all because they wouldn't put a stop to it looong before it came to that
Posted on 05/13/2019 2:47:33 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, police begin evacuating people from their Osage Avenue homes in order to prepare for an operation against MOVE, a radical cult group that had assembled a large arsenal. By the end of the confrontation, 11 people were dead and 61 homes had been burned down. --SNIP-- Authorities soon realized that there was very little they could do to remove MOVE members from their entrenched position. At about 5:30 p.m. on May 13, a small bomb was dropped on the roof of the building in an attempt to destroy their bunker. This proved disastrous, as the roof was covered with tar and gas, and a blistering fire broke out
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I remember it quite well. Bit’s difficult to believe it was almost 35 years ago......
Wow - 35 years. I was on the train that morning. We pulled into Overbrook station and you could hear automatic gunfire. People were jumping on the train that morning.
One of my co-worker’s house was burnt down in that fire. Mayor Goode’s cronies rebuilt the home and it was nothing but problems...what a time that was...
I remember that! It was the day the mayor of Philadelphia burned half his city down.
Of course he was a Dem. Do you even have to ask?
MOVE plunked itself down in the middle of this neighborhood, and almost immediately began acting like a festering boil. They stuck stereo speakers, and later loudspeakers, out the windows, broadcasting all kinds of mumbo-jumbo, sometimes all night long.
They fortified the interior of the rowhouse they occupied with railroad ties and other heavy timbers.
They broke through their attic into the crawl space above neighboring homes, and started stockpiling gasoline up there.
They all took the name "Africa." There were a lot of children living in their unit. They had been kicked out of a previous location, and relocated to their new location, in a neighborhood at the west end of Osage Avenue, near 63rd street, which separates the neighborhood from Cobbs Creek Park.
The trouble started when the City tried to evict them. They were thought to be stockpiling weapons, and the neighbors had made many complaints to the City. Their leader, John Africa (may have been the second John Africa, not sure) refused to go and said they'd rather die and destroy everything than be made to move out.
The fire was caused when the Philadelphia PD dropped a satchel charge on the roof of the MOVE building. That set fire to the stored gasoline. The police wouldn't give the fire department clearance to fight the fire, so they "let the bunker burn," in a phrase that became infamous.
I had no idea that police authorities were permitted to use explosives against civilian targets.
I remember watching this on tv and humming the tune of Disco Inferno...
It was a very serious situation. MOVE was essentially a suicide cult, with aspects that resembled the Jim Jones cult in Guyana. They had military-style weapons, had built a fortified bunker inside their rowhouse, had threatened to burn everything down if anyone tried to evict them.
The rowhouse was in the middle of the block. The only lines of approach were from the front, from the alley behind, or from the roof. There was no access and no visibility into the MOVE unit from the sides.
They dropped a satchel charge on the roof from a police helicopter. They were planning to make entry through the resulting hole in the roof. They didn't realize how much gasoline the MOVE people had stored in the attic crawlspace.
The MOVE people were really, really crazy. As crazy as any hard-core militant organization in the country.
I felt bad for the residents, and I felt bad for Mayor Goode too. He gave blanket authority to the police department to handle the matter, and it escalated uncontrollably.
The best part of this raid was the airstrike!
“They had military-style weapons”
Were they really military-style or just fashionable with olive-drab accents?
I wasn’t living in Philly then but remember watching it on the news at the time. We all felt sorry for the residents who lived in the neighborhood and especially for the young children trapped in the fire.
Yeah, what a crazy cult. Wasn’t Mumia Abu-Jamal part of it, too?
The house my father was born in, on Osage Avenue, in 1925, was destroyed in this raid.
Believe me, they were very bad news. The main thing the city can be faulted for is not stopping them sooner, although it's hard to see how they could have. I don't recall any talk of FBI or BATF involvement at all. It's like the City didn't want the feds in on the situation.
Yes, he was, which I didn't realize at the time. Officer Daniel Faulkner was murdered about three months after I moved to Philly, and I wasn't that immersed in the city's politics and radical scene at that time.
To my knowledge this is the only time it was done.
Did not work out well.
all because they wouldn't put a stop to it looong before it came to that
I remember that day well when I was a kid. Move and the “Africas” were truly reprehensible nasty people. Never forget that the Move scum murdered WWII and Korea War vet Officer Ramp in ‘78.
Talk about Urban Renewal
They were all named “Africa,” as I remember.
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