“The Blood of Innocent Children”: Race, Respectability, and “True” Victimhood in the 1985 MOVE Police Bombing

Public support for the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) has surged in the wake of several recent cases of law enforcement using lethal force against African American citizens–including George Floyd, Elijah McClain and Breonna Taylor–suspected of minor infractions, if anything at all. As mass protests spread across the United States following Floyd’s May 2020 death in Minneapolis, stories began to circulate on social media and in news outlets like The New York Post detailing Floyd’s previous arrest records, seemingly to undermine his claims to “innocence. It is a pattern no doubt familiar to many: as outrage and protests mount following the death of an African American citizen at the hands of the police, stories quickly emerge in social media, traditional media outlets, or law enforcement statements assassinating the victim’s character or past, as if to suggest they were somehow complicit in their own deaths. The insistence on “good victims” deflects from larger systemic critiques of policing and mass incarceration like those being made by M4BL’s founders and other activists in the police abolition movement as well as scholars in critical carceral studies, Africana studies, and related fields It also obscures the ways in which state violence is routinely enacted against the most vulnerable or marginalized, including the poor, transgender individuals, and those struggling with mental illness We also know that in reality, no amount of respectability–not social standing, wealth, or education, not gender or age–has shielded African Americans from police violence. Nor is there a perfect way to act in an encounter with law enforcement; after all, as many activists have pointed out, Breonna Taylor was quite literally asleep in her bed when police arrived and subsequently, fatally shot her.

These lessons come from a long history of anti-black state violence. Moving further back in time, on May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia police department, with authorization from the mayor, responded to a stand-off with an Afrocentric revolutionary environmentalist organization called MOVE, which the city was trying to evict from its communal house in West Philadelphia, by dropping a military-grade bomb on the roof, burning the house to the ground and killing eleven MOVE members, five of them children In the process, the ensuing inferno also burned down an entire block of the predominantly African-American neighborhood, leaving 61 houses destroyed and over 250 people homeless.

As an especially extreme and deadly incidence of police brutality and overreach, the 1985 MOVE bombing resonates with the contemporary cases around which the M4BL has organized, as well as with the long history of U.S. racial violence in which law enforcement was either complicit or looked the other way (and sometimes both). But it also offers a cautionary tale against focusing on the “innocence” of the victims instead of the intrinsic flaws of the American system of policing, including the deep racial bias that drives state violence. Given the military-style bombing, the death toll, and the sheer scale of destruction, the MOVE disaster should have prompted a national reckoning and real change. Instead, law enforcement across the U.S. has only become more militarized in the interim, and the use of lethal force against African Americans has continued with alarming regularity The bombing also reminds us that concepts like “innocence” or even victimhood, are historically situated, contextual, and profoundly racialized. Similar issues of racism, the disproportionate use of excessive force against African Americans, and what constitutes an “innocent victim” undergirded public discussions of the MOVE bombing in the 1980s and the black deaths by law enforcement in the 2010s and 20s that have galvanized the M4BL movement, particularly those also involving children or youth, such as Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin (who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer).

Yet there is a notable point of disjuncture between these more recent incidents and the MOVE bombing as well. Various media outlets today have been called out for circulating images of both 12-year-old Rice and 17-year-old Martin in stereotypical, racialized “thug” poses or attire, images that seemed designed to simultaneously make them appear older than they were and undermine their claims to innocence–or even to the very category of childhood. Likewise, many of the accompanying stories questioned both boys’ behavior, character, and possible criminal proclivities, and Martin’s alleged marijuana use even came into play in the trial for the man, George Zimmerman, who shot the unarmed teenager, for which he was famously acquitted. In sharp contrast, both the commissioners who conducted the lengthy public investigation into the MOVE disaster and the journalists who covered it were nearly unanimous in their insistence that the youngest victims of the bombing were children and thus inherently innocent. Their age alone should have afforded them protection, the common refrain went, regardless of their race and the actions of the adults who were raising them.

Indeed, the children were the locus through which the public, the media, city officials, and the Special Investigation commissioners attempted to make meaning of what many described as urban warfare, to humanize the tragedy, and to draw moral conclusions about what went wrong and who was responsible. Yet in many ways, the focus on the children also functioned to deflect or obfuscate the larger ethical questions raised by the state-sanctioned bombing–chiefly, even if there were no children present, should the state be permitted to utilize a bomb on its own citizens, in a residential neighborhood on U.S. soil? Is such a militant and militarized response warranted, in which law enforcement personnel fired an estimated 10,000 rounds from automatic weapons, at a home containing six adults armed with handguns, followed by a bomb and a fire allowed to spread unchecked as it consumed the neighborhood, whether there were children inside or not? Certainly, the answer to me–and likely you, the reader–is a resounding “no,” but the question went largely unanswered, or even addressed, in the immediate aftermath of the fire, as the public, the media, and many city officials alike continued to mourn for the “true” victims, the children.

Similarly to the invocations of the MOVE children in the 1980s, education scholar Erica Meiners explains that in contemporary debates over mass incarceration, both sides emphasize the need to “save the children,” but neither interrogates the “a priori association with innocence.” Though she is writing specifically here about localized debates over prison closures or expansions, her analysis has clear resonance for the related issue of police brutality, and the MOVE disaster in particular:

Also masked is the cascade of effects associated with representations of children and childhood. For example, demanding that police view select youth as more childlike, therefore deserving of leniency or differential treatment, does not interrupt why so many adults are culpable, are not viewed as valued and do not merit rehabilitation, and are therefore unfree. If only a select few–the children–merit care, access to resources, or a future, what of the rest of us

The focus on the children in the wake of the MOVE bombing begs similar questions, including “What of the MOVE adults? Why were they not viewed as valued, in life or death?” But perhaps most pointedly in terms of my argument here, I would also add, “How does even debating the perceived degree of innocence or social worth of the victims–child or adult–at all serve to deflect meaningful critique of policing itself?”

