Philly Neighborhood Scars Unhealed From 1985 Bomb

[The Bobster]

http://cbs3.com/topstories/move.bomb...2.1687315.html

Philly Neighborhood Scars Unhealed From 1985 Bomb

PHILADELPHIA (AP) ― Gerri Bostic lost all her material possessions 25 years ago when police dropped a bomb on her block, killing five children and six adult members of the militant group MOVE and incinerating 61 row homes.

Perhaps her biggest losses were her peace of mind and sense of community.

Her West Philadelphia neighborhood—now nearly vacant and eerily quiet—never recovered from the city's horrific botched attempt to arrest the MOVE members on May 13, 1985. The violent confrontation was a rare bombing of American citizens by civilian authorities in the United States.

Today, after spending more than $43 million on redevelopment, the city has two blocks of boarded-up eyesores to show for its efforts. The homes built to replace those lost in the bomb-ignited inferno were so shoddy that officials stopped making repairs and offered buyouts.

"There's nothing nice about this block anymore," said Bostic, 89. "All the people are gone."

And now that a long-running lawsuit over the replacement houses has ended, Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell says the city needs to put the past to rest on Osage Avenue and Pine Street.

"It's time to make peace with it all and fix up the properties," Blackwell said.

It won't be easy; Philadelphia has many blighted areas competing for attention. And developers of these blocks will have the added challenge of winning support from embittered residents whose American Dream of homeownership has been a nightmare.

"We've been victimized twice," Osage resident Milton Williams said.

Some might say Williams and his neighbors have been victimized three times—the first being when MOVE arrived around 1981.

The revolutionary back-to-nature group came to the city's Cobbs Creek section after a 1978 shootout with police at its previous home. One officer died in the firefight; nine MOVE members went to prison, and others moved to Osage Avenue.

They soon turned their middle-class row house into a fortified compound, with a bunker on the roof and wooden slats over the windows. Reeking garbage attracted vermin, and loudspeakers blared obscene daily rants against authorities for jailing their peers.

"You really couldn't get any rest," said Connie Renfrow, who still lives on Osage. "The kids couldn't do their studies."

Her husband, Gerald Renfrow, said neighbors at first tried to address the problems directly with MOVE members, all of whom used the surname Africa. When talking failed, residents called authorities—but to no avail.

"They just let it fester," he said.

Police decided to move on MOVE in mid-May 1985, obtaining arrest and search warrants on the belief the group's house contained illegal weapons and explosives. Authorities evacuated the block on May 12, telling residents there would be a police action the next day.

When they were refused entry to serve the warrants on May 13, police began an hours-long siege using water cannons, tear gas and bullets. A state police helicopter flew overhead carrying Philadelphia officers and a canvas satchel loaded with explosives.

The bomb ignited a gasoline-fueled conflagration that killed the MOVE militants and children and obliterated two blocks of homes. Ramona Africa, then 29, and Birdie Africa, then 13, escaped with major burns.

Residents, who had been told to take just a change of clothes with them, came home to find ruins.

"Nothing but brick and rubble," recalled Gerald Renfrow, 64.

After more than a year in temporary housing, residents returned to their rebuilt homes in the fall of 1986. That winter, the roofs started leaking.

Next came discoveries of defective plumbing and wiring, bad flooring, nails popping out of walls, burst pipes, flooded basements and backyards and broken appliances. Replacement trees have since uprooted parts of the sidewalk and are strangling pipes.

Milton Williams, 61, has had five stoves, four roofs and two living room ceilings. Today, his front and back windows look out on boarded-up homes.

"It's embarrassing to invite people over here," he said.

After 14 years of unending repairs, then-Mayor John Street decided in 2000 that the houses were beyond salvage. He offered owners $125,000 each plus $25,000 in moving expenses; 37 people took him up on it. The homes were then worth about $75,000 each.

But 24 residents sued for breach of contract for stopping the repairs, which had been promised by Street's predecessor. A federal jury awarded each homeowner $534,000, but a judge slashed it to $250,000. An appeal brought the settlement to $190,000 per house in 2008

[manbearpig]

"It's embarrassing to invite people over here," he said.

well nigger, you can't use that one...

