National

Brutal Aftermath of Police MOVE Bombing Still Resonates

Published

11 years ago

May 27, 2015

Row houses in Philadelphia burn after officials dropped a bomb on the MOVE house in this May 1985 photo from files. Ramona Africa, the lone adult survivor of the May 13, 1985 fire, and two other MOVE members sued the city of Philadelphia, and the former police and fire commissioners for financial damages in what was the first trial in court to address the MOVE bombing. (AP Photo)

by Askia Muhammad
Special to the NNPA from The Final Call

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) – More than 30 years have now passed since the worse abuse of police authority in modern American history.

On May 13, 1985 a massive police operation was launched in Philadelphia after Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor, abdicated his authority over the police force permitting its racist commanders to first rain a 10,000 bullet fusillade, before executing a helicopter bombing of the headquarters of a radical, Black naturalist organization known as MOVE.

Armed Philadelphia police offi cers man a rooftop as the sky is illuminated by the fl ames from a neighborhood in West Philadelphia, Pa., that burned after police dropped a bomb on a building occupied by members of MOVE, May 13, 1985.

The fire caused by the attack incinerated six adults and five children, and destroyed 65 homes and two city blocks. Despite two grand jury investigations and a commission finding that top officials were grossly negligent, no one from the city government was criminally charged.

MOVE was a radical movement dedicated to Black liberation and a back-to-nature lifestyle. It was founded by John Africa, and all its members took on the surname Africa.

Ramona Africa is the only adult survivor of the vicious attack. In 2010 she told “Democracy Now!” what happened. “In terms of the bombing, after being attacked the way we were, first with four deluge hoses by the fire department and then tons of tear gas, and then being shot at—the police admit to shooting over 10,000 rounds of bullets at us in the first 90 minutes—there was a lull. You know, it was quiet for a little bit.

“And then, without any warning at all, two members of the Philadelphia Police Department’s bomb squad got in a Pennsylvania state police helicopter and flew over our home and dropped a satchel containing C4, a powerful military explosive that no municipal police department has. They had to get it from the federal government, from the FBI. And without any announcement or warning or anything, they dropped that bomb on the roof of our home.”

Linn Washington is a journalist, a former columnist for The Philadelphia Tribune and a Temple University journalism professor, who has covered MOVE for nearly 40 years. “The bullets were so intense that they were raining from the sky like hail—and then, later in the afternoon, to see a bomb dropped on a house occupied by children. And then the very callous decision of the authorities to let the fire burn was just unreal. It’s a sight and a memory that I can’t get out of my mind,” he said.

When MOVE members realized that their house was on fire, some tried to escape the inferno, but then, police opened fire on them, driving some of them back into the house to die.

In this May 15, 1985 file photo, people sort through debris on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia, after a blaze destroyed scores of homes in the area. The fire started when police dropped a bomb onto the house of the group MOVE, and it spread throughout the area.

The scars which provoked the MOVE tragedy go back to the heavy-handed, Gestapo-like police tactics of former Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, who led a 1978 attack on a MOVE compound which resulted in the jailing of nine members who received jail sentences totaling hundreds of years according to Mr. Washington.

“What generally gets overlooked is that the roots of what happened in 1985 were planted in the extreme police brutality that was rampant in Philadelphia in the 1970s under Frank Rizzo,” Mr. Washington told The Final Call. “Rizzo essentially ramped up police brutality in Philadelphia that existed for decades, going back to the 19-teens.”

In addition, MOVE suffered from a bias against them which White anti-government communes at the time did not face. And their lifestyle—believing that no creatures, not even rats, roaches, or other vermin should be killed—conflicted with their neighbors in an urban setting. Their lifestyle would have been far more compatible in a rural setting, Mr. Washington said.

MOVE members even harassed neighbors who sought to exterminate vermin on their property, setting up a confrontation with the city administration which had to deal with complaints from neighbors who had grown tired of the intransigence shown by MOVE. On Christmas day 1984, Mr. Washington recalls, loud speakers were set up on the roof of their compound, and for 24 hours they blared loud music which some neighbors found insufferable.

But the neighbors there on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, were just as poorly served by the Goode administration as was MOVE, Mr. Washington said. “The neighbors felt that the punishment (meted out against MOVE) far exceeded the crimes. Let’s understand, at that point, the neighbors were then crime victims—the crimes that were committed by the city government. Their homes were burned to the ground because of negligence, incompetence and callousness on the part of city government,” Mr. Washington continued.