In this article then, after providing a brief background of MOVE and its contentious interactions with Philadelphia law enforcement, I will discuss how childhood innocence was used to frame discussions about police violence after the bombing; how race and racism underlie popular conceptions of “true” victimhood and culpability; how racist assumptions about family structure and the emphasis on MOVE’s deviance from 1980s neoconservative values undergird these themes, particularly as demonstrated in popular media coverage of Birdie Africa, the lone child survivor of the fire; and will conclude with an assessment of the perils of looking for “good victims” rather than unpacking the racist underpinnings and limitations of American policing.

“The City That Bombed Itself”: A Brief History of MOVE and the Philadelphia Police

Although the bombing received a tremendous amount of national and international media coverage in 1985, it is less widely known today among the general public than other previously buried examples of racial and state violence such as the Tulsa massacre, which has become more visible in school curricula and the popular imaginary alike in recent years Consequently, a brief background is important here MOVE was founded in the early 70s by Vincent Leaphart, a handyman who later adopted the name John Africa, and Donald Glassey, a social worker who first encountered Leaphart in West Philadelphia. Initially called the Christian Movement for Life and later shortened to MOVE, the group was founded as a revolutionary, environmentalist organization that emphasized the sanctity of all life, to the point that they refused to neuter their pets or exterminate. MOVE’s members took on the surname of Africa as a reference to where they believed all life began. Their custom of living with dozens of cats and dogs in a densely populated neighborhood is what first brought them into conflict with neighbors, and later, the city, which tried to enforce health and housing code violations against them. Though Glassey and some of the early members were white, over time, the organization took on a more explicitly black liberationist ideology and by the early 1980s, Glassey had broken ties with MOVE and its membership was predominantly black.

Tensions with the city first came to a head in 1978 when the police raided MOVE’s communal home in the Powelton Village neighborhood of West Philadelphia. They assaulted its inhabitants, including children, with tear gas and torrents of water, and shots were fired on both sides. The attack destroyed the MOVE house, killing a police officer, and injuring numerous MOVE members— including Delbert Africa whose brutal beating at the hands of angry policemen was shown on the local news, including shocking footage of uniformed officers dragging him across the ground by his dreadlocks and kicking him repeatedly in the head. Nine MOVE members were convicted for the police officer’s death, and received life sentences; the ongoing imprisonment of the “MOVE 9” quickly became an additional source of anger and tension between MOVE and the city’s legal and political establishment, which ultimately culminated in the tragic events in May 1985 The 1985 bombing, then, was not the first time local law enforcement responded to MOVE with violence, but neither was it an aberration in terms of anti-black policing in Philadelphia more generally. In fact, police brutality against black citizens, neighborhoods, and organizations like the Black Panthers, and, of course, MOVE, was pervasive and well known in Philadelphia in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This period was often referred to locally as the “Rizzo Years,” in reference to the tenure of Frank Rizzo, a populist opponent of de-segregation who served as Police Commissioner from 1968-1971 and mayor from 1972-1980. Known to brag publicly about the costly military-style equipment he acquisitioned for Philadelphia law enforcement, the period and the man himself are so synonymous with police brutality and racism that a prominent downtown statue of Rizzo was removed by the city in 2020 following M4BL protests of George Floyd’s death

Following the 1978 standoff, which occurred during Rizzo’s tenure as mayor, MOVE relocated deeper into West Philadelphia, to the quiet, black working-class neighborhood of Cobbs Creek. There, relations with their neighbors again went sour. Though neighbors complained to the city about the growing number of stray dogs and piles of food waste in the yard of the MOVE house, their biggest complaint was the high-powered loud speaker the MOVE members installed outside the house to voice profanity-laden political harangues demanding the release of the MOVE 9, sometimes well into the night. The city was slow to respond to their complaints, the neighbors insisted to the media, who generally painted MOVE members as a dirty, dangerous, and socially deviant group of radicals The conflict became a crisis in 1985, when MOVE members built a bunker on the roof of their communal home, and the Philadelphia police hatched a plan to remove MOVE from the house.

What happened next was by all accounts a disaster. On May 13, the police moved in with arrest warrants and eviction notices; MOVE members refused to leave their home, and negotiations stalemated. The police responded to the standoff by evacuating the residents of the surrounding blocks then dropping a military-grade bomb on the roof of the occupied MOVE house. Hoping to fully destroy the bunker on the roof, Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor gave the infamous order to “let the fire burn” when the roof caught on fire. The house was soon engulfed, as the fire department stood by with their hoses turned off, and by the time they attempted to fight the blaze, the fire was already spreading to neighboring rowhomes The images that circulated in newspapers across the globe were almost incomprehensible. Aerial photos panned out over the rows of leveled homes, capturing what appeared to be a war zone–as the 6200 block of Osage Avenue was often described in media accounts

