Frank Powell, a Philadelphia police officer who in 1985 was chief of the city’s bomb disposal squad, remembers vividly the moment he was given his instructions. “Wow,” he recalls thinking. “You want me to do that?”
On 13 May 1985 Powell was handed an army-style green satchel containing a bomb made of C-4 plastic explosives of the sort widely deployed in Vietnam. He boarded a state police helicopter, and took up his position balanced precariously on the skids of the aircraft.
“I can’t remember being scared,” he told the Guardian, “though I must have been.”
At 5.27pm as the helicopter rose into a crystal-clear blue sky he carried out his orders. Flying over a largely African American residential neighborhood of west Philadelphia, he lined up his sights, lit the 45-second fuse with a military igniter and followed his orders.
“I reached out and I dropped it. Perfect. It was going right where it was supposed to go.”
His target was the roof of 6221 Osage Avenue, a row house which at the time had 13 American citizens inside. They were all members of Move, a group which combined the black liberation struggle with back-to-nature environmentalism.
Each Move member took the last name Africa to signal their commitment to race equality as well as to each other as a family. For years they had been in a running battle with the Philadelphia authorities culminating that May in arrest warrants, for a range of offenses including “terroristic threats”, “riot” and “disorderly conduct”, being served and a standoff ensuing that ended with the dropping of Powell’s bomb on to their house.
It led to one of the great, largely forgotten, outrages of modern America.
After the bomb struck, a fire took hold and began to spread. The police commissioner, Gregore Sambor, critically and fatally decided “to let the fire burn”.
By the following morning 61 homes had been razed to ashes, leaving 250 Philadelphians destitute and homeless.
Only two of the 13 residents of the Move house got out alive.
The remaining 11, including five children aged seven to 13, were similarly reduced to ashes.
As the 35th anniversary of the bombing approaches, efforts are under way to increase public awareness of the atrocity. It was one of the rare times in US history that American civilians were attacked on domestic soil by aerial bombing, another being the dropping of dynamite on to African American homes in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the bloody race riots of 1921.