I don’t recall the details of what I was doing when I first heard of the bombing of Osage Ave. It was 35 years ago, and I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast this morning.
I can tell you that I was at my Grandmother’s house. I can recall sitting in the living room on 30th St in front of the TV in the living room, with the news on with questions Catherine would not answer.
Bonnie eventually picked me up and those questions continued as we traveled to Limekiln Pike.
For those of you new to the story:
A Black Liberation group named MOVE lived in a row home at 6221 Osage Ave in West Philadelphia. This group wasn’t new and it had a storied history with the residents of the neighborhood and the Philadelphia Police Department. There are those who would tell you that they were not heroes, they were problematic. I tell you they were 11+ human beings who didn’t have to be attacked and die 35 years ago.
A ‘naturalist’ group interested in Black liberation, clean eating, and radical changes to the system wasn’t welcome in that neighborhood 35 years ago. Shit, truth be told they may not be welcome in your or any neighborhood now. What they stand for us the opposite of those who sit in power desire and those who covet acceptance are willing to expose themselves.
A better historian than I could explain the details of MOVE, I am here to explain what a 12 year old girl saw then and felt then and feels now.
The Philadelphia Sheriff’s office arrived to evict the residents of 6221 Osage Ave on May 13. The eviction turned into a ‘standoff’ with the Philadelphia Police Department. The ‘standoff’ turned into an ‘explosive device’ being dropped from a helicopter, onto an occupied house. That house caught fire. The occupants of the house tried to leave as the smoke filled the home and were fired upon by the Police causing them to retreat back into the smoke filled home. The fire was allowed to burn, and the lack of action caused adjacent homes to catch fire.
What the city witnessed the next day were the headlines stating 11 people died on Osage Ave and a city block was destroyed.
I would be exposed to multiple layers of Blackness that day and in the weeks after as the incident was discussed at home, in school etc. It would be years before I could identify those layers and years more before I could accept their existence.
I realized for the first time at 12 that the color of my skin was dangerous to me. I don’t believe that was the intention Bonnie wanted to happen. She wanted me to know that MOVE were bad Blacks who didn’t do the right things. When you are a bad Black who doesn’t do the right thing you get punished. I was a 12 year old though who had the audacity to question the death sentence of people who looked like me, and the unmitigated gall to ask what the little boy did wrong.
He has another name now, but he will always be Birdie Africa to me. I can recall watching him run up the street with smoke surrounding him and thinking he looks like me. I asked Bonnie what did he do wrong and she’s never answered that question. In my head the thing that made sense was nothing, but it wasn’t until I aged, experienced life in America as a Black that I understood it really was nothing.
He was a child, living his Black life with his Black family when power determined his Black family needed to be dealt with and pay for the bill they owed in the minds of the PPD. He was a child, different only in zip code from me.
The neighbors it is reported didn’t much care for MOVE. Another layer of Blackness I would learn when I aged, that makes sense to me now. They would not have been welcomed understanding the nature of that neighborhood then, and the contrast between the life MOVE suggested and the life the Jones wanted.
The neighbors had no bill to pay in reference to the alleged crimes of MOVE in ‘78. That didn’t stop indiscriminate fire from rendering their homes to ash.
The neighborhood would have changed eventually, all neighborhoods do. The fire accelerated the alteration of that articulations neighborhood in ways that are too varied and complex to type here, in this particular post.
The fire was put out, the bodies buried, trials civil and criminal happened, the homes were rebuilt but we – Black Philadelphians – were never the same. I was never the same.
My childhood which was already troubled at that point became more complicated as I had to process alone, the weight of just being Black.
It was something which I’d have to try to teach my own child later, and the complexity of existing in this nation doesn’t make that a simple task.
35 years later, I’m blocks away from the 6221 Osage Ave. I am socially distant due to COVID-19. I am mother of a 19 year old Black male. I am lover of a 47 year old Black man. I am friend to all ages and sizes of Blackness.
We are dying at a higher rate from the virus. Our education is still substandard. We are dying because yt people fear us and yt women weaponized their tears against us. We are statistically more poor, more at risk. Our daughters are not protected, our sons are incarcerated. Being Black in America is though as shit, and at times like May 13, 1985 a death sentence.
It is also exhausting constant reader. Bitterly exhausting.