by O.J. Spivey PHILADELPHIA TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT
Some of Philadelphia’s longtime Black journalists, who were either present on the scene or covered the 1985 MOVE bombing in some capacity, sat down at The Philadelphia Tribune recently to discuss the tragedy and its impact on the community.
The discussion included: Michael Days, former Wall Street Journal reporter; Barbara Grant, former news director at WDAS radio; Pete Kane, former photojournalist at WCAU-TV 10; Linn Washington, former executive editor for The Philadelphia Tribune; Irv Randolph, former Tribune reporter; and Tyree Johnson, former Philadelphia Daily News reporter.
Their recollection was vivid, complex and multifaceted, with numerous unanswered questions and ample opportunities for learning.
It was on Mother’s Day 1985, when news broke that there was a police presence on-site at the block of 62nd Street and Osage Avenue.
“I just came in from church with my family and my pager went off,” Kane said. “I called the assignment desk. They said, we need to get out to Osage Avenue. I went in there at 8:30 p.m. Sunday night. I stayed for 24 hours. It’s still a nightmare for all of us.”
Grant remembered “My family had taken me out to dinner, I got a call from the newsroom. I then said to my husband and my son that I need to go, but I’ll be back. Turns out I didn’t come back home for three days.”
Washington said he got a call at 3 a.m. “The caller was very cryptic or I should say, short. He just said, man, it’s going down. Get over here, and he hung up. I knew what was going down and where.”
With news technology being what it was in 1985, Kane had to get creative with the 60-foot antenna on his station’s live truck in order to get the best coverage.
“I knew there was a small camera that we had borrowed to try out,” he said. “So we tie-wrapped and taped it to the top of the antenna and ran the cable down into the truck.”
Kane could then see the bunker and used the mass camera to rotate around and observe activity on the roof. Once Kane entered an adjacent home, police officers commandeered the live truck, which also provided them with visibility of what was happening on the roof.
“I found that out, like the next day that they had taken over control of our vehicle, with one of our techs in it so they can observe the activity on the roof,” he said.
That’s the notorious video viewers saw: the police satchel being dropped from the chopper onto the MOVE house.
“I had been on the phone all day long with the news anchors and I said, ‘What just happened?’ They just dropped a bomb from the helicopter,” Kane said. “I’m looking out the window, and that’s when you see that black smoke coming out of the MOVE house. And that’s when we knew that it was more than just a shootout.”
To begin unraveling all that transpired in 1985, one must revisit 1978 in Powelton Village, where MOVE and the police first met. Washington was there.
He said, “1978 clearly laid the groundwork for 1985 because MOVE was trying to get the release of those nine members, but these things all meshed up because five of the MOVE 9 should never have been in prison for the murder of police officer James Ramp.”
MOVE had a rocky relationship with their neighbors, who turned to the city for help. They wanted a resolution, not a bomb to blow up their block.
Johnson, who later co-founded the Westside Weekly with his wife, was one of those neighbors and recalled his interactions with them.
“Yeah, that part (the bombing) you can’t justify,” he said. “As a neighbor, and as a reporter back in 1978 and then in 1985, I’ve always felt that they was confrontational, and they weren’t very good neighbors. I just think they wanted a confrontation (with the police) and unfortunately, they got it. And it was handled so bad.”
“It’s interesting,” Grant said. “All of the help that they had asked for from anybody who they thought could assist, put them in a very strange position as Black folks. You know, because MOVE was Black. Somebody asked me, ‘Whose side are you on? The MOVE people or the neighbors?’ I said I’m on the Black side.”
The neighbors didn’t want the city to harm MOVE. They also didn’t think the help they had asked for meant that they too would be evacuated from their homes.
“I remember being on the ground talking to neighbors, and they had a few belongings with them,” Grant said. “A little of this, a little of that, because they thought in a couple of hours, they would be back home.”
Randolph, who is now the managing editor of The Tribune, questioned if the bombing would have happened in any other community.
“I don’t think you can overlook the fact of racism, of this happening in a Black neighborhood. I don’t think this would have happened in a white neighborhood,” he said.
The journalists were asked if they believed the city, whether it was the mayor, the police or the fire department, were capable of a positive resolution to avoid the bombing.
“Reading all this stuff for the last few days, I don’t know if they had the ability, the skills to really do what needed to be done to end that thing peacefully,” said Days, who later became editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. “Now, should they have burned down the whole neighborhood? Absolutely not. But there should have been a way to talk those folks out of that house.”
The decision that is most frequently questioned — apart from the bombing itself — was the authorities’ failure to save any of the 11 lives, let alone, fight the fire.
“It looked like incompetence, but it was intentional,” Grant said. “And the other thing that made me think that is intentional was that the promise that was made in terms of the police operation, was that none of the cops that were involved in 1978 would be involved in 1985. And the 1978 cops were not just involved, they were in the back alley.”
The journalists noted that MOVE members might have been willing to negotiate, but not with the city or law enforcement. Instead, they reached out to the Black media at that time.
“MOVE didn’t want the cops to come,” Kane said. “They wanted some of the Black reporters to come in, but the police did not want the Black reporters MOVE had dealt with over the years, Barbara, Harvey Clark, Vernon Odom, etc. They trusted them.”
Washington called it a missed opportunity by city officials to negotiate and prevent the bombing.
“That was a blown opportunity,” he said. “MOVE said they wanted the reporters to come in and negotiate with them. But no one could get a hold of the mayor. I think, in various ways, that there was a bunch of stuff going on that day.”
In 1986, the city held hearings. The MOVE Commission was tasked with investigating the events leading up to and including the happenings of May 13, 1985. Throughout the hearings, the commission examined the conflicts including the city’s response to the MOVE organization and the actions by police.
“I thought the commission did a good job in terms of an investigation and getting all the facts out there,” Randolph said. The findings and recommendations sparked significant controversy with many dissenting from its conclusions.
Goode took full responsibility for everything that transpired on that fateful day and was successfully reelected for a second term.
“There was a lot of tumult in the Black community about whether Goode was responsible or not,” Randolph said.
Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune
https://www.phillytrib.com/news/local_news/some-of-phillys-longtime-black-journalists-recall-covering-move-bombing-its-impact/article_699e48e6-afc3-46f0-83f2-8b9b5be32766.html
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