“The raid itself, the whole conception of the raid, gave no respect for the property owned by Black people. And now, many of the neighbors are experiencing, I wouldn’t know how properly to characterize it, but it’s a psychological condition, where they really feel bad. They’re blaming themselves for what happened with the children, with the death of the adults, and the devastation they endured on the 13th of May 1985.”

City officials ignored the neighbors and even entreaties from MOVE itself, as the confrontation approached. “In the hours before the shootout, there were efforts to reach a negotiated settlement, but the city administration, Wilson Goode refused to even listen to that,” Mr. Washington said.

“I actually ran into the right hand man of (MOVE founder) John Africa, and he was trying to reach Mayor Goode, and he was in the company of a prominent Civil Rights activist from West Philadelphia and a former judge—a guy named Robert Williams—who was the Democratic candidate for District Attorney. All three of them were on the phone trying to reach Goode, and Goode’s city hall office wouldn’t put them through to Goode, so they subsequently called the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court at that time, a Black man named Robert Nix. Nix called Goode’s office and Goode’s office wouldn’t even put the chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in touch with Goode.

“They were trying to negotiate. At that point, MOVE was just asking for a promise to have the 1978 matter re-examined. So there were many efforts to try to avoid what happened that day, but at some point the city just got recalcitrant and moved ahead with a militarized situation that led to death and destruction.”

Mayor Goode had apparently surrendered to following the prevailing police and judicial hostility to MOVE. In one instance, for example, when MOVE members followed court orders and moved to Richmond, Va. following the 1978 confrontation, Philadelphia police actually went to Richmond where they arrested the members for moving out of the city, even though they were complying with a court agreement.

In another instance, MOVE members were denied parole from prison and ordered into anger management sessions, even though the members involved had already been certified by the prison as anger management counselors, Mr. Washington recalled.

The gross mistreatment of MOVE also helped radicalize journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, earning him the ongoing hostility of the police and courts, which eventually led to his 1982 conviction—in a trial which Amnesty International and other human rights observers have declared to be grossly unfair—for murdering a Philadelphia police officer. Mr. Abu-Jamal steadfastly maintains his innocence, and remains imprisoned and in declining health while receiving what his supporters insist is inadequate medical attention. His sentence was commuted to life without parole, when the Supreme Court overturned the sentencing phase of his trial. Afraid that a new sentencing trial would open up the guilt-phase of the trial to possible appeals, prosecutors opted to commute his sentence.

In a commentary—part of his ongoing series of commentaries which began when he was on death row, Mr. Abu-Jamal reacted to the 30th anniversary of the MOVE bombing.

“Why should we care what happened on May 13th, 1985? Because what happened then is a harbinger of what’s happening now all across America. I don’t mean bombing people—not yet, that is. I mean the visceral hatreds and violent contempt once held for MOVE is now visited upon average people, not just radicals and revolutionaries like MOVE.

“In May 1985, police officials justified the vicious attacks on MOVE children by saying they, too, were combatants. In Ferguson, Missouri, as police and National Guard confronted citizens, guess how cops described them in their own files. ‘Enemies.’ Enemy combatants, anyone? Then look at 12-year-old Tamir Rice of Cleveland. Boys, men, girls, women—it doesn’t matter,” Mr. Abu-Jamal said in his commentary, broadcast by Prison Radio.org.

“There is a direct line from then to now. May 13, 1985, led to the eerie robocop present. If it had been justly and widely condemned then, there would be no now, no Ferguson, no South Carolina, no Los Angeles, no Baltimore. The barbaric police bombing of May 13, 1985, and the whitewash of the murders of 11 MOVE men, women and children opened a door that still has not been closed. We are today living with those consequences,” he concluded.

“His conviction is clearly an overreach,” Mr. Washington said. “As a reporter he became increasingly radicalized by the injustice that he saw MOVE experiencing—the 1978 shootout, the conviction of those persons in a long and ugly and incredibly corrupt trial.

“One MOVE member was beaten to a pulp, live on television. Three or four police officers were eventually put on trial. The district attorney took a year to be able to find out who the people were. They put them on trial. They brought in a jury from out of town to make sure the rights of the police officers were recognized. Then after the prosecution put on its case, the judge issued a directed verdict of acquittal, freeing the police officers, even before the defense put on one witness,” Mr. Washington said.

Ironically, MOVE is larger, stronger, and more widely embraced in Philadelphia, nationally, and even internationally, than they were in 1985, Mr. Washington noted. Their new headquarters is barely distinguishable from the homes of the neighbors surrounding them, and with an increased number of children, their ranks have swollen to perhaps 100 members.

