They let it burn.
Don’t ever forget that part. The government of the City of Philadelphia — under the leadership of its first Black mayor, Wilson Goode — dropped a bomb on the West Philly home of Black MOVE members, and let the 6200 block of Osage Avenue burn to the ground. Never forget that part.
As we commemorate the tragedy at the heart of the so-called City of Brotherly Love, we are called to reckon not just with what happened on May 13, 1985, but to confront a deeper, ongoing and historic pattern of neglect, abuse and racialized violence.
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We must undertake the Herculean task of processing the trauma, understanding the heroes in this history, and wrestling with the legacy of a city that may never atone for this particular sin. A sin delivered by way of a firebomb. A sin that took the lives of 11 Black Philadelphians — men, women and children. A sin that burned a neighborhood to ash while the City’s Fire Department stood down with orders to “Let It Burn.”
Never forget.
What’s the difference between a cult and a revolutionary organization?
Answer: We might never know. One family’s revolution can be another society’s cult. One neighborhood’s nuisance may be someone else’s salvation. The particularities of MOVE — their ideology, their confrontations, their persistence — must be situated within a long, troubled history in the so-called birthplace of American democracy.
This is complicated. Most of you who are reading this would never want to live in a neighborhood where there was a 20th century MOVE compound. Acknowledging the brutality and injustice of the MOVE bombing does not require a revisionist portrayal of MOVE as a wholly benign, universally welcomed neighbor. Many neighbors on Osage Avenue described years of escalating tension — barricades, bullhorn messages blaring day and night, unleashed dogs, visible weapons, and threats that disrupted daily life.
For Philadelphia to move forward, we must first return — return to Osage Avenue, return to the smoke and silence … return to the moment when the capacity for compassion and justice was incinerated alongside Black life and home.
One resident in the MOVE documentary Philly on Fire recounts how his children had to do their homework in the basement just to escape the noise. These accounts matter. They remind us that MOVE’s presence in the neighborhood was, at times, aggressive and deeply unsettling for many of the Black families who lived nearby. Recognizing these dynamics does not justify the state’s militarized response — nothing does — but it does demand a fuller, more honest accounting of how fear, frustration and official neglect spiraled into one of the most catastrophic moments in Philadelphia’s history.
This fire — this literal and metaphorical fire — is a smoldering intersection of American democracy’s promises and its betrayals. It’s a byproduct of racialized capitalism. Of a society built on the backs of enslaved Africans and still willing, even in 1985 — and perhaps still today — to treat their descendants as disposable.
In some sick way, the MOVE bombing could only have happened here. In Philadelphia. In the “cradle of liberty” that will never fully reckon with this nation’s original sins of genocide and slavery. This is our legacy. And if there’s any path through the trauma, it begins with a clear-eyed look into the flames of Philly’s fires.
Every day.
But especially on May 13. That’s what Philly on Fire — producer Gary Cohen’s searing, essential documentary directed by Ross Hockrow — compels us to do. It refuses to let us look away. It forces us to stare into the blaze, to confront not only the physical fire that devoured a city block, but the ideological one that still burns in our civic institutions. It reminds us that this was not just a moment — it was an indictment. Of power. Of racism. Of America’s social contract.
Many residents of the 6200 block of Osage Avenue remember that the fire was allowed to burn. They remember leaving their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs — never to return. And while we must center the loss of the 11 MOVE members killed that day, we must also account for the collateral damage: the ruined homes, the destroyed keepsakes, the scorched memory-scapes of hundreds of families. The photographs, the letters, the toys, the wedding dresses — burned into footnotes of municipal cruelty.
And yet this trauma does not stop with MOVE or its immediate survivors. The psychic residue lingers in the lives of Black Philadelphians who had no direct affiliation with MOVE, but who understood in their bones that what happened on May 13, 1985, could just as easily have happened to them. This is not simply a local tragedy. It is a searing national wound. And it is still gaping and raw.
There is no getting past a wound like this without going directly through it.
