977. It is worth noting, however, that while there was ample coverage critiquing racist policing in Philadelphia’s mainstream media in the 1970s and 80s, that did not equate to journalistic sympathy toward MOVE during the same period; MOVE received as much, if not more, negative press prior to the bombing as the Philadelphia police.

11 For clarification, when I reference “the media” here, I am referring primarily to the mainstream media–the local media in Philadelphia, but also national media such as the New York Times, or People magazine. To be sure, the MOVE organization was a mainstay in Philadelphia news media throughout the 1970s and 80s, but it was also the subject of considerable national coverage surrounding the 1978 and 1985 standoffs. Both Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s Discourse and Destruction and Kimberly Sanders and Judson L. Jeffries’ “Framing MOVE: A Press' Complicity in the Murder of Women and Children in the City of (Un) Brotherly Love” examine the ways in which the local media’s highly negative portrayals of MOVE as deviant and dangerous contributed to the disaster on May 13. While some of this earlier coverage comes into play in my analysis, in what follows this brief background, I focus more on the news accounts after the bombing, in which media outlets–who these scholars rightly portray as having long demonized MOVE–pivoted and reacted in horror at the way the city responded to the standoff. To be clear, then, throughout this essay, I use language that reflects how the mainstream media and others characterized MOVE, not–unless otherwise noted–my own personal assessment nor how MOVE described themselves.

12 On Sambor’s order to let the fire burn, for which he was initially unrepentant, then later described simply as a suggestion he made to the fire commissioner, to whom he shifted the blame, see for example Boyette and Boyette, Let It Burn, 222–42, 266–69 and Philip Lentz, “Blame for MOVE Fire Shifts Again,” Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1985, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-10-19-8503110537-story.html.

13 See for example, Frank Trippett, “It Looks Just Like a War Zone: A Police Raid in Philadelphia Turns to Tragedy,” Time Magazine, May 27, 1985, in Series 6, Box 31, Philadelphia Special Investigation (MOVE) Commission Records, Acc. 669, 727, 764, PC-33, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For examples of the kinds of images I describe here, see the image gallery of photos of the MOVE disaster originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the (Philadelphia) Daily News maintained at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/MOVE_Devastation_on_Osage_Avenue.html.

14 The content and source of the bomb have been discussed in numerous newspaper and scholarly accounts of the MOVE disaster, and was the subject of much scrutiny and expert testimony in the year-long investigation and two weeks of public testimony conducted by the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission in 1985–1986. See for example, Edwin Guthman, “The Mystery Of The C-4 Explosive Remains Unsolved,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 16, 1986; Michael Coard, “MOVE Would Have Never Happened in a White Neighborhood,” Philadelphia Magazine, May 2014, http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/05/12/move-would-have-never-happened-white-neighborhood/#JSoMo11XCIAyWH8g.99; William H. Brown et al, “The Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission,” reprinted in the Temple Law Quarterly 59 (1986): 365.

15 Indeed, much of the mainstream media coverage following the disaster continued to employ the same negative portrayals of the adult MOVE members they used previously, now alongside negative characterizations of the police and city officials as well.

16 See for example, “Commission’s Members,” New York Times, March 7, 1986, 13; “How the Panel Came to Be,” Daily News, March 7, 1986; Scott Heimer, “Phila. Lawyer Named To Iran Probe Lytton Had Served As Counsel To The Move Commission,” Daily News, April 17, 1987 in Series 6, Box 32, Philadelphia Special Investigation (MOVE) Commission Records, Acc. 669, 727, 764, PC-33, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

17 James Kunen, “Young Birdie Africa Survives Philly's 'Move' Bombing and Is Reborn as Michael Moses Ward,” People, December 2, 1985, 68.

18 There has been a burgeoning literature that contextualizes the ways in which Americans think about race and childhood, as well as the ways children themselves “learn” race, including Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011) and Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black And White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

19 See for example, Bernard Headley, The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); Richard Beck, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2015); and Joel Best, Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), itself published as the 1980s drew to a close.

20 Michael E. Ruane, "The Unclaimed Children of MOVE," Philadelphia Inquirer, May 13, 1986, 12A in Series 6, Box 32, Philadelphia Special Investigation (MOVE) Commission Records, Acc. 669, 727, 764, PC-33, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

21 “About Move,” On a Move: Website of the MOVE Organization, http://onamove.com/about/. Italics mine.

22 See for example, Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (New York: Harper Collins, 2008) and John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

23 Wilentz, The Age of Reagan, 134–35.

24 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2^nd Edition (New York: Routledge, 2002), 47. Italics mine.

25 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 413.

26 Premilla Nadasen, “From Widow to ‘Welfare Queen’: Welfare and the Politics of Race,” Black Women, Gender, and Families 1, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 53. On the cultural significance of the “welfare queen,” see also Carly Hayden Foster, “The Welfare Queen: Race, Gender, Class, and Public Opinion,” Race, Gender, and Class 15, no. 3/4 (2008): 162–79, and Ange-Marie Hancock, “Contemporary Welfare Reform and the Public Identity of the ‘Welfare Queen,’” Race, Gender, and Class 10, no. 1 (2003): 31–59.

27 See for example, John J. Goldman, “MOVE’s Philosophy: Militant Blend of Anti-Materialism, Contradiction,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1985, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-15-mn-8551-story.html.

28 On the growth of the “pro-life movement,” see for example Carol Mason, Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Self, All in the Family, 339–403.

