On May 13, 1985 I was sixteen years old and I of course was busy being a teenager. Occupied with all the usual crap teenagers are occupied with. On May 12th I was concerning myself with underage drinking, hanging out with my boys, trying to get laid, thinking I was grown, and remembering where I hid my mothers Mother's Day gift. On May 13th, all of that went out the window, for that was the day the powers that be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania lost their minds. That was the day authorities of the United States decided to drop bombs on US citizens. More specifically they dropped ordinances on MOVE, a small radical collective located in a middle class neighborhood in West Philadelphia.
According to the police, they went to evict MOVE and serve arrest warrants on four members of the organization for the murder of a police officer. What followed led to a violent standoff where at least 10,000 rounds of ammunition were fired into the house and a C4/Tovex Bomb was dropped. The bomb blast blew the house apart killing everyone inside except Ramona Africa. Eleven members of MOVE were killed as were five children.
This was all due to a confrontation the city of brotherly love had with MOVE back in 1978. Nine members of MOVE were given lengthy prison sentences (30 to 100 years each) for the murder of a police officer who died from a single bullet. Those nine members were known as the MOVE 9 and the leader of MOVE, John Africa demanded justice. He believed the police arrived with warrants because MOVE wouldn't let the issue die. The eviction part of the issue was due to complaining neighbors regarding the rats, roaches, and living conditions within 6221 Osage Ave, where MOVE was headquartered.
On May 12th, authorities evacuated the block telling residents there was going to be a police action the next day, and the next day the police destroyed the entire block, took sixteen lives in the process, and made countless others homeless. As 6221 Osage Ave burned, the fire department was told not to put the fire down and to instead let it burn. The fire began leaping from rooftop to rooftop and consequently destroyed the entire block of houses. The neighborhood was predominantly African-American.
That was the day I ceased being proud to be an American and began to look at this country with a different eye. That was the day my radical side was born because if they could drop bombs on Black people in this country, what are they doing to Black and brown people abroad? What atrocities was this country committing to people of color in distant lands that we never hear about? On May 14th I was no longer concerned with trying to get drunk or trying to get laid. Now I was educating myself, sharing with my boys what was going on, and hugging my mother tight because that's when I realized there was a target on our backs if we dared not fall in line.
There is a documentary coming out on this tragedy entitled Let The Fire Burn and I cannot wait to see it. In fact, I will be first in line. Never forget that the struggle continues!
Again...tell the stories, M! THIS one blew my mind when I read about it the first time. It was only a few years ago that conversations about racial issues in this country brought up this topic. How had I never heard? I thought they had their dates wrong. 1985? Don't you mean 1965? When I read up on things later I was shocked. How the hell did we drop a BOMB inside our country, and it wasn't talked about by everyone in the country for weeks if not months?!? Somehow at the ripe age of 13, I never heard a word. The space shuttle blowing up, Reagan getting shot, the Iranian hostage crisis...all those things had managed to hit my youthful radar, but not this. As I read about this a few years ago, a huge chunk of those last bits of my naivete crumbled to dust. It isn't that we should simply never let this happen again, it was that it shouldn't have ever fucking happened in the first place.
ReplyDeleteDropping a BOMB on our own soil was NOT an act of due process and our constitutional rights. It was state sanctioned mass murder. Those MOVE members were found guilty by the state. Damn, any of the principles this country was SUPPOSE to stand for. Can we say...Weapons of mass destruction anyone? Hmmm...how does it feel to look in the mirror and see that in the shadows of OUR All-American fairly recent past the similarities between us and Iraq? Syria? Yet we oh-so smugly cast stones at the world and declare ourselves lily white innocent. (Borrowing someone's so appropriate saying...) Whaaatthefuckever. Maybe some god-fearing country should have threatened US with military intervention in 1985 to free the African American community from its unending persecution at the hands of the American government? Hmmmm...just imagine...what that might have looked like?
And people wonder why most of the rest of the world hates us. lol Self-righteous hypocrites.
~shaking my head~ I'm sure the sheep have already bowed their heads and are munching on their blades of grass or got distracted listening to Rush or Hannity. Blah...