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Protesters demonstrated this week outside Penn Museum over the handling of the recently revealed MOVE remains. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
The 1985 bombing of MOVE headquarters, a rowhouse at 6221 Osage Avenue, remains one of the largest stains on Philadelphia history. City officials killed 11 people, including five children, after police dropped explosives on the home via helicopter and authorities let the fire burn. Thirty-six years later, four surviving mothers of the youngest victims say even in death, their children can’t find peace.
On two recent occasions, Janine, Janet, Sue, and Consuewella Africa said they were shocked to learn how human remains of their family members were treated and kept from them via a muddled chain of custody.
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Philadelphia’s racist past resurfaced in recent weeks, with the public disclosure that the bones of one or two African American children killed by the city’s police in 1985 were being used in an online Princeton University course, “Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,” without the knowledge of their families.
May 13th marks the 36th anniversary of the day the city of Philadelphia bombed its own citizens. On that day in 1985, police surrounded the home of MOVE, a radical Black liberation organization that was defying orders to vacate. Police flooded the home with water, filled the house with tear gas, and blasted the house with automatic weapons, all failing to dislodge the residents. Finally, police dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter, killing eleven people: six adults and five children. The fire burned an entire city block to the ground, destroying over sixty homes.