The details of what happened that day would be the subject of debate for years, but several things were clear almost immediately: Eleven MOVE members were dead, five of them children, and the once stable neighborhood lay in ruins. As national and international media circulated images of the destruction, many commentators questioned whether such police action would have ever happened in a white neighborhood, while others insisted the tragedy had nothing to do with race since the mayor himself was also black. Despite the controversy, no city official or member of law enforcement was ever held legally accountable for the MOVE bombing. Though the MOVE Commission’s final report was damning, and concluded that the eleven MOVE members who perished were the victims of homicide at the hands of the city, a grand jury declined to press charges against any city employee for their role in the deaths. The only person charged for anything to do with the events of May 13 was the sole adult MOVE member to survive the inferno, Ramona Africa, who served seven years in prison for inciting a riot and conspiracy. Ultimately, the MOVE members were widely abhorred–and ultimately fell victim to state violence–for their stark deviance from Reagan-era capitalist and neoconservative values; their threat lay not in their success (and thus competition with whites), but in the burden they represented in the 1980s racialized metanarrative of the welfare state and black family pathology.

Of Victims and Villains: Centering Children in the Wake of Disaster

Despite the many photos depicting the shocking scale of the destruction in Philadelphia in 1985, two images in particular circulated more than any others–a grainy image of a police helicopter dropping the bomb, a satchel made of C4 and Tovex explosives obtained in an off-the-record deal with a local FBI field agent, and a photo of the lone child survivor, Birdie Africa, sitting nude in the back of a police car after his escape from the burning home In fact, it was the children–the traumatized survivor and the five children who never made it out– around which the most heated debates, finger-pointing, cost-accounting, and moral outrage would center immediately following the fire. As the ash settled, Philadelphians reckoned with a deadly disaster seemingly precipitated on the one hand by police and city officials the media characterized as either deeply racist with a callous disregard for black lives or as wildly incompetent and ill-informed, and on the other hand, a radical organization the media characterized as deluded ideologues at best and at worst as dangerous terrorists. Faced with such bleak characterizations, everyone, it would seem, chose to focus on the children Most notably, the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission (also known as the MOVE Commission), which conducted a year-long investigation and held two weeks of hearings on public television, published a scathing report in 1986 that concluded, “the dead children are innocent victims of irrational, inept, and impatient acts of adults.”

Chaired by William H. Brown III, a widely respected African American lawyer and former head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the eleven-member Commission included local civic and religious leaders, as well as legal and law enforcement professionals–among them a former special prosecutor for the Watergate scandal and a former assistant director with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the only member of the Commission who did not live in the Philadelphia area at the time of the investigation. Each member of the MOVE Commission, six of whom were African American and three of whom were women, was appointed by the mayor, Wilson Goode, to conduct an “independent and impartial” investigation of the events of May 13, and all served without pay. The Commission also enlisted a staff of investigators and special counsel; among the latter was William B. Lytton III, who Ronald Reagan appointed as Deputy Special Counselor to the President shortly after he completed his service as staff director and chief counsel to the MOVE Commission

However central the children were to public discourse in the wake of the MOVE disaster–as well the ways in which the events of May 13th have been remembered since –the rhetorical function the children served was complex, contested, and sometimes paradoxical. Coverage of thirteen-year-old Birdie Africa, who became the reluctant subject of countless human-interest stories after the fire, including a feature story in People, often served a double function. While these stories did not shy away from the trauma Birdie experienced from the deadly fire itself, which left him badly burned and claimed the life of his mother, Rhonda Africa, they also underscored how much MOVE deviated from social norms, emphasizing that Birdie had been denied a “normal childhood” and “normal family” within the MOVE home and thus implicitly–or explicitly–placed much of the blame for his trauma on the adult MOVE members, including his own mother Meanwhile, when journalists and MOVE commissioners invoked the five children who perished in the fire, they generally did so to accentuate the dissonance between the police department’s militaristic actions and the domestic space in which they occurred and to reproach city leaders and law enforcement on the scene for their careless disregard for the safety of “innocents.” One might also imagine that for many of the commissioners–the majority of whom were themselves African American–their emphasis on the MOVE children may have been shaped in part by what were no doubt formative memories of high profile incidents during the Civil Rights era earlier in their lives that underscored just how much black children in the United States were denied the protections childhood afforded whites: the brutal lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, the Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls in 1963, and the violent mobs that awaited sixyear-old Ruby Bridges as she desegregated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960, for example

Moreover, even as the actions of the police suggested that in practice no distinction was made for age, or gender, when it came to the use of deadly force against the MOVE home on Osage Avenue, there are a number of likely reasons for why the young victims were at least afforded innocence rhetorically after the fact. More generally, from the string of child murders in Atlanta (who, like the MOVE victims, were all black) to the high profile kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh and the nationwide panic over accusations of child abuse at daycares–all of which were made even more visible through popular television movies and miniseries–Americans were worried about children in the 1980s And regarding the MOVE disaster specifically, very little was known about the five children who perished in the fire, as many journalists explicitly pointed out. With MOVE members eschewing traditional medical care, and at least one of the deceased children having been born inside one of the MOVE homes, even their exact ages were subject to some debate. Rather than offer up details that undermined the childhood innocence of victims, as seen with the Rice and Martin cases more recently, journalists in the 1980s struggled to unearth any possible minutiae to humanize the MOVE children and underscore their youth. “Little is known about the lives of the children,” Michael E. Ruane, a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, remarked in 1986, before adding “‘Phil [who Ruane previously noted was “about 12”] showed a particular interest in looking at books,’ wrote a welfare worker in Richmond, VA, after a MOVE house there was raided in 1980. He ‘could identify colors and shapes … [But] none of these children know what their last names are or their ages. In that sense, the MOVE children were largely pitied for their atypical life as well as for their untimely death, with news stories typically emphasizing all the ways in which they had been denied the trappings of a “normal” childhood–from sweets and toys to outside schooling–within the MOVE homes.

