Philadelphia bombs Osage Avenue
13 May 19856221 Osage Avenue, Cobbs Creek, West Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA
On 13 May 1985 the city dropped an explosive from a helicopter onto an occupied rowhouse in a Black West Philadelphia neighbourhood, then let the fire burn. Eleven people died, five of them children, and sixty-one homes were destroyed.
Note: Describes the deaths of children in a fire set by the city.
MOVE was a small Black radical organisation founded in Philadelphia in 1972, combining Black nationalism with a back-to-nature philosophy. Its members were loud, confrontational with neighbours and implacably hostile to the police, and after a 1978 shootout in Powelton Village that killed Officer James J. Ramp, nine of them were imprisoned for life. By 1985 the group had fortified a rowhouse at 6221 Osage Avenue in Cobbs Creek, a settled Black middle-class neighbourhood whose residents had complained for years to a city that did nothing until it did this.
On 13 May 1985, after a day-long siege, gunfire and tear gas, Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor and Mayor Wilson Goode authorised dropping a satchel of C4 and Tovex from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter onto the roof of the house. The roof held a wooden bunker and several drums of petrol. The explosion started a fire, and the fire commissioner, on instruction, let it burn.
Eleven people died in the house: six adults, including MOVE's founder John Africa, and five children. Only two people came out alive, Ramona Africa and thirteen-year-old Birdie Africa. The fire spread down both sides of the street and destroyed sixty-one homes, leaving more than 250 people - almost all of them neighbours who had asked the city for help - homeless.
The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission reported on 6 March 1986 that the decision to drop the device on an occupied rowhouse was "unconscionable", that the tactics were grossly negligent, and that the deaths of the five children were unjustified homicides. It also said plainly that it doubted the same tactics would have been used in a white neighbourhood. No one was prosecuted. Ramona Africa and relatives of the dead won $1.5 million in a civil suit in 1996. The city rebuilt the block badly, spending decades and tens of millions on houses that had to be bought back and demolished. In 2020 the City Council formally apologised, thirty-five years on.
Eleven killed, five of them children; sixty-one homes destroyed and more than 250 people made homeless, nearly all of them neighbours. The shape covers the 6200 blocks of Osage Avenue and Pine Street that burned, drawn indicatively.
Sources
- MOVEEncyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, Rutgers-Camdenphiladelphiaencyclopedia.orgBeverly C. Tomek. Backs the address, the authorisation by Goode and Sambor, the helicopter drop, eleven dead including five children, sixty-plus homes destroyed, the commission's findings and the absence of any prosecution.
- Report of the Philadelphia Special Investigation CommissionPhiladelphia Special Investigation Commission (1986)The city's own commission of inquiry, reporting 6 March 1986. The source of the findings that the bombing was "unconscionable", that the tactics were grossly negligent, and that the children's deaths were unjustified homicides.