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Arts and Culture

Against All Odds: Mary Jackson’s Journey to NASA Engineer

Jackson’s life took a significant turn when she was offered the opportunity to work in a wind tunnel, a facility used to test the effects of air moving over aircraft structures. It was here that her passion for engineering truly took flight. However, there was a challenge: to become an engineer, she needed to take advanced courses that were only offered at a segregated high school.

Published

9 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Oakland Post

Mary Jackson. Public domain.

By Tamara Shiloh

When we talk about breaking barriers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the name Mary Jackson deserves a place at the top of the list.

Jackson was born in 1921 in Hampton, Virginia, a place that would later become central to her groundbreaking work. From an early age, she showed a strong aptitude for math and science—subjects that, at the time, were not widely encouraged for African American women. But Jackson was not one to be limited by expectations. She earned degrees in mathematics and physical science from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), setting the foundation for a career that would change history.

Before joining NASA, Jackson worked as a teacher and later as a research mathematician at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that eventually became NASA. Like many African American women of her time, she began her career as a “human computer,” performing complex calculations by hand. It was in this environment that she worked alongside brilliant minds like Katherine Johnson, forming part of a powerful group of African American women whose calculations helped launch America into space.

Jackson did something truly remarkable. She petitioned the city of Hampton for permission to attend those classes. She didn’t accept “no” as an answer. And she won.

In 1958, Jackson became NASA’s first African American female engineer.

But Jackson’s impact didn’t stop there.

Later in her career, she chose to step away from her engineering position—not because she couldn’t continue, but because she wanted to make a difference. She moved into roles focused on equal opportunity, working to ensure that women and minorities had access to the same opportunities she fought so hard to get.

Jackson’s story gained wider recognition through the book and film Hidden Figures, which highlighted the contributions of African American women at NASA. But long before the spotlight found her, Jackson was doing the work—quietly, persistently, and brilliantly.

Jackson retired from Langley in 1985. Among her many honors were an Apollo Group Achievement Award and being named Langley’s Volunteer of the Year in 1976. She served as the chair of one of the center’s annual United Way campaigns and a member of the National Technical Association (the oldest African American technical organization in the United States).

She and her husband Levi had an open-door policy for young Langley recruits trying to gain their footing in a new town and a new career. A 1976 Langley Researcher profile might have done the best job capturing Mary’s spirit and character, calling her a “gentlelady, wife and mother, humanitarian and scientist.”

For Jackson, science and service went hand in hand.

She died on Feb. 11, 2005, at age 83, at a convalescent home in Hampton, Virginia.

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Activism

Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling Reverberates From the South to California

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act is reshaping political battles, particularly in the South. While California’s protections may offer a buffer, the decision raises national concerns about Black political representation and redistricting.

Published

9 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Oakland Post

Researchers pointed out that the number amounts to 1 in every 50 adults, with 3 out of 4 disenfranchised living in their communities, having completed their sentences or remaining supervised while on probation or parole. (Photo: iStockphoto)

iStock.

By Brandon Patterson

A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling weakening a key section of the federal Voting Rights Act is already reshaping political battles in parts of the South while raising broader questions about the future of Black political representation nationwide.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s conservative majority limited the use of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision historically used to challenge electoral maps that dilute minority voting strength. Writing in dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the ruling marked the “now-complete demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

The immediate effects of the ruling are expected to be felt most sharply in Southern states, where litigation over majority-Black districts has shaped congressional maps for decades. Republican-led states including Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas have already moved to defend or revisit maps following the decision, according to reporting by Reuters and Politico.

California’s political landscape is different. The state uses an independent citizen’s commission to draw district lines and also has its own California Voting Rights Act, which in some cases provides broader protections than federal law. Because of those safeguards, the Supreme Court’s decision is not expected to immediately alter Black political representation in California.

Still, legal scholars and voting rights advocates say the ruling could shape future national debates over how race is considered in redistricting and voting rights enforcement.

“It changes the legal atmosphere around voting rights nationally,” UCLA law professor Rick Hasen told Axios. “Even states with stronger protections are paying attention to where the Court is headed.”

The decision also arrives amid renewed political fights over redistricting. In California, voters approved Proposition 50 in November 2025, a measure backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that expanded the state’s ability to redraw congressional maps in response to mid-decade redistricting efforts in other states.

Supporters argued the measure was necessary to counter increasingly aggressive Republican-led redistricting nationally, while critics warned it could weaken California’s independent redistricting tradition.

