Film: Let the Fire Burn
“We had to destroy a village in order to save it.” Mumia Abu-Jamal
This unusual documentary was put together over the past two years from archival TV footage of the MOVE bombing of May 13, 1985 in Philadelphia. MOVE, an outgrowth of the Black Panthers, was a back to Africa sect that set up shop in two separate working class neighborhoods. Their eviction from the first headquarters was accompanied by gun violence in which a policeman was killed and firemen wounded. Some confusion exists as to who actually fired the shots, since they came from automatic weapons which were not found during a police sweep of the house. Thirteen people were given huge prison sentences; they remain in prison.
MOVE’s adherents were throwbacks to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, although they had no clear intention of leaving the USA. It is fair to say that they were obnoxious neighbors, the property was a mess, they had a Luddite streak, abjuring electricity and other modern conveniences that go along with electrical power (e.g. television, vacuum cleaners) and they broadcast a lot of angry messages over loudspeakers, apparently an exception to the electrical ban. They were determined to bring up their kids in a manner befitting tribal, and not modern, Africa; pictures from the film show the children perpetually undressed. The violence of their messages reflected the violence done by the FBI in assassinating thirty-eight Black Panthers and throwing many more into prison.
None of MOVE’s exceptional behavior, however, justifies in the least the atrocity that took place. As in the burning of a cult home in Waco, Texas, the row house was bombed and the mayor, a black man named Goode (who quit politics to become a minister!) gave the order to bomb the MOVE headquarters/living space, inhabited by thirteen people, six of whom were children. Only one child and a woman made it out alive and the entire neighborhood burned down in what can only be described as a criminal act or even an atrocity by officials and police. One policeman tried to save children’s lives and was held back by his superior officer. This living example of compassion and morality was subsequently called a “nigger lover” and retired from the Philadelphia police, suffering from P.T.S.D. The final tally from the MOVE bombing: eleven dead, dozens injured and sixty-one homes destroyed, well kept homes inhabited mostly by black people. Thirty-two million dollars in reparations were awarded over two decades later, but no one was charged for their part in this atrocity.
This kind of brutality was the result of two separate phenomena. First, the American defeat in Vietnam created residual anger that took decades to dissipate. The methodology that was used in Vietnam, carpet bombing, attempted intimidation, napalm, i.e. overwhelming force, became part of the mentality of police forces. For years, it was said by politicians that if only the Americans had used more force they would have triumphed in Vietnam. At best, this belief was delusional.
The second phenomenon was a loss in the belief of the American Dream, characterized by an unprecedented crime wave in American cities. Politicians and police looked the other way as innocent people were railroaded into prison, evidence be damned. The police also routinely used physical violence against mostly African American communities.