Remember May 1985 MOVE Massacre

“Attention MOVE. This is America.” That was the ultimatum issued over a cop bullhorn on 13 May 1985. Soon after, the Philadelphia police, working together with the FBI and BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), dropped high-powered explosives onto the MOVE commune. When MOVE members attempted to escape the ensuing fire, hundreds of heavily armed cops drove them back into the inferno under a hail of gunfire. Eleven black people, among them five children, were slaughtered. The fire was deliberately allowed to rage for five hours, reducing the entire neighborhood to smoldering rubble and leaving hundreds homeless.

The firebombing, ordered by Democratic mayor Wilson Goode and orchestrated by the Feds, was the culmination of years of harassment, beatings, arrests and police assaults against MOVE, a largely black, radical back-to-nature collective. It was also meant as a message to those who might “get out of line.” Ed Meese, Republican president Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, cited this state terrorism as a “good example” for other police to follow. Unlike much of the left, the Spartacist League protested this heinous massacre at the time, describing it as “the signature of the Reagan years” and vowing to sear the atrocity into the memory of the working class.

Not one of the government officials behind this monstrous crime was ever penalized, much less jailed. But Ramona Africa served seven years in prison for the “crime” of being the sole adult survivor. To this day, eight MOVE members still languish in prison, falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died from the cops’ own crossfire during a 1978 police assault on MOVE’s former home in Powelton Village. It was in the wake of his courageous defense of these MOVE prisoners that Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed up and sentenced to death in 1982. The Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, sends monthly stipends to the eight MOVE prisoners, as well as Mumia, as an expression of solidarity with those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression.

Free the MOVE prisoners! Free Mumia! The American workers revolution will avenge the MOVE martyrs!