For Black Californians, the ruling lands at a time when political representation remains significant even as demographic shifts have changed historically Black neighborhoods in cities like Oakland, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee criticized the Court’s decision in comments to The Oaklandside, calling the Voting Rights Act one of the nation’s foundational civil rights protections.

“This decision weakens one of the most important civil rights tools our communities have had,” Lee said. “We know voting rights were never given freely. People fought and died for them.”

Rep. Lateefah Simon warned against complacency.

“This is part of a larger effort to erase the gains of the civil rights movement,” Simon told Oaklandside. “Black political power matters, and representation matters.”

The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, helped expand Black political representation nationwide, including in California, where coalition politics among Black, Latino and Asian American voters helped elect candidates of color at the local, state and federal levels.

For many observers, the latest ruling serves less as an immediate threat to California districts and more as a reminder that voting rights protections long viewed as settled remain politically and legally contested.

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Activism

The People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft Speaks at National Probate Reform Coalition Meeting

Evangeline Byars and Carmella Carrington lead the STOPDEEDTHEFT.org movement, fighting rising deed and title fraud, which disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities nationwide.

Published

9 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Oakland Post

Left to right: Evangeline Byars and Carmella Carrington are gaining nationwide attention with their STOPDEEDTHEFT.org movement.

By Tanya Dennis

The National Probate Reform Coalition (NPRC) has learned that aside from rampant theft of properties occurring through probate court, deed theft extends even further with the support of banks, police, judges, attorneys and “the system” to steal Black and Brown properties.

Deed and title fraud are rising, with FBI data showing over 9,300 complaints and $173.6 million in losses in 2024 alone.

To that end, NPRC invited Evangeline Byars of The People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft as their keynote speaker on May 7.

Deed theft victims reach out to Byars because she has a reputation of getting things done. Introduced to community organizing at Medgar Evers College in 2011, Byars was mentored by Harry Belafonte and gained further movement training in 2012-13 through his “Gathering for Justice.” Byars also trained with the Youth Brigade 32BJ, Union in 2012 where she learned to map, target, and execute actions.

With that knowledge as an advocacy worker, Byars ran for president of TWU Local 100 for transit workers. During challenges of the union and political changes in New York when unions no longer had friends in government, they organized.

In 2025, deed theft victims approached Byars and told their stories. Byars investigated, and discovered rampant, unrelenting theft of properties, primarily from Black and brown families, got involved and helped them with their fight, teaching them how to sustain their fight at the grassroots level while remaining politically independent. This independence gave them the ability to move without co promise.

Deed theft is the taking of someone’s deed through fraudulent mortgages or a stranger that accesses property records, prepares paperwork and files for an owner’s property. New York is a’ first notice’ state, which means whoever appears first on record is the designated deed holder.

Deed theft escalated between 2013-23, the outcome of the subprime market, when people faced mass foreclosure and short sales. By 2014 people, primary Black and Brown, were fighting for their property.

In California, title theft (deed fraud) is a fast-growing threat often targeting high-equity homes, vacant land, and rentals. As of 2024, California leads the nation in real estate fraud with over 1,583 cases costing roughly $24.8 million in losses in a single year, reflecting the state’s prime position for scammers due to high property values, the FBI reports.

Byars says, “Deed theft affects Black and Brown people: it is by design, leading to the erasure of people of color homeownership that is happening nationwide. In every big city across the United States, towns and municipalities, we are witnessing a mass exodus of Black and brown people. This theft cannot occur without judges, notaries and law enforcement, it is a syndicate of players working together for the removal of people by illegal ejectment or eviction.

The People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft does court watch and constantly highlight the inequities in the court system.

Byars says, “This is a human rights crisis. Because of Wall Street and what New York signifies to the nation, know that no state is safe. Any person can come and create paper terrorism, slap forgery notes on homes; engage in illegal guardian procedures; initiate foreclosures; apply for fraudulent loan modifications; then there’s outright theft and forgery, just taking people’s homes. Believe me, it’s happening nationally and on the daily, These predators also target seniors over the age of 60 and women.”

The People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft take direct actions against perpetrators and are working with the New York District Attorney to create an office dedicated to gighting deed theft.

“Two ways to protect your deed is to keep a note, never satisfy your mortgage, because the bank is the biggest gangster, but if you’re making a payment, it keeps them in check. Or put your home in a living trust, once you have a trust, it hides the owner’s name and protects the person from predators.”