29 Meiners, For the Children, 59.

30 Boyette and Boyette, Let It Burn, 110.

31 Though the MOVE organization itself did not appear to ever use the phrase “back to nature” to describe itself, it was a moniker nearly every media account utilized as a shorthand for the group’s varied beliefs, lifestyle, and physical appearance, in particular their shared natural styling of their hair in dreadlocks.

32 Boyette and Boyette, Let It Burn, 168.

33 Sharon Sims Cox (as told to Carol Saline), “My Life in MOVE,” Philadelphia Magazine, September 1985, 170 in Series 6, Box 32, Philadelphia Special Investigation (MOVE) Commission Records, Acc. 669, 727, 764, PC-33, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

34 Such a philosophy was not out of touch with the long tradition of fictive kin within African American communities, though that historical context was soundly ignored by media accounts more focused on underscoring MOVE’s difference from their African American neighbors. On the cultural importance of fictive kin traditions among African Americans, see for example Bonnie Thorton Dill, “Fictive Kin, Paper Sons, and Compadrazgo: Women of Color and the Struggle for Family Survival,” in American Families: A Multicultural Reader, ed. Stephanie Koontz (New York: Routledge, 2008): 25; Donna L. Franklin and Angela D. James, Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 179–83.

35 Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 182.

36 Beth Gillan, “A Lost Past, and Fears of the Future,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 16, 1985 in Series 6, Box 31, Philadelphia Special Investigation (MOVE) Commission Records, Acc. 669, 727, 764, PC-33, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

37 “Goode: The Right Decision Despite the Consequences,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 15, 1985 in Series 6, Box 31, Philadelphia Special Investigation (MOVE) Commission Records, Acc. 669, 727, 764, PC-33, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Italics mine.

38 See for example, Sims Cox, “My Life in MOVE,” 170–72.

39 Kunen, “Young Birdie Africa Survives Philly's 'Move' Bombing and Is Reborn as Michael Moses Ward,” 66–74.

40 Michael Capuzzo, “The Miracle of Birdie Africa,” Philadelphia Inquirer (May 8, 1988), https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/The_miracle_of_Birdie_Africa.html.

41 Nadasen, “From Widow to ‘Welfare Queen’,” 53.

42 Capuzzo, “The Miracle of Birdie Africa,” https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/The_miracle_of_Birdie_Africa.html.

43 Dave Davies, “Ruling on What Killed ‘Birdie Africa,’ MOVE’s Lone Child Survivor,” NBC10 News Philadelphia, June 12, 2014. http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Birdie-Africa-MOVE-Ship-Hot-Tub-Death-262845331.html.

44 For MOVE members, dreadlocks not only served as a marker of group identity, they also represented a visual manifestation of their adherence to natural laws and eschewal of man-made chemicals. “Our hair is left the way nature intended, uncombed and uncut,” they write on their official website, and “…we don’t favor using the system’s chemicals, cosmetics, and disposable conveniences…” (“About Us,” On a Move, http://onamove.com/about/).

45 Brown et al, “The Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission,” 380.

46 For example, a 1872 report of the Special Committee on Criminal Abortion noted, “The professional abortionist is a being who recognizes no higher law than his own base interests, whose heart has long ceased to know a humane feeling, whose soul is freighted with abominable crimes, whose hands are stained with the blood of innocent children, victims of his foul lust for gain.” Quoted in James Foster Scott, “Criminal Abortion,” The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children 33 (1896): 83.

47 Brown et al, “The Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission,” 287–88.

48 Larry Eichel, “The MOVE disaster: May 13, 1985–Day that forever changed the city,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 8, 2005, http://articles.philly.com/2005-05-08/news/25440488_1_move-headquarters-oklahoma-city-bombing-move-disaster.

49 The revelation about the remains–which have since been returned to members of MOVE–received a great deal of local and national media attention throughout the spring and summer of 2021, including coverage in The New York Times. See for example, Michael Levenson, “Decades After Police Bombing, Philadelphians ‘Sickened’ by Handling of Victim’s Bones,” The New York Times, April 24, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/us/move-rowhouse-bombing-victim-remains.html. The University of Pennsylvania commissioned an external firm, the Tucker Law Group (TLG), to conduct an independent investigation into the handling of the remains. Summarizing the lengthy final report following its August 20, 2021 release, Penn Today explained, “The report, commissioned by the University and the Museum, cited the ‘lingering sense of injustice relating to MOVE’s treatment by the Philadelphia Police Department.’ The investigation found that forensic anthropologists Alan Mann and Janet Monge did not violate any professional, ethical, or legal standards, but said that their actions ‘demonstrated, at a minimum, poor judgment and insensitivity.’” The report further concluded that contrary to media reports, the museum had made efforts prior to return the remains to family members, and that there was no evidence that the remains belonged to more than one child. Jill DiSanto, “Report on the Handling of Human Remains from the 1985 MOVE Tragedy,” Penn Today (August 25, 2021), https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/report-handling-human-remains-1985-move-tragedy. The full text of the TLG report, “Odyssey of the MOVE Remains: Report of the Independent Investigation into the Demonstrative Display of MOVE Remains at the Penn Museum and Princeton University,” is available online at https://www.penn.museum/documents/pressroom/MOVEInvestigationReport.pdf.

50 On the disproportionate policing of Black youth, see for example, Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: New York University Press, 2011) and Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: The New Press, 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa N. Stein

Melissa N. Stein (PhD, History, Rutgers University) is associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, and affiliate faculty in African American and Africana Studies, History, and the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies. She is the author of Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled (Dis)Membering MOVE: Race, Meaning-Making, and the Politics of Memory in the 1985 Police Bombing.