zuky:
MOVE massacre: On May 13, 1985, 11 people, including five children, were burned alive after police, acting on orders from Democratic Mayor Wilson Goode in collusion with the Feds, dropped a powerful incendiary bomb on the Osage Avenue home of the largely Black MOVE commune in West Philadelphia.
The firebombing followed a 12-hour siege during which the cops unloaded over 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house. Firefighters on site were held back, and cops shot at anyone who tried to escape the burning building. The inferno spread, destroying 61 houses and leaving hundreds homeless in the African American neighborhood.
This is one of my earliest memories.
Nobody was ever criminally charged for this atrocity — because it fit comfortably into the larger pattern of ongoing white supremacist violence and ethnic cleansing (e.g. white race riots, lynch mobs, redlining) perpetrated or supported by the state. This was 1985, almost two decades after the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — the attack on Black communities was strongly resurgent in the Reagan era, with the CIA’s documented introduction of crack to inner cities, alongside the “war on drugs” and the reformulated “southern strategy” racist propaganda about “states rights” and “welfare queens” who defiled America’s “shining city on a hill” (i.e. white people paradise!).
More on the Philadelphia firebombing from Democracy Now! including an interview with Mumia Abu-Jamal and Ramona Africa.
(via nezua)
