"The Bombing of Osage Avenue"

Produced in 1986 for WHYY, The Bombing of Osage Avenue examines the 1985 MOVE bombing and its aftermath through interviews with neighborhood residents, footage of the siege and the investigation that followed, and the poetic narration of Toni Cade Bambara.  In a report from Death Row aired on Democracy Now, Mumua Abu-Jamal observes that on May 13, 1985. “the city, armed and assisted by the U.S. government dropped a bomb on a home and called it law.”  The MOVE bombing was a “massacre,” an example of a “city wag[ing] war on its citizens,” and proof of the corruption of the system.  The Bombing of Osage Avenue reinforces Abu-Jamal’s assessment and situates the 1985 MOVE bombing along a historical continuum of white aggression (a history fires and bombings, a history of burning) toward black and black-friendly communities and institutions in the United States generally and Philadelphia specifically.  Images show the destruction of an aerial assault on a black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the infamous race riot there in 1921.  The image echoes that of the burned blocks surrounding the MOVE home in West Philadelphia.  Further, footage of the police helicopter dropping a bag of military-grade explosives on the roof of the MOVE house recalls the state-sanctioned assault on Tulsa (each a result of a kind of elite panic of the city’s white citizens).  The film also touches (briefly) on the history of MOVE in Philadelphia, especially the 1978 confrontation with police that capped the previous decade of antagonism between the two groups.  Though this film focuses more on the 1985 bombing, the images from the 1978 siege also illustrate the militarization of city space by government forces against “undesirable” members of its citizenry that pose a real or imagined threat against the institutional status quo (in this case the Frank Rizzo administration/ machine). 

We see images representative of the carceral city; barricades, helicopters, assault rifles, (a majority white) police officers in formation mobilized against a black community.  The military mobilization of 500 officers with heavy artillery pointed at the Osage Avenue house.  It shows a city “neighborhood [as] a free fire zone” where police officers pin members of MOVE inside their burning home.  The MOVE house is both fortress and prison, a bunker shielding its residents from the city outside and, ultimately, a fiery tomb.  It stands aggressively against the city and its neighborhood, its speakers blaring during the day and night before burning to the ground.  Visually, the rubble of the neighborhood echoes that of the bombed out cities of Europe during the Second World War.

The Bombing of Osage Avenue deals with the neighborhood of Cobbs Creek as much as it does with MOVE, and it illustrates well the vibrant and thriving (mostly) black community that existed in Cobbs Creek prior to the 1985 bombing.  The neighborhood was one of working-class blacks and home owners (according to the film the largest population, per capita, home ownership in the city) who had supplanted previous generations of white residents in the post-war period.  The horrific bombing of the MOVE house (and the effective murder of those inside) was, perhaps, the most visible and immediate disaster.  The destruction and erosion of the vibrant Cobbs Creek neighborhood is another part of the disaster legacy of the bombing. 

Though The Bombing of Osage Avenue touches on the history and mission of the MOVE organization and the more recent history of racism in the city, it focus chiefly on the antagonistic relationship between MOVE and the city and the between MOVE and its neighbors in the first part of the nineteen eighties during the administration of the city's first African-American mayor W. Wilson Goode.  An earlier film, MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia (which is available in its entirety here), provides a more in-depth look at the 1978 confrontation between the organization (then located in Powelton Village) and the Philadelphia city government under controversial mayor Frank Rizzo, illustrating the antagonistic relationship between the city and its African-American residents.  This event seems to have laid the groundwork for the response 1985 bombing.  It seems clear that city leaders perceived and treated its black communities as a disaster spaces, which resulted in policies and actions that actually made them so.   

The residents of both Powelton Village and, later, Cobb’s Creek obviously felt otherwise and interviews with residents suggest the kind of vibrant community suggested (but ultimately overlooked) by Jane Jacobs in her influential 1961 book The Life and Death of Great American Cities.  In terms of Cobb's Creek, it would be interesting to see how practices of redlining and blockbusting may have facilitated or limited the creation and development of the black community.  City funded efforts to make the community whole in the wake of the 1985 bombing have failed, and one gets the sense that the damage done cannot be undone by rebuilding of (shoddy) homes because there was much more to this (and any)  neighborhood than just physical structures.  Further, the failed efforts to make the neighborhood whole in the wake of the MOVE bombing suggest the ways in which planners fail to take into account the notion of lived space.  It is an example of a city betraying the trust of its citizens, first in a state sponsored act of terrorism against African American community, and again in its efforts to restore the neighborhood in the wake of the 1985 MOVE bombing.