WW in 1985: Philadelphia police holocaust

Workers World is reprinting archival articles during our 50th anniversary. The following article appeared on the front page of the May 23, 1985, issue. Death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a MOVE supporter, praised WW’s coverage of this heinous act To this day, not one Philadelphia official has been legally accused of mass murder or indicted for the criminal bombing of this Black community.

May 15–The smoke has now cleared within the devastated Black community of West Philadelphia, terrorized by the police for the past two days. But the shock and anger remain.

Ten charred bodies, including at least two children, have been discovered so far in the carnage and destruction reminiscent of a war zone.

Clarence Mosley, the city’s Black assistant managing director, remarked while investigating the area in the aftermath of the siege, “I’ve been to Korea and Viet Nam, and I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s devastating. There’s nothing left.”

More than 60 homes were leveled, leaving more than 250 people homeless, with no place to go. The people of Philadelphia, around the country, indeed around the world are asking: Why and how did such an atrocity happen?

What possible reason could there have been for the bombing of a residential neighborhood? What justification is there for this brazen exposition of force and violence by the police?

No concern for community

The racist bourgeois media play up that there were complaints in the neighborhood about the unsanitary lifestyles of the members of MOVE, the group occupying the house. If that was the problem, why weren’t health officials called in to deal with it instead of an army of police? Why couldn’t the house be quarantined instead of firebombed off the map?

When Union Carbide, a U.S.-owned multi-million-dollar chemical corporation, caused the deaths of 2,000 innocent people in Bhopal, India, last year due to a toxic gas leak, it was quarantined and the area sealed off. Why wasn’t the same consideration given to the people of West Philadelphia if MOVE members posed a health hazard to the community?

Is the neighborhood better off now that it has been burnt to the ground?

The All Peoples Congress was one of the first organizations to condemn the police assault. National coordinator Larry Holmes asked in a statement to the press:

“When is the last time the army or police dropped a bomb on any one of the hundreds of multi-million-dollar chemical, waste disposal and weapons manufacturing corporations that pollute rivers, lakes and the air above, creating a deadly health hazard for millions and profits for the bosses? The truth is that the police had no concern for the health of the residents of that community or any other Black or poor community.

“No excuse can conceal the racism behind the police violence in West Philadelphia. The police had a racist vendetta against MOVE ever since their last assault on the group’s home in 1978.”

Philadelphia is a police city

Philadelphia is the fifth largest city in the U.S. with close to 2 million people, including a very large Black and Latin population. The unemployment rate is 13.5 percent generally, and twice that for Black and other oppressed people. Four out of 10 adults are functionally illiterate.

Philadelphia is becoming more and more a city of homeless people, who number approximately 15,000 and are increasing every day. Hunger, poverty and gentrification are becoming more acute for the poor and working class communities.

There is another side to Philadelphia. Since the days of ex-Mayor Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia has been and remains a police city. Wilson Goode may be the mayor now, but Rizzo’s racist, repressive police force has not changed in character. In fact, it was Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor, who is white, and not Mayor Goode, who is Black, who made the decision to drop the explosive bomb in the Black community, although Goode has defended the decision.

It was a former army general, Leo Brooks, now the city’s managing director, who took responsibility for dropping the bomb, which did an estimated $5 million damage to property.

The police are the controlling element in any city and are given the green light by the ruling class. In Philadelphia, this is wealthy families like the Biddles, the Pews, the Dicksons, Drexels and Dorrances, who live in the exclusive suburbs on the Main Line outside the metropolitan area.

This is where the real power lies in Philadelphia. The police are answerable to the wealthy ruling class, the bankers, the real estate interests, not to the mayor or any other elected city official, and they will act independently of the city government, especially when it comes to repression against the Black community and suppressing rebellions against intolerable living conditions, like those of the 1960s.

This attack may seem to have been aimed against a small group of people, but it should be remembered that just a few months ago, thousands of youth in Philadelphia, who suffer 60 percent unemployment, fought police in the streets. With the cutbacks in social services, and racism and unemployment on the rise, the police have been developing all kinds of new tactics to keep down social unrest, and they’ve been itching to try them out.

The bombing of West Philadelphia exposes the vicious nature of the repressive capitalist state and the inability of the representatives of this profit system to solve the crisis of unemployment, homelessness, hunger and other social diseases except with extreme violence and terror.

The only answer is for the millions of poor, oppressed and working people to organize themselves into a powerful, militant fightback movement. The survivors of West Philadelphia not only deserve new homes and monetary compensation for the horror and suffering brought upon them, but they and millions of others need jobs, justice and basic human rights–not police terror!