There are those — like myself — who have wrestled with how best to write about this history, how to shape it into something that can transcend trauma. But Philly on Fire reminds us that transcendence may not be possible (or desired) here. That reckoning might not arrive. The burn may never cool.
Forty years later, the people still feel the pain. The violence of the Philly/Philadelphia fire is still vivid. The lessons, still elusive.
MOVE is our Four Little Girls.
MOVE is our Black Wall Street.
MOVE is our Iran-Contra, Uzis, and crack cocaine
MOVE is our modern-day race riot — except the violence came not from White or Black mobs but from city officials with bombs and bullets.
A haunting reminder of America’s limits
The brilliance of Philly on Fire lies in its ability to humanize this history without sanitizing it. We are (re)introduced to Ramona Africa, whose life and leadership remain central to MOVE’s ongoing story. We meet Jim Bergheiser, a former PPD officer now working as a janitor, who recounts the tragedy with complicated honesty. And we follow the story of Birdie Africa — Marcus Moses Ward — the lone child survivor, pulled from the inferno into the arms of that White officer — chastised after as a “nigger lover” for daring to save a Black life.
Birdie’s survival, his trauma, and his early death in 2005 are treated with care, but I wrestle with the emphasis on the innocence of the children over the full dignity of all the lives lost. It is not enough to mourn the children and minimize the adults. The claim that officials would have acted differently had they known children were in the house is an insult to our memory and intelligence. It assumes that some lives matter more than others. That some fires are more regrettable than others. That some deaths are more tragic than others. That’s the logic of white supremacy — and it must be refuted.
The MOVE bombing is not an aberration. It is a reflection of what America is capable of. MOVE lived differently, thought differently, and loved fiercely. They practiced composting, raw food diets, and environmental sustainability decades before these were trending on Instagram. They fought in the 1970s the same battles Black Lives Matter would fight 50 years later. The same struggles. The same surveillance. The same policing. The same fire.
This is why MOVE remains a haunting reminder of the limits of American democracy. Especially in Philadelphia.
This is not simply a local tragedy. It is a searing national wound. And it is still gaping and raw.
Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman’s masterful novel, offers a fictionalized but no less powerful account of the bombing’s aftermath. The novel’s protagonist, Cudjoe, is a writer — much like Wideman himself — grappling with how to make sense of what cannot be made sense of. Early in the book, Cudjoe recounts the teachings of a MOVE-like figure known as “King,” a clear nod to John Africa. His Tree of Life philosophy focused on harmony, self-love, and resistance to despair. Wideman’s words echo MOVE’s foundational values and serve as a counterpoint to a society intent on spiritual and environmental destruction.
Wideman doesn’t flinch. He shows us the devastation, but also the reckoning. He reminds us that even the revolutionaries can be studied, archived, and dissected by the very systems they sought to overturn.
In one scene, Cudjoe interviews a woman who once despised MOVE but eventually comes to see their purpose. Her transformation is complicated and incomplete, just like the city’s relationship with the bombing. And just like our own.
Today, 40 years later, the story is still unfinished. Local museums and universities disgustingly mishandled the remains of some victims. Legal battles have only recently been settled. The trauma persists.
There is no getting past a wound like this without going directly through it. For Philadelphia to move forward, we must first return — return to Osage Avenue, return to the smoke and silence left after the fire, return to the voices of the survivors and the still-smoldering anger of the neighbors, return to the moment when the capacity for compassion and justice was incinerated alongside Black life and home.
This return is not about reanimating pain for spectacle or shame. It is about reckoning. It is about placing memory above convenience, accountability above amnesia. Healing requires an unflinching confrontation with the truth: that the city, its institutions, and its citizens allowed this to happen. And then let it burn. Healing requires us to acknowledge the thorny facts of MOVE’s adverse impact on those Black communities that burned. If we hope to reclaim justice in Philadelphia, we must excavate what was buried beneath the ashes — not just the facts, but the feelings, the failures, the forgotten names.
We must teach it in schools. We must preserve it in public memory. We must name what was lost, not just in lives, but in trust, in moral leadership, in civic integrity. Only then can healing begin — not through forgetting, but through a radical commitment to remember.
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