At the same time, their sheltered, nature-centered, and communal upbringing seemed to further accentuate their status in media accounts as true “innocents,” isolated from the outside world, primitive, and uncorrupted–portrayals which, of course, intersected with racial ideology in ways both implicit and explicit. A related theme also ran through much of the coverage of MOVE, that the MOVE house on Osage Avenue was more fortress than home, that the police response was likewise hyper-militarized, and that the bombing was paramount to urban warfare; in such portrayals, the MOVE children were akin to innocent victims of war. But perhaps most of all, the MOVE children seem to have been granted a kind of unique innocence because so many in the media and the wider public found the actions of the adults on both sides so abhorrent that the children compared favorably in contrast; in a narrative in which there appeared to be villains on all sides, it was imperative to find real victims.

For their part, MOVE members–who describe themselves online today as “a family of strong, serious, deeply committed revolutionaries” committed to the equal importance of all life, and of “natural laws” over the man-made laws of “the system”–officially define the central role of children in their organization as follows:

We dearly love our children. We protect them and watch over them so they will become healthier and stronger than we ourselves. We are all one family and all the adults help to look after the kids … We don’t send them off to school for the system’s brainwashing and indoctrination. We stay close to our children and they stay close to us

To be sure, MOVE did not have an official website in the 1980s, and were often deliberately tightlipped with outsiders about the exact content of “The Guidelines,” the philosophy penned by the organization’s co-founder and leader, John Africa, that comprised their core beliefs. Nonetheless, it was the MOVE children’s communal upbringing, insularity, and nontraditional schooling that functioned as a lightning rod for criticism of the organization throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The Value of Life: Race, Deviance, and Social Worth in the Reagan’s America

In many ways, criticisms such as these and the overwhelming emphasis on the children as the only “true” victims of the May 13th standoff reflected the political and cultural milieu and racial climate of the Reagan era. Historians have long characterized the late 1970s and 1980s as a period of conservative counter-revolution in the United States, in response to the cultural changes spurned by the antiwar activism, sexual revolution, and women’s liberation, gay liberation, and Black Power movements immediately prior Even as more and more women entered the work force, for example, popular culture in the late 1970s and 1980s valorized traditional “family values” and an imagined 1950s represented by nuclear families with stay at home mothers and children who respected rather than challenged authority, evidenced by the popularity of television shows like the revealingly titled Happy Days. A two-term president first elected in 1981, Ronald Reagan was the embodiment of these trends. As historian Sean Wilentz describes, “The odd mixture of restoring traditional assets while creating new opportunities, prospects, and benefits formed the mythic core of Reaganism. Its slogan might have been borrowed from the title of one of the hit films of the day: Back to the Future. Home, in Reaganite mythology, was a re-created bygone place of close-knit families and neighbors.

The communal homes inhabited by biologically unrelated, unmarried MOVE members and their children, and the dissonance between MOVE members and their neighbors described in many accounts represented the complete antithesis of the Reagan-era idealized home and the ostensibly traditional family within. As intersectional feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins has explained,

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children … In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not

That is, although MOVE’s communal households may have differed even from many of their African-American neighbors at the time, rhetorically situating black family units more generally apart from the idealized “American family” has long functioned as a core pillar of anti-blackness.

At the same time, the conservative counter-revolution had profound implications for social policy as well, particularly with regard to race. Welfare reform was among Reagan’s most notable–and lasting–interventions. In a 1976 campaign speech, Reagan famously invoked the “welfare queen”– a largely mythological, and implicitly Black, woman who defrauded the government of public assistance funds while driving a Cadillac–as a threat to American prosperity and a symbol of big government gone wrong. In doing so, Reagan repackaged the tropes of African American indolence and the pathological black family popularized by the 1965 Moynihan Report to buttress his own economic policies and dramatic cuts to welfare spending, and as historian Robert O. Self points out, “by the late 1980s, the welfare queen had become a stock character of media-driven politics. Similarly, historian Premilla Nadasen observes that “[welfare] reform efforts were premised on a discourse falsely suggesting that most welfare recipients were black and unworthy of assistance. Welfare became a code word for race and came to symbolize the perceived problems within poor black communities—single parenthood, family breakup, and unemployment. Media narratives about MOVE fit seamlessly into such rhetoric, and journalists liked to point out that despite its anti-establishment ethos, many MOVE members themselves reportedly collected welfare checks, according to an inside informant The myth of the welfare queen fostered a sharp rhetorical divide between “good” victims and easy villains, between the deserving poor, and a thoroughly demonized and largely urban class of lazy adults unwilling to work or properly care for their children–a divide that was deeply racialized. Meanwhile, the Reagan era was also marked by the growth and mounting political reach of the anti-abortion movement, which elevated the status of children–particularly the “unborn”–as rhetorical victims at the same time that welfare reforms and similar economic policies dramatically cut resources and services to mothers, infants, and children. Similar to media characterizations of the MOVE children as innocent victims of urban warfare, pro-life activists heralded a war against the most vulnerable children of all, the “unborn,” who must be protected at all costs In other words, the varied commentators on the MOVE disaster focused so often on the child victims in part because the actions of the adults involved–the police and city officials as well as the adult MOVE members–seemed so inscrutable or disagreeable to many, but also because the political and cultural context of 1980s America produced particular understandings about race, gender, and family. As Meiners reminds us, “The child reinforces the legitimacy and the perceived ahistoric neutrality and stability of concepts–such as innocence and consent–that undergird the criminal justice system, and, as [scholar and poet Fred] Moten suggests, also feed our disgust and distaste for unfamiliar adults”–and for years, Philadelphia media and law enforcement alike had presented MOVE adults as very unfamiliar, and unusual, indeed

