Forum on the 31st anniversary of the MOVE bombing will relive the horrific day when City officials oversaw the murder of its citizens by police and others.
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2016 will mark the third year that a Friday the 13th, a day and date that an estimated 17-21 million Americans fear, will coincide with the May anniversary of the horrific 1985 bombing of a black family by the City of Philadelphia, which, in addition to destroying a middle-class neighborhood by fire, killed 11 men, women and children, whose family and allies to this day speak their names often and who at 6pm this Friday at Abiding Ministries Church (57th & Washington Ave) will participate in the ‘Never Forget Forum.’
City officials then at odds with MOVE – a radical back-to-nature group with strong social justice values whom in the late 1970s was seized upon by Philadelphia police and their brute force – opted to, instead of seeking federal intervention or a range of other avenues to get the perceived irritants to mitigate their behavior, tossed a bomb consisting of sticks of Tovex TR2 with C-4 onto the roof of MOVE’s compound and, once a fire ignited, let it burn for hours.
“There were so many options,” CBS 3 reporter Mr. Walt Hunter, who is retiring from the news business at the end this month and who was working a radio reporter during the 1978 confrontation and a television reporter during the 1985 bombing, said in critique of a government who saw use of force as its only recourse to alleviate tensions between MOVE and the neighbors who complained regularly about them.
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Firefighters were on the scene, remembers award-winning journalist Mr. Linn Washington, but they didn’t attempt to extinguish the blaze, despite the crowd’s demand to fight the f*cking fire. But as bad as that day was, said Mr. Washington last May at a panel featuring journalists who covered Philly police’s altercations with MOVE, “the aftermath was worst.”
Mr. Washington, who had begun covering the May 13th fiasco in the early morning when more than 500 cops fired thousands of rounds of ammunition into the Osage Ave rowhome – “bullets were raining down out the sky like hail” – lamented the fact that not a single city official faced prosecution let alone was convicted.
A speaker last year at the 30th anniversary rally suggested that if city officials responsible for the many deaths were held accountable then, than today a different type of political paradigm for law enforcement and government accountability would exist.
Last May, Mr. Hunter, like countless others who witnessed the bombing in person or on television, said he’s still looking for answers and closure. Mr. Washington summed up the whole experience in one word: surreal.
Mr. Michael Coard, a prominent Philadelphia attorney, civil-rights activist and media personality, this week penned an article in The Philadelphia Tribune calling for the prosecution of the “each perpetrator because there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
Ironic it is that the bombing of MOVE revealed one of the catalysts for their existence: justice’s double-standard.
“For some, the book is thrown at them; and for others, the book is ripped up,” said Mr. Washington.
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