MOVE was an extremely radical group based on the Back to Africa movement that constantly terrorized their neighbors due to their unsanitary conditions that they believed exemplified “simplicity,” such as rejecting bathing, hygiene, medicine and electricity. Their way of “recycling” included throwing trash and excrement onto the front yard, attracting hundreds of rats.
They assaulted their neighbors with guns and each night took to the bullhorn to broadcast their anarchist ideology.
In 1978 a health inspection of their facility/home went terribly wrong, led to a shoot-out started by MOVE, leading to the killing of one policeman. Nine members were convicted of the murder. Those are the people in jail. They murdered a police officer. That has nothing to do with this next incident.
Then, in 1985, in another part of the city, MOVE was continuing to wreak havoc with rats, garbage, terroristic threats, explosives, etc. The police evacuated the neighbors (all black), who had been complaining about the organization for some time, due to safety concerns and then staged a raid on the MOVE row house. The MOVE members began shooting first, with their machine guns, and the shootout lasted over two hours, the “activists” unrelenting. They had automatic weapons and a rooftop bunker fitted with peepholes and gun slots. Then the fire department got involved and bombarded the house with water cannons for FIVE HOURS. They didn’t leave or let up.
Rooftop bunker…automatic weapons…gun slots… Sounds like a little war, huh? At 5:30am, finally, although due to a miscalculation, a police helicopter dropped explosive material on top of the house in an attempt to destroy the bunker, and unfortunately the explosive set off a conflagration that burned down the whole neighborhood and killed the 11 MOVE members. How did this happen? MOVE members had been storing gasoline on the roof! Where they were attacking police for several hours!
If you ask the actual (black) neighbors, they will tell you it wasn’t racism that caused this. They asked for this. MOVE was terrorizing the neighborhood. If you ask Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox, they will say it was racism and Nazi-like (no, really, they actually said that).
The deaths and injuries were the fault of MOVE, not the police. By this calculation, this “antiracist” group has killed more black people than the KKK has in the last three decades.
I learned about this story in undergrad. I’m from Philadelphia, and I didn’t learn the truth about it, which is outlined above. I learned, simply, that police bombed an activists’ home, and “how racist is that? Can you believe it? Right here in Philly? Scary world we live in,” was all we said during class.
Like how the fuck you think the police just randomly decided to bomb the shit out of some neighborhood for no damn reason?
