The MOVE Bombing of 1985: The Day Philadelphia Dropped a Bomb on Itself
- Daniel Holland
- 4 minutes ago
- 7 min read
On the morning of 13th, May, 1985, a police helicopter circled above a quiet residential street in West Philadelphia. Below it sat a row of brick houses that looked like thousands of others across the city. Children had grown up there. Families had planted small gardens out front. By the end of the day, sixty one of those homes would be gone, eleven people would be dead, and Philadelphia would be permanently marked by a decision that still feels almost impossible to comprehend.
Locally, the event is often referred to simply as May 13. It needs no qualifier. Nationally, it became known as the MOVE bombing, the only recorded instance in which an American city dropped an explosive device from the air onto its own neighbourhood.
This is how it happened, and what followed.
What MOVE actually believed
To understand why Osage Avenue ended the way it did, it helps to understand what MOVE thought it was doing in the world. The group was often flattened into a caricature: armed radicals, anti social eccentrics, or a dangerous cult. The reality was more complicated, and far more unsettling to mainstream society.
Even the group’s name was misunderstood. MOVE was not an acronym. John Africa chose it because, as he explained, “everything that’s alive moves. If it didn’t, it would be stagnant, dead.” Movement meant life. Stillness meant decay. When MOVE members greeted each other, they said they were “on the MOVE”.
John Africa’s worldview was rooted in a deep suspicion of anything artificial. Anything living, growing, or organic was considered necessary and sacred. Anything manufactured, processed, or chemically altered was treated with alarm. Members often described him as having an intuitive, almost spiritual connection to nature.
This philosophy shaped every part of daily life, especially food. MOVE rejected processed food entirely. Members avoided pasteurised products, chemically treated produce, and foods designed to prolong shelf life. Genetically modified or seedless foods were seen as violations of nature.
Food was not just fuel. Health, MOVE believed, could not be created in a laboratory. It came from nature or not at all. Members were encouraged to eat locally grown food, preferably food they had grown themselves. Exotic imports were frowned upon, not for environmental calculations, but because they disrupted the relationship between people, land, and community.
Waste barely existed in MOVE thinking. Food scraps were not rubbish but nutrients waiting to return to the soil. Members kept what they called “life buckets”, containers of food waste that would later fertilise the ground. To neighbours, this looked unsanitary. To MOVE, it was respectful. What others called garbage, they saw as life continuing in another form.
This difference in perspective fuelled constant conflict. When scraps were dumped on the ground, neighbours complained. When MOVE began digging holes instead, rumours spread that they were building tunnels, claims later repeated by police as justification for aggressive action.
MOVE avoided consumer culture wherever possible. Furniture was scavenged or improvised. Tree branches were used as seating. Plates were sometimes folded from paper bags. Paper could be burned for heat in winter. Purchases were made in bulk, and containers were reused if they were glass, wood, or cardboard.
Appearance mattered too. John Africa and most of his followers wore their hair in dreadlocks, influenced by Rastafari culture. MOVE advocated a radical form of green politics that combined Black liberation with environmental and animal rights activism. They opposed modern science, medicine, and technology, believing these systems existed primarily to control and exploit rather than heal.
Members described themselves as deeply religious, though not in any conventional sense. Life itself was sacred. Humans were not above animals, and animals were not above the Earth. Justice, in MOVE’s view, had to apply to all living beings or it was not justice at all.
As John Africa had done, members changed their surnames to Africa as a rejection of inherited names tied to enslavement.
MOVE’s activism reflected these beliefs. Members protested against puppy mills, zoos, circuses, industrial pollution, nuclear power, and police brutality. Writing years later, journalist Ed Pilkington described MOVE as a fusion of Black liberation politics and 1960s counterculture, blending revolutionary Black power with nature focused communal living.
The courts are the tools of industrial plague, granting big business privilege to poison our Earth. - John Africa
Arrival on Osage Avenue
In 1981, MOVE relocated to a row house at 6221 Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighbourhood of West Philadelphia. Cobbs Creek was a stable, largely Black, working and middle class area. The houses were closely packed. Disputes travelled quickly from one front step to the next.
Complaints to the city began almost immediately. Neighbours reported piles of rubbish around the property, verbal confrontations, threats, and relentless loudspeaker announcements. Over time, MOVE reinforced the house with wooden barricades and constructed a bunker like structure on the roof.
One detail would later become crucial. The bullhorn that featured so prominently in official descriptions of MOVE’s behaviour had been broken and inoperable for three weeks prior to the police action. Despite this, MOVE continued to be framed as actively escalating its tactics.
Arrest warrants and the language of terror
By 1985, city officials had decided that negotiation was no longer an option. Police obtained arrest warrants for four MOVE members, charging them with parole violations, contempt of court, illegal possession of firearms, and making terroristic threats.
Mayor Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor, and Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor formally classified MOVE as a terrorist organisation. It was a powerful label, and one that would shape every decision that followed.
