Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission

The violent confrontation of May 13, 1985 between the MOVE organization and Philadelphia's city government, which left 11 MOVE members dead and 61 homes destroyed, was one of the most controversial episodes in the city's modern history. In its aftermath, the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, appointed by Mayor W. Wilson Goode, investigated in detail the events leading up to and including the attack on MOVE, held televised public hearings, and finally in March 1986 issued a report which was highly critical of government actions.

The confrontation was the cumulation of a dozen years of activity on the part of MOVE, which had emerged in the early 1970's as a small and very extreme "back to nature" radical group following the teachings of the self styled John Africa. Years of increasing trouble with the police and neighbors in the Powelton area of West Philadelphia ended in a gun battle in August 1978 in which one policeman was killed and nine MOVE members arrested and eventually sentanced to jail terms. A number of the remaining MOVE members-- all of whom were black-- settled in 1982 and 1983 in a house on th 6200 block of Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek area, a predominantely middle class black neighborhood. They began to campaign for the release of the comrades and in May 1984 started day and night denunciations of their enimies through a loudspeaker. In October they began the construction of a bunker on the top of their building. The loudspeaker and the extremely unsanitary life-style of the MOVE members led the neighbors to demand action from the newly installed Wilson Goode administration. After over a year of vacillation and appeasement, the city finally determined in the spring of 1985 on a plan to evict the MOVE members and arrest several of them. But the attack early on May 13 went disastrously wrong, as 10,000 rounds of ammunition, tear gas, and explosives failed to break down the fortified MOVE house. At 5:27 pm the police bomb unit dropped a bomb on the house and the ensuing fire was allowed to spread.

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