Most often when the media, as well as the MOVE commissioners and the witnesses they deposed, referred to “the children” in conjunction with the 1985 police bombing, they focused specifically on the five children who perished in the fire or on the lone child survivor, Birdie. But so entrenched was the convention of using children as a rhetorical device through which to assess and humanize the disaster that even discussions of other players in the MOVE crisis–including the neighbors and the police officers on the scene–tended to invoke children. Describing in their book on the MOVE disaster the final moments leading up to the earlier 1978 confrontation between MOVE members and the police, journalists Randi and Michael Boyette intoned for dramatic effect, “A lot of fathers and husbands would not be coming home for dinner that night. Not only did such a characterization presume an all-male police force, it also invoked yet another set of potential victims of the MOVE crisis–the children of fathers whose dangerous work in law enforcement drew them away from their families for hour upon hour, and by implication, possibly forever.

Likewise, in the years leading up to the fatal fire and beyond, local journalists published numerous stories, exposes, and editorials on the plight of both the MOVE children themselves and the children residing in the wider Cobbs Creek neighborhood, which they often juxtaposed to underscore just how culturally out of place MOVE was within the neighborhood and how far-reaching the group’s negative impact had become. In these mainstream media accounts, journalists described the MOVE children as unwillingly subjected to a radical “back-tonature” lifestyle that included a strict raw food diet, no formal education within the public school system, “squalid” conditions exacerbated by the adults’ refusal to exterminate or turn away stray dogs, communal living with various unrelated adults, and many would allege, an increasingly violent and repressive culture that did not tolerate dissent In short, they were being denied the features of a “normal childhood,” from toys and junk food to the presumed stability of nuclear family life and thus they needed to be saved, such accounts alleged. Meanwhile, journalists maintained, the other children in Cobbs Creek were victimized by the barrage of political rhetoric peppered with obscenities emanating at all hours from a loud speaker attached to the MOVE home, as well as by the public health threat MOVE posed to the neighborhood with the piles of compost in their yard and their refusal to exterminate for rats or roaches. Cobbs Creek residents complained first to the city, then to the media, that their children were suffering from stress and nightmares because of MOVE’s disruptive presence, and many had even sought the services of trained therapists. As tensions increased between MOVE members and their neighbors prior to the bombing, community activists and journalists criticized the local government for not intervening, alleging that the city was unresponsive to the needs of black residents and implored them to “think of the children,” both within the MOVE house and the surrounding neighborhood. It was indeed the neighborhood children whose needs city officials attempted to address when they finally did intervene. Responding to the neighbors’ many complaints and mediators’ recommendations, the city arranged for social services to provide weekly counseling services every Monday for the children residing in Cobbs Creek. The group counseling sessions were designed to alleviate the stress the children experienced from the neighborhood conflict and to redress any “bad habits” playing with the MOVE children in their midst may have given them. As the Boyettes point out, “Until May 13, 1985, that once-a-week counseling program [for the children] was the only official assistance provided to the neighbors in response to their demands. The neighborhood children were not the only ones who needed counseling, however; soon, so too would Birdie Africa.

From “Family” to Family: The Redemption Narrative of Birdie Africa

In a lengthy firsthand account of her life in the MOVE organization published in 1985, Sharon Sims Cox–who no longer considered herself an active member but rather a sympathizer–described MOVE’s early years: “It started with people getting together rappin’ and it grew to a family. First it was mostly being taught the meaning of family–but a family working toward total revolution. The sense of family that Cox described, of individuals who shared a common political ethos and a united fate that transcended blood ties, only grew stronger as members formed several communal homes, collectively raising their children, and became a core tenant of the MOVE philosophy.

To be sure, such beliefs were hardly out of step with the long tradition of fictive kin practices within the African American community, a rather conspicuous omission in media accounts of MOVE, which were more focused on underscoring the members’ difference from other black residents in Philadelphia We return here to Hill Collins, who notes,

The traditional family ideal assigns mothers full responsibility for children and evaluates their performance based on their ability to procure the benefits of a nuclear family household. Within this capitalist marketplace model, those women who ‘catch’ legal husbands, who live in single family homes, who can afford private school and music lessons for their children, are deemed better mothers than those who do not. In this context, those African-American women who continue community-based child care challenge one fundamental assumption underlying the capitalist system itself: that children are ‘private property’ and can be disposed of as such

Collins’ assessment of fictive kin traditions here encapsulates why MOVE’s communal living fit seamlessly with its anti-capitalist (and anti-establishment) ethos. It also hints at the underlying reasons for most journalists’ ongoing fascination and discomfit with the family structure in which MOVE members lived. Some journalists, as well as numerous city officials testifying before the MOVE Commission, admitted it was often difficult to ascertain to whom each child “belonged” (itself a concept that likely would have been anathema to MOVE’s ideology)–even as most condemned the manner in which they died.

