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Organizers and surviving members of the MOVE family march down the 6200 block of Osage Avenue on May 13, 2021. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
It was 36 years ago that city officials targeting The Movement, a Black liberation group, flew a helicopter over a West Philadelphia home and dropped a bomb on top of it killing 11 people, five of them children.
Officials let the subsequent massive fire burn. More than 60 houses in the predominantly Black neighborhood were reduced to rubble.
More than three decades later, “the scars of the West Philly bombing continue to devastate Philadelphia’s Black community,” Abdul-Aliy Muhammad wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley speaks at a press conference ahead of the opening of the Esperanza Community Vaccination Center in North Philadelphia on April 9, 2021. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
Thomas Farley has resigned as Philadelphia’s health commissioner due to his involvement in the mishandling of remains of the victims in the 1985 MOVE bombing.
His departure comes less than a month after news broke that a set of remains, thought to be 12-year-old Tree Africa and 14-year-old Delisha Africa, were held at both the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University for decades and studied by their anthropology and archaeology departments, without the family’s knowledge. The children were inside the MOVE headquarters when the City of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on the West Philly home, killing 11 people in total and destroying 61 homes in the neighborhood.