[SickOfAfricans]

Dropping a bunch of Niggers in an area is like dropping a bomb on it. Same destructive effect, just that they move a lot slower than a bomb-blast.

[YTISFEDUP]

After more than a year in temporary housing,On our dime, of course. residents returned to their rebuilt homes in the fall of 1986. That winter, the roofs started leaking.

Next came discoveries of defective plumbing and wiring, bad flooring, nails popping out of walls, burst pipes, flooded basements and backyards and broken appliances. Replacement trees have since uprooted parts of the sidewalk and are strangling pipes.I would put money that they were forced to hire nigger contractors, so you absolutely know the materials and workmanship were garbage to begin with!

Milton Williams, 61, has had five stoves, four roofs and two living room ceilings. Today, his front and back windows look out on boarded-up homes.

"It's embarrassing to invite people over here," he said. Niggers aren't people, so you have nothing to worry about.

Nigger whine is endless, give them a free house and they expect you to fix it forever. I suggest just giving them a pile of mud and some sticks, if they survive the winter good for them, if not good for us.

[DR. Lynch, M.K.N]

They should have used napalm!

[The Bobster]

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/na...E_message.html

Ramona Africa still carrying the MOVE message
By Connie Langland
For The Inquirer



In the spring of 1979, when she first attended a MOVE rally, Ramona Johnson was a student at Temple University, about to graduate with a bachelor's degree in political science and plans to enter law school. Through that summer, she got a fast-track course in court proceedings by sitting in on the criminal cases brought against MOVE members stemming from the 1978 confrontation that left Police Officer James Ramp dead, and four police officers and four firefighters wounded.

Johnson aligned herself with MOVE and became Ramona Africa. She met John Africa in May 1981, she says. He made her MOVE's minister of communications.

On May 13, 1985, then 30, she was the only adult survivor of the Osage Avenue inferno, walking out of the flames and into the custody of Police Officer Charles "Tommy" Mellor.

Mellor was in the alley dividing Osage Avenue and Pine Street, spotting his partner, James Berghaier, who had made a dash to rescue 13-year-old Birdie Africa. "I said, 'Ramona, you're under arrest.' She said, 'Don't shoot. I give up, I give up.' "

But Ramona Africa has never given up. She is the most visible, and forceful, of MOVE defenders.

Prior to the confrontation, she remembers MOVE members' publicizing the plight of the MOVE Nine, the five men and four women convicted in Ramp's murder.

Police monitored MOVE activities on Osage Avenue, she said, knew children lived there, knew gasoline cans were in the roof bunker, and had opportunities to avoid confrontation.

"If . . . they wanted to arrest us, they could have done that at any time, when we were at the park, when we went food shopping, when we were walking on the streets," she said.

On May 11, she said, adults in the house sent "a couple" of children grocery shopping with a MOVE supporter. Meanwhile, she said, police set up a barricade across Osage Avenue at 62d Street.

MOVE people were aware of the police activity, she said, but also knew past drills had ended uneventfully.

Early the next morning, "the first thing that we experienced was the Fire Department deluge hoses."

Police had warrants, signed by then-Judge Lynne M. Abraham, to arrest four adults in the house in connection with an incident there April 29.

"Government officials told people their reason for being out there was complaints from neighbors. Now I'm not saying no neighbors ever complained; I'm sure some of them did. But . . . there is not a neighborhood in this city, in this country, where some neighbors don't complain about their neighbors."

On May 13, Ramona Africa was in the basement when the state police helicopter flew over and dropped the incendiary device - the bomb - on the roof of the rowhouse.

"We felt the house shake, but I can speak for myself here, it never, ever occurred to me they dropped a bomb. It started getting hot, more and more smoke, crackling of the fire. We realized then the house was on fire. We immediately tried to get our children, our animals, ourselves out of that burning building.

"The adults were hollering, 'We're coming out, we're coming out.' The children were hollering. And the instant we could be seen trying to come out, the cops immediately started shooting at us. You could hear the bullets all around us, forcing us back into the burning building.

"This happened at least twice. It started getting so bad in there with the fire spreading so quickly and the smoke. You're faced with the situation, you're either going to be burned alive or possibly shot to death. So we tried to get out again. I got out, I got Birdie out, and everyone was right behind me trying to come out. I don't even remember being burned, but I was burned all up my arm, my wrist, my leg, my back. I know I was in shock."