In contrast, news stories in the years surrounding the deadly fire would often note that MOVE members lived communally and referred to each other as brothers and sisters, or as family–but to seemingly denote that they were not really family, with virtually no exception, journalists used quotation marks around those words of familial relation when referring to MOVE members. At the same time, no such quotation marks were used when the journalist was describing MOVE’s “normal” neighbors, with whom they were constantly contrasted to underscore MOVE’s deviant family structure. For example, in one of the many articles focusing on the enormous loss suffered by the non-MOVE member residents of the neighborhood, the Philadelphia Inquirer writes, “Robin Neely, 28, race-car owner, part-time waitress, wife of an automotive mechanic and mother of three, is among the disposed. Her peaceful middle-class family life has been shattered by the MOVE conflagration.” The description of Mrs. Neely was rife with normative gender and class indicators that bolstered her status as a “true” victim Meanwhile, the same article used the commonplace quotation marks when describing the MOVE “family”; though they lost more than property, their family life was not disrupted, because they were not really family in the conventional sense (i.e., blood relation)–even though the practice of and respect for fictive kin had been a crucial part of African American culture since the days of slavery, something that never came up in news accounts that contrasted the devastation faced by neighborhood families versus the MOVE “family.” So ingrained was this linguistic convention of setting apart MOVE’s definition of family from other Philadelphians that even the typed transcripts produced by a professional transcription service from the televised public hearings held by the city’s Special Investigative Commission on MOVE used quotation marks around the words brothers, sisters, or family any time they were used in reference to MOVE members–again, despite being taken from oral testimony.

Philadelphia’s mayor, Wilson Goode, even more starkly underscored the “us vs. them” theme that pervaded discussions of MOVE when, in a televised address two days after the fire, he defended his own actions on May 13 by stating “This city knows MOVE. We know them as a group dedicated to the destruction of our way of life. Nowhere was MOVE’s deviance from and apparent threat to the American “way of life,” with all the normative ideals about family, gender, race, and class implicit within it, more apparent than in the countless stories focusing on the lone child survivor of the fire. In fact, two MOVE members survived the May 13th inferno–one child, Birdie Africa, and one adult, Ramona Africa. Birdie quickly became a human interest story, while the media cast Ramona as a masculinized and delusional radical; the former a “true” victim of the MOVE disaster, the latter a symbol of MOVE’s complicity in their own sad fate. After the boy’s parents divorced when he was just a toddler, his mother Rhonda Africa took him to live with the MOVE organization, where he was given the name Birdie Africa.

The now iconic image of a nude thirteen-year-old Birdie (though he looked much younger than his age, every story seemed to note) with visible burns in the back of a police car after being rescued from the fire was picked up by the Associated Press and appeared in newspapers and broadcasts around the globe. This one picture seemed to symbolize the horror Birdie lived through–both his unusual childhood in the communal home and the fire itself–and frequent human interest stories in the ensuing months and years detailed his reentry into a normal life, and a normal family, with his biological father and his father’s second wife somehow a symbol of hope and redemption.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, journalists reported on his difficult physical and emotional recovery at the burn unit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; many included the ostensibly heart-warming detail that the boy who, like other MOVE children, had been raised on a strict vegetarian and raw food diet, was given a hamburger from the McDonald’s in the hospital’s lobby. Later, after he went “home” with the father he did not know, to a life wholly unfamiliar to him, they reported that he was given a bike, a childhood necessity denied him in the communal MOVE house, and his heroic father refused to ever give him another raw vegetable again. In contrast to the Moynihan-esque language of black family pathology the media used to describe the MOVE homes these stories heralded the redemptive possibilities “real” family held for Birdie.

Two lengthy stories, in People magazine’s December 2, 1985 issue and the Philadelphia Inquirer two years after the fire, were particularly evocative of these themes. “He grew up as a wild child in the radical cult MOVE. Now, three years later, he has almost caught up, in an amazing transformation wrought by his own courage and his father’s love,” the second article’s teaser read. Both stories described how his father, Andino Ward, moved the boy to the suburbs, changed his name to Michael Moses Ward, cut off his dreadlocks despite the boy’s protests, and changed his diet. Setting up a virtual laundry list of contrasts between a socially deviant environment that stole Birdie’s childhood and the “normal” family through he was “reborn,” writer James Kunen intoned,

It would take more than a new name to enable Michael to begin a normal life. ‘Birdie’ had existed almost as a wild creature in the MOVE house, not unlike the countless dogs, cats and rats that lived there. According to the philosophy of John Africa—formerly Vincent Leaphart, a grade-school dropout—eating cooked food was ‘impure.’ So the children’s meals consisted solely of raw fruits and vegetables, occasionally with raw, often decaying, chicken or fish thrown in … The children, ill-clothed or naked and caked with grime, often slept on the roof. ‘Birdie’ did not know what a toothbrush was. Forbidden books, TV or movies, Birdie’s principal entertainment was running through a nearby park or helping the MOVE men construct a bunker atop the house. He never went to school and could not read, write, count, tell time or name the days of the week

Frequently compared to the nameless and largely absent men who cycled in and out of the communal MOVE homes, Andino was a real father, the stories emphasized. And in turn he taught Birdie the real definition of family. As the article in the Philadelphia Inquirer described, “According to MOVE, Andino wasn’t Birdie’s ‘natural’ father, only his ‘biological’ father, the boy said. ‘I made him understand,’ said Andino, ‘that … he was my son and my blood runs through his veins. He is part of me’.