Residents of Osage Avenue were evacuated ahead of police action. Many were told they would be able to return within twenty four hours. Most left with a change of clothes and little else.
13th, May, 1985
Just after 5:30 a.m. on Monday, 13th, May, 1985, nearly five hundred police officers arrived at Osage Avenue, joined by city managing director Leo Brooks. Water and electricity to the MOVE house were shut off in an attempt to force the occupants out.
Commissioner Sambor addressed the house over a loudspeaker. “Attention MOVE: This is America. You have to abide by the laws of the United States.” The occupants were given fifteen minutes to surrender.
No one came out.
Inside the house were thirteen people: seven adults and six children.
The gunfight
Police attempted to force entry using tear gas. MOVE members responded with gunfire. What followed was a ninety minute exchange involving semi automatic and automatic weapons.
Police fired more than ten thousand rounds of ammunition. One officer’s flak jacket was struck in the back, but he was not seriously injured. No MOVE members were hit during the gunfight.
At around 2 p.m., Commissioner Sambor authorised an extraordinary escalation.
Dropping the bomb
From a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, Philadelphia Police Lieutenant Frank Powell dropped two explosive devices onto the roof of 6221 Osage Avenue. Police referred to them as “entry devices”.
Each device weighed approximately 1.5 pounds and was constructed from Tovex, a commercial dynamite substitute, combined with two pounds of FBI supplied C 4. The target was the fortified rooftop bunker.
The devices detonated after forty five seconds. The explosion ignited a gasoline powered generator, starting a fire.
Letting it burn
Firefighters had already soaked the building earlier that day. After the explosion, officials made a decision that would define the tragedy. The fire would be allowed to burn.
Authorities later said the plan was to let the flames destroy the rooftop bunker so tear gas could be dropped into the house. For roughly ninety minutes, the fire burned out of control.
When firefighters eventually moved in, gunfire was reported and they were ordered back. The blaze spread rapidly along Osage Avenue and onto Pine Street. Sixty one homes were destroyed across two city blocks. Around two hundred and fifty people were left homeless.
The fire was finally declared under control at 11:47 p.m.
Deaths and survival
Eleven people died inside the MOVE house. Six were adults and five were children.
Those killed were John Africa, Rhonda Africa, Theresa Africa, Frank Africa, Conrad Africa, Tree Africa, Delisha Africa, Netta Africa, Little Phil Africa, Tomaso Africa, and Raymond Africa.
Only two people survived. One was Ramona Africa, the only surviving adult. The other was Birdie Africa, who was thirteen years old.
Ramona Africa later said police fired at those attempting to escape the burning house. Police disputed this, claiming MOVE members continued firing as they moved in and out of the building. The accounts have never been fully reconciled.
Investigations and apologies
Public outrage was immediate. Mayor Goode appointed the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, chaired by attorney William H. Brown III.
The Commission’s report, released on 6th, March, 1986, was blunt. “Dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable,” it concluded. The report criticised the use of explosives, the failure to control the fire, and the lack of clear command responsibility.
Goode issued a formal public apology. No city official was criminally charged. Sambor resigned later in 1985, saying he had been made a “surrogate” for the mayor.
Courts and compensation
Ramona Africa was convicted of riot and conspiracy and served seven years in prison.
In 1996, a federal jury ordered the city to pay $1.5 million to Ramona Africa and relatives of two victims, finding that Philadelphia had used excessive force and violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Ramona Africa received $500,000 for pain, suffering, and physical harm.
In 2005, residents displaced by the destruction of Osage Avenue were awarded $12.83 million following a civil trial overseen by Clarence Charles Newcomer.
Rebuilding failure after failure
Reconstruction began later in 1985. Residents who returned soon discovered the new houses were poorly built. By 1995, inspections found all sixty one homes were not up to code.
By 2005, the city offered residents $150,000 to leave. More than two thirds accepted. In 2016, the city committed to rebuilding again.
In January 2023, Mike Africa Jr., the great nephew of John Africa, bought 6221 Osage Avenue with plans to turn part of it into a memorial.
The remains scandal
Decades later, another shock emerged. The remains of two children killed in the fire had been kept by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and later transferred to researchers at Princeton University without the family’s knowledge.
They were used in an online forensic anthropology course. “They were bombed, and burned alive,” Mike Africa Jr. said when the news broke. “And now you wanna keep their bones.”
Further investigations revealed mishandling of remains by city officials, including unauthorised cremations ordered in 2017. In November 2024, additional remains believed to belong to Delisha Africa were discovered at the University of Pennsylvania.
Why May 13 still matters
The MOVE bombing is not just a historical curiosity. It is a warning about what happens when fear, militarised policing, and political expediency replace restraint.
As Ramona Africa later put it, “They could have waited us out. They chose to burn us out.”
Osage Avenue has been rebuilt once again. But 13th, May, 1985 still hangs over Philadelphia, a date that reminds the city of what happens when authority decides that force is easier than patience.
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