On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia experienced one of the most shocking episodes in its history: the city police dropped a bomb on a residential home occupied by members of the African-American activist group MOVE, killing eleven people - including five children - and leaving more than 250 people homeless. It was, as Smithsonian Magazine described it, "the day Philadelphia bombed its own people."

MOVE was founded in the 1970s by Vincent Leaphart, known as John Africa. It was an organization that blended civil rights activism, naturalist philosophy, veganism and a strong critique of government and police brutality. The relationship between MOVE and the Philadelphia authorities had already been strained for years. In 1978, a previous confrontation between the police and MOVE ended with one officer dead and several members of the group convicted.

According to The New York Times, the group was on the authorities' radar because of their refusal to vacate the homes they occupied, their confrontational rhetoric and the fact that they accumulated weapons on their properties.

The Air Raid

On the morning of May 13, 1985, after a long police siege, authorities attempted to forcibly remove MOVE members living in a house on Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia. After hours of exchanging gunfire, police decided to use plastic explosives - a mixture of C-4 and Tovex - which were dropped from a helicopter onto the roof of the house.

The explosion sparked a fire that quickly spread through the neighborhood. As The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, "authorities allowed the fire to burn for nearly an hour before intervening." The result: 61 houses destroyed and an entire community displaced.

Eleven deaths and a scarred city

The fire killed eleven people inside the house, including the group's founder, John Africa, and five minors. Only two people survived, including a 13-year-old girl, Ramona Africa, who later reported that police had prevented them from leaving alive.

In the words of NPR, "the police not only bombed a home, but allowed the neighborhood to burn out of control." The city's mayor at the time, Wilson Goode - the first African-American to hold office - was harshly criticized for authorizing the operation. Years later, he acknowledged that it was "a terrible mistake."

The aftermath

A special commission created by the city concluded in 1986 that the government's actions were "reckless, poorly planned and clearly unacceptable." The MOVE Commission Report, an official document of more than 500 pages, details how decisions were made without adequately assessing the risks to human life.

Despite the scandal, no city officials were criminally prosecuted. In 1996, a federal jury awarded $1.5 million in damages to Ramona Africa and the family of one of the deceased children, finding that the city had violated their constitutional rights.

The case returned to the center of public debate in 2021, when it was discovered that skeletal remains of two of the children killed in the bombing were being kept without consent by the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum, even used in online classes. This finding sparked protests, forced academic resignations and opened a new wound for the city's African-American community.

As director Jason Osder reflected in his documentary Let the Fire Burn, "the MOVE tragedy was not simply a tactical error, but a reflection of a policy of repression against radical black voices." 

A city reconciled?

Today, 40 years later, the MOVE Bombing remains an open wound in Philadelphia's history. Not just because of the extreme use of state force against citizens, but because of what it represented: institutional contempt for a marginalized community that dared to challenge the system.

"It was a war against the city's own residents," Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, a local activist and journalist, said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer. "And it was, above all, a warning of what power can do when it feels unpunished."