MOVE Remembered

In other Philly news, it's been twenty years since W. Wilson Goode dropped a bomb and burned down an entire city block on Osage Avenue:

Twenty years ago this Friday, Philadelphia became "The City That Bombed Itself."

On the evening of May 13, 1985, in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philadelphia, police dropped explosives onto the headquarters of the radical group MOVE. The explosion started a fire that city officials allowed to burn.

When the blaze was out, 61 homes were gone and 11 people, five of them children, were dead inside MOVE headquarters.

The days that followed were a period of sadness and shame unlike any in the city's history, the start of a civic funk that lasted for nearly a decade.

The disaster cost Philadelphia millions of dollars, with the final bill yet to be tallied. And it destroyed the reputation of the city's first African American mayor, W. Wilson Goode, once hailed as the embodiment of racial reconciliation and managerial competence.

Goode was subsequently reelected Mayor. More:

The story of what happened that day sounds no less preposterous now than it did then.

Who in his right mind would drop a bomb on a house, then not fight a fire? Why wouldn't all of the people inside leave a burning building? How could a city run by a black mayor do such a thing to a black group in the middle of a black middle-class neighborhood?

"It makes no sense, even today," said William H. Brown 3d, the lawyer who chaired the probe into what happened. "Every time I think about it, the angrier I get. There was no reason to drop that bomb. Whatever people thought about the MOVE adults, there were children inside that house."

No one has a clue what the hell Goode was thinking. After the first shootout with MOVE in which Officer James Ramp was killed, perhaps Goode decided that he wasn't taking a chance on having another cop killed. He had many other options short of dropping an incendiary device on that house.