Today in Labor History May 13, 1985: The city of Philadelphia bombed the house of the radical black activist group MOVE. The police dropped a bomb made with C-4 explosives from a helicopter over the African American residential neighborhood. When survivors tried to flee, the cops shot at them. As a result, eleven MOVE members died, including five children. Furthermore, the bomb and fires destroyed sixty-two others homes in the neighborhood. Consequently, 250 Philadelphians became homeless. Adding insult to injury, the bones of some of the victims were transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where professors used them to teach courses on forensic evidence.
MOVE was a black liberation environmental movement. Many surviving MOVE members were still in prison as late as 2020. Mumia Abu Jamal, who was an associate of MOVE, is still in prison on trumped up charges of killing a cop. He is currently severely ill with diabetes and heart disease. The government has bombed civilians from the air several other times in history. The first was during the Tulsa anti-black pogrom of 1921. They also aerially bombed striking Appalachian miners that same year.
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