[The Bobster]

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/na..._his_life.html

Ex-mayor Goode says tragic day was an "aberration" in his life
By Amy S. Rosenberg
Inquirer Staff Writer



When he left office in 1992, W. Wilson Goode Sr. set about putting what he called his "real feelings" about the MOVE tragedy into writing.

"Sadly I realized that the police had killed two birds with one stone - MOVE and me," Goode wrote in his autobiography, In Goode Faith.

But today, at 71, with two more decades of perspective, a doctorate from a Baptist seminary, and a distinguished gray goatee, the city's first black mayor says he has moved on from such a harsh assessment of the significance of May 13, 1985.

"It's just one day in the life," he said in a recent interview in his sixth-floor office at 2000 Market St., where he acts as executive director of Amachi, a nationally recognized program that matches children of incarcerated parents with mentors.

"I view it as an aberration in my life," he said. "I don't view it as part of a continuum in my life. Mistakes were made. You put it in perspective. You don't let it paralyze you. You don't let enemies or anyone define you by it.

"I have no explanation as to why it happened or how it happened," he said. "It is something that should never have happened."

Goode said he has never discussed MOVE with his wife, Velma, or his three children, including City Councilman W. Wilson Goode Jr., who himself refused to discuss even the idea that the family did not talk about the subject.

In recent weeks, though, Goode resigned himself to a series of interviews, on camera and off, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the MOVE assault, in which a botched police plan left 11 people dead, including five children, and 250 people homeless. But he stressed that in 25 years, the only people to ever bring up MOVE have been Philadelphia journalists.

"I have to say I don't see it as the media sees it, as the darkest day in the history of the city," he said. "In the last 25 years, I've been to 46 out of 50 states, and the issue of MOVE has never been raised with me.

"I've never been confronted by anyone about the issue," he continued. "People who have known me by my reputation see it as an aberration, and see it as something that happened one day in my life and not a pattern.

"I do not believe that people think about it any more. Keep in mind, that people who are now 30 years old were 5 years old. People in the city under 25 or 30 years, that's a whole lot of people in the city."

Indeed, at a recent appearance at the Fels School of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, no student asked about MOVE, nor did Goode himself bring it up.

Goode said he has personally become "spiritually stronger" as a result of the tragedy. He serves as the minister of administration at the First Baptist Church of Paschall in Southwest Philadelphia, and said he had always felt a special relationship with God that only intensified after such a severe testing in 1985.

[The Bobster]

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/ho...a_protest.html

MOVE mounts a protest

MOVE members and their supporters gathered at City Hall yesterday afternoon to mark today's 25-year anniversary of the Osage Avenue disaster.

"We never ever want anyone to forget the vicious murder of our fambly," said MOVE member Pam Africa.

"These people dropped a bomb and did that to stop us from exposing what's wrong in the system."



Carrying posters bearing the name of MOVE founder John Africa and signs with the face of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, about 40 peaceful demonstrators listened to speakers and handed out fliers to passers-by.

May 13, 1985, was the day Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the roof of the fortified MOVE house, sparking a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed an entire city block.

Verbena Lea, who belongs to a California-based group called Friends of MOVE, said yesterday that she traveled across to country to mark the anniversary.

"I came from a few thousand miles away to continue putting pressure until there's some justice," said Lea.

At a news conference earlier, MOVE bombing survivor Ramona Africa said her group was pursuing private criminal complaints charging former city officials who presided over the bombing with murder.

The District Attorney's Office denied the request last month, but Africa's lawyers yesterday filed motions in Common Pleas Court asking a judge to force the D.A.'s office to review the request.

[Doc Johnson]

Too bad they didn't use a bigger bomb!

%^$ Niggers!

Doc

[JenkemKid]

I remember this stupid shit nice to see that it is all niggers still suffering from other niggers bullshit

I love the part about all the trash and the move niggers screaming and making noise.......sounds just like living next to

here is the best part though

The revolutionary back-to-nature group came to the city's Cobbs Creek section after a 1978 shootout with police at its previous home. One officer died in the firefight; nine MOVE members went to prison, and others moved to Osage Avenue.


these niggers were back to nature......living in the middle of fucking filly in ROW HOUSES