That same definition of family as biological, as limited to blood relation, however did not seem to extend to the boy’s mother, Rhonda, who perished in the fire (and according to Birdie himself, in one of the last moments he saw her alive, she was in the basement trying to resuscitate another child–not her “biological” descendent–who had succumbed to smoke inhalation, while Ramona, not his “biological” mother, tried to pull him up onto an elevated walkway to safety after they had escaped into the alley through the basement window). In another context, if the two women were white, one might imagine the media characterizing their actions as maternal sacrifice. Instead, neither black woman was cast as a sympathetic character at a time when “the image of the ‘welfare queen’ framed the political discourse about race, class, and gender in modern America. Moreover, the redemptive quality of “real” family–that is, a normative nuclear, biologically related family–echoed throughout the many human interest stories written on Birdie, rendering the caring acts the MOVE women showed toward children that were not “theirs” invisible or irrelevant. The high value such stories placed on normative families was often quite explicit. For example, “The Miracle of Birdie Africa” reads:

Michael [formerly Birdie] watches the commercial flickering before him without expression, then smiles when Family Ties comes back on, the story of a normal American family, his story now. No visible trace remains of the wild child he was raised to be, no vestige of Birdie Africa, except for the scars, scars whose surface smoothness belies their depth and angry origin

The fact that he was watching Family Ties seems almost too perfect a fit for the story; the show, after all, centers around two hippie parents whose 1960s-era values are constantly at odds with their Reagan-worshipping, diehard capitalist son, who represents the new world order of the neoconservative 1980s.

Birdie’s smile was not present, however, when he testified via a pre-taped video recorded in a small room with only the Chair of the Commission and his father present as part of the televised hearings on MOVE in October of 1985. His name already changed to Michael, his dreadlocks shorn, the boy sadly described all he had lost–chiefly, his family as he knew it. Ultimately, he did not have the happy ending the numerous human-interest stories predicted. Hounded by the media his entire life, the man described by family as guarded and shy last agreed to speak to journalists in 2003 about his past, and his present. Ten years later, Michael Moses Ward, formerly known as Birdie Africa and a divorced father of two, died on September 20, 2013 at the age of 41. He had taken a Caribbean cruise with his father, stepmother, sisters, and their spouses, and on the final night, Birdie drowned in a hot tub. Though the national and international media reported his death, the announcement of the cause of death–drowning due to acute alcohol intoxication–weeks later received far less attention outside of the Philadelphia area It would seem that the “wild child’s” redemption through a nuclear family life was not as simple as it had once been made to appear, and sad endings to human-interest stories do not make good copy. In a final irony, Andino Ward, the father who became famous for turning Birdie Africa into Michael Moses Ward, a process that included cutting the boy’s dreadlocks as well as his ties to his former life, now wears his own hair in waist-length dreadlocks

“The Body Bags Containing the MOVE Children Was the Most Accusing Sight of All”

Whereas Birdie/Michael became the human face of the MOVE tragedy, a complex figure the media constructed as a symbol of hope and redemption moving forward, the five children who died on May 13 served as the most potent indictment of the city’s actions that fateful day. There were far fewer details available on who they were as individuals, nor would they ever answer–or refuse–a journalist’s questions year after year as they grew into adulthood. Consequently, they remained enigmatic in media accounts and the public imaginary, invoked most often collectively, and known simply as “the children.”

In the wake of the bombing, the city’s Special Investigation Commission was highly critical of the police action in Philadelphia, and grieved for the “true victims,” the children who perished in the fire alongside adults whose radicalism and intractability seemingly made them unworthy of grief. The Commission was formed at the behest of the mayor (which many feared–incorrectly, they soon found out–would result in a toothless advisory board reluctant to criticize the city’s leadership), and conducted a year long investigation and two weeks of televised public hearings that included testimony from the fire commissioner, the police commission, police officers on the scene, the mayor, the city’s managing director, and young Birdie.

In 1986, the Commission’s damning final report made international news, and again, the children took center stage. “At least five children were killed in the inferno which engulfed the small row house known as the 6221 Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985,” the report began, and charged that “Neither the adults who cared for them nor the adults who governed had the ingenuity, humility, or sagacity to reject the challenge of and avoid the dangers of a violent confrontation.” It continued, “the evidence gathered by the Commission reveals how the children’s lives were forfeited to ideologies which are incompatible with urban lifestyles, to official policies of procrastination, mundane bureaucratic procedures, to uninformed and indecisive [police leadership],” among other adult sins Amid detached analyses of the particular explosives used in the bomb, critiques of the conflicting reports given by police and fire officials, and scale drawings of the tactical plan in place on the morning of May 13, the commissioners saved their most emotionally charged and morally outraged rhetoric for a lengthy section in the majority opinion report entitled “The Blood of Children”–itself a phrase commonly used in anti-abortion campaigns that venerated childhood innocence dating back as far as the nineteenth century Therein, they surmised,

At the heart of this tragedy is the indelible stain made by the blood of innocent children on the history of Philadelphia, its claim to humane values, and its standing among civilized societies. That blood stain also marks the lives of every person who accepted a role in their death from the highest office suite to the Osage asphalt street. The bomb and the unrestrained fire are conclusive evidence of a wanton and callous disregard for the lives and the safety of the children. The inability of any person in authority or involved at any level to articulate a clear definition of the status of the children refutes any claim that their well-being was a major concern … [To the police under Commissioner Sambor] they were simply “MOVE children.” As a result, there was no specific planning for their protection in the event of violence, and no restraint in weaponry or explosives because of their presence

Left unsaid, and largely unaddressed, was whether or not the commissioners would have found such lack of “restraint in weaponry or explosives” acceptable had the police only been dealing with adults. In other words, would dropping a bomb on an inhabited home–a home in a black neighborhood–be acceptable if there weren’t children present?

