MOVE Bombing
What was the outcome of the MOVE bombing in 1985?
Who founded MOVE, and what were its beliefs?
What led to the escalation of violence between MOVE and the police in 1978?
How did the police plan to handle the MOVE standoff in 1985?
What was the aftermath of the MOVE bombing?
The bombing of the MOVE compound on May 13, 1985, by Philadelphia police left 11 people dead and more than 250 homeless in an action that has had long-lasting repercussions for the city and its residents. It was the climactic and devastating resolution to years of escalating tension between the Black liberation group and law enforcement.
A history of activism
MOVE, which is not an acronym, was founded in 1972 by Korean War veteran and West Philadelphia native John Africa, who was born Vincent Leaphart. Largely a Black organization, with a belief structure that opposed technology, corporations, and the government, the group advocated for environmental and animal rights. In the early days of the organization’s existence, MOVE members, who changed their last names to Africa to honor the group’s founder as well as the continent, engaged in nonviolent protests at locations including zoos and group homes for older people.
Philadelphia residents were conflicted and confused by the group. Some neighbors found them disruptive and their tactics, which included the use of bullhorns, annoying; but largely they supported MOVE’s right to exist and protest. However tensions rose between MOVE and city officials when the group began squatting in a house in Powelton Village, a neighborhood close to the University of Pennsylvania. Members were seen standing guard on the street outside the house, armed with long guns, and delivering tirades via megaphone. Tensions between the increasingly radicalized group and law enforcement escalated, with federal agents seizing stockpiled pipe bombs and police barricading the surrounding neighborhood for more than 50 days.
Escalation into violence
The city struck a deal with MOVE in the summer of 1978: the city would release some MOVE members who had been arrested and jailed if the organization left their building and turned over their weapons. Though the city freed the MOVE members, MOVE did not leave their building. On August 8 police raided the house with water canons and battering rams. MOVE opened fire from the basement, killing a Philadelphia police officer, James Ramp. Sixteen others were injured in the raid.
MOVE eventually surrendered, but as Delbert Africa, a member who had been taunting police during the confrontation, emerged with his arms outstretched to show he intended no further harm, white police officers brutally beat him before throwing him to the ground, kicking and stomping on him. Nine MOVE members, including Delbert Africa, were convicted of third-degree murder three years after Ramp was killed.
In 1982 the group moved into 6221 Osage Avenue, located on a middle-class, largely Black block. Neighbors continually complained about loudspeaker tirades and the conversion of a row house into a fortified compound with a bunker on the roof. Despite intervention by the police the activity continued, and the tensions rose.
Police crackdown
On May 12, 1985, police began evacuating the residents of Osage Avenue on the orders of Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor. The next morning, about 500 police officers undertook a plan to forcefully remove the organization from the residence on orders from Goode and Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor. As one police sergeant recounted in a testimony:
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The tactical plan as I understood it was to remove the MOVE people, all the people from the house safely…by causing a diversion on the roof, inserting the insertion teams on either side of the properties, and by then, inducing an amount of CS [tear] gas in a sufficient concentration to make those people come out of the house.
Things did not go according to plan. About 6 am Sambor issued a final warning to MOVE members in the house that they had 15 minutes to evacuate. Instead, someone inside the house fired on the assembled police. In response, police shot back, and over the course of the next 90 minutes, they fired more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Still MOVE members would not leave the compound; heavily armed police tried to break down the walls through adjoining houses and used small incendiary devices to no avail. At one point, Goode held a press conference, telling reporters he intended to “seize control of the house…by any means possible.”
Shortly after 5:30 pm—some 12 hours into the violent standoff—a helicopter carrying a makeshift bomb circled the residential neighborhood and dropped the explosive. The impact was cataclysmic. The fire started by the bomb quickly spread to the adjacent houses. But Sambor, the police commissioner, ordered firefighters to stay away; ultimately more than 60 homes were damaged. Ramona Africa, one of the two survivors of the bombing, recalled:
We felt the house shake, but it hadn’t occurred to us that they dropped a bomb. Pretty quickly, it got smokier and smokier. At first we thought it was the tear gas, but then it got thicker.…It started getting hot in there. The house was on fire.
Eleven people were killed in the fire: five children—Katricia (“Tree”) Dotson, Zanetta Dotson, Tomaso (“Boo”) Levino, Delisha Orr, and Phil Phillips—and six adults—Theresa Brooks, Raymond Foster, James Conrad Hampton, Frank James, Rhonda Ward, and MOVE’s founder, John Africa. Along with Ramona Africa, only 13-year old Birdie Africa survived. Ramona Africa served seven years in prison related to warrants issued on rioting and conspiracy charges from before the bombing. In the destroyed house, police found five guns.
Aftermath
“Drop a bomb on a residential area? I never in my life heard of that. It’s like Vietnam.”—Osage Avenue neighbor on the night of the bombing.
A special commission investigated the actions of that day and heard testimony from 90 witnesses over the course of five weeks. Their final report, issued in March 1986, concluded, among other things, that “dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable” and that “the plan to drop the bomb was reckless, ill-conceived, and hastily approved.”
Ramona Africa won a $1.5 million settlement with the city in 1996. Though residents returned to the block in 1986, the majority of the neighborhood was bought out by the city by the early 2000s. In 2021 it was revealed that the remains of the Dotson children had been kept in a “cardboard box on a shelf” at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology without the knowledge of the children’s family. Their brother, Lionell Dotson, filed a lawsuit against the university and the city. In March 2025 the city agreed to pay Dotson an undisclosed amount but admitted no liability. His suit against the university is ongoing.
In November 2020 the Philadelphia City Council passed the following resolution:
The Council of the City of Philadelphia hereby apologizes for the decisions leading to the devastation of May 13, 1985 and acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of the MOVE Bombing.