Instead, their assessment of the city’s moral failings in its response to the MOVE standoff remained squarely centered on the children. Addressing the suggestion that Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor made during his testimony that perhaps the MOVE children had become so brainwashed that they would themselves have fought the police if given the chance, the Commissioners wrote, “Have children become so threatening or has human compassion become so diluted that armed men would seriously accept the challenge to battle children, even armed children. The horror of a mind that could seriously consider the prospect of armed conflict with nine year old boys and girls is frightening. The thought that such a mind existed in the police commissioner of a major American city is sobering.” Likewise, the resonance of their words for the recent death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, killed on sight by police for waving what turned out to be a toy gun is chilling. But a notable divergence with these more contemporary high profile cases of police brutality is that in the immediate aftermath of the MOVE tragedy, nearly everyone across the political spectrum seemed to agree that the children who perished in the fire–some as old as 15–were indeed children and deserved the protections that status should have conferred upon them regardless of race. As seen in the Commission’s final report, any implication to the contrary was swiftly and squarely denounced, even if many disagreed regarding who had denied the MOVE children a true childhood, the adult MOVE members or the police who dropped a bomb on their home.

Each time the anniversary rolls around in May, Philadelphians, and the Philadelphia media in particular, seem to engage in a collective soul-searching about the legacy of MOVE. But there too, discussions of the ethics of what happened primarily invoke the children. One such article commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fire, for example, recalled that “In the aftermath, city officials would be second-guessed for their hurried, secretive planning and for their failure to grab the MOVE children before the assault—a step that would have been legally and logistically feasible because the children went to a park regularly. And the radicals would be accused of having used the children as shields, needlessly exposing them to a fate they were too young to choose for themselves.” The article went on to quote two key figures in the day’s events, Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond and the Investigative Commission head William H. Brown, III, who had both been interviewed recently about the fire twenty years prior. "The operation should not have gone forward that morning without knowledge that the kids were out of there," Commissioner Richmond lamented. Brown, for his part, noted “"It makes no sense, even today. Every time I think about it, the angrier I get. There was no reason to drop that bomb. Whatever people thought about the MOVE adults, there were children inside that house. The children have also remained central to the ways in which the MOVE disaster has been remembered in the media since as well. The title of a lengthy editorial published in Philadelphia Magazine commemorating the 27th anniversary of the fire is particularly revealing in this regard: “Philly’s Bomb-Dropping, Guns-Blazing, Child-Murdering Day,” the headline blared.

In 1985 and today, the city of Philadelphia has yet to fully grapple with the question of whether the police actions would be considered unjust if only adult lives had been lost. Many of them no doubt parents themselves, the commissioners’ and critics’ visceral outrage at the violent loss of five young lives is of course understandable. Yet the overwhelming focus on the children following the tragedy and in the yearly commemorative cost-accounting prevents grappling with more difficult questions about race and policing more broadly construed, which clearly continue to resonate today. We should of course mourn the loss of the five children lost on May 13th, but also the six adults. The critical interventions by scholars of race, carceral studies, and police and prison abolition–as well as M4BL activists, with their most recent refrain of “all black lives matter”–push us to examine the legacy of the MOVE disaster in a new light. They all compel us to emphasize the need for structural change and challenge a value-laden rhetoric about “good” victimhood. After all, while the cultural, economic, and political milieu has changed between the Reagan Era and the present, the alarming frequency of African American deaths at the hands of the police has not. Moreover, just as no city official or member of law enforcement faced any legal repercussion for the 1985 bombing of MOVE despite the Special Investigative Committee’s findings, so too has been the case in countless incidents of black lives ended unjustly by police in the interim. The recent trial and conviction of Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd stood out for being the exception to an all too pervasive rule. We should not need to defend the inherent value of any black life, child or adult. Instead, we need meaningful policy change regarding the role of policing in American communities. Such change would entail scrutinizing the latitude with which law enforcement may use deadly force and the impunity with which they have used and continue to use it. It would mean stopping the continued militarization of the police that results in law enforcement using surplus military equipment and tactics designed for warfare against citizens on U.S. soil–from bombs in Philadelphia to tanks on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.

Ironically, the rhetorical emphasis on innocence in media and public discourse around police violence has never protected children, then or now. A particularly sobering postscript to this story is the controversy that ensued after news broke in April 2021 about the remains of a child, or possibly children, who perished in the MOVE bombing. Those human remains had been held, and on occasion shown to students or private visitors, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for the past thirty-six years, and had also been used in a demonstration during an online forensic anthropology class at Princeton University The presumptive innocence assigned to the MOVE children after the bombing, then, did not prevent them from being killed in the first place, nor did it protect them from being exploited posthumously. Finally, the outrage so widely expressed in 1985 that the MOVE children had been denied the protections that their young age should have afforded them likely rings hollow to the families of black children and youth who have continued to be disproportionately punished in schools, arrested and imprisoned for minor offenses, or killed by law enforcement officers in the so-called “post-racial” era