Review – MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy
The May 13, 1985 bombing of the MOVE organization headquarters by the Philadelphia Police Department was the denouement of an American passion play. By the time the smoke cleared from the barrels of police guns and the smoldering remains of over two city blocks, six adults and five children were dead, and 250 people were homeless. Forty years later, the shockwaves of the fiery and bloody campaign of police terror are still felt throughout West Philadelphia and beyond. The 2025 podcast
MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy is produced by Yvonne Latty, director of Temple University’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting and professor of journalism at the Klein College of Media and Communication. Latty’s colleague Linn Washington Jr. serves as the principal narrator for the podcast series. A former reporter for The Philadelphia Tribune and The Daily News, Washington has a unique perspective on the history of MOVE, having covered the organization from its inception. In the series’ introductory episode, Washington explains his deep-running professional and personal connection to the story of MOVE:
“I was one of the reporters that covered it and like many of my colleagues that day, I never really recovered from what I saw and experienced. It was the first and only time in U.S. history where a police force dropped a bomb on their own citizens. So many have forgotten, but I can’t forget. It’s with me every day of my life.”
(Episode One: “The Beginning”)
MOVE was founded in 1972 by activist John Africa, who combined spiritualism with communal living and anarcho-primitivist ideas to shape the group’s philosophy. The organization drew its name from one of Africa’s key assertions: “Everything that’s alive moves. If it didn’t, it would be stagnant, dead–MOVE.” As revolutionaries in the tradition of the Black Panthers, MOVE both endorsed and practiced armed self-defense—a stance that intensified as tensions escalated between the group and Philadelphia police through the mid-1970s.
While MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy does not offer an explicit political evaluation of the MOVE organization, the podcast does not ignore the problems of MOVE’s strategies and tactics. The organization’s infamous penchant for annoying, offending, and frustrating their neighbors ultimately alienated potential sympathizers and allies. In Powelton Village, neighboring residents complained of insect and rodent infestations caused by conditions within the MOVE homestead. Similar concerns manifested at the Osage Avenue headquarters, coupled with the organization’s use of a public address system to broadcast a non-stop cascade of profanity-laced rage and resentment upon residents and passers-by. Latty and Washington also revisit allegations of child neglect and violence within the MOVE organization.
Unsurprisingly, Frank Rizzo, who served as Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner and later as Mayor, emerges as a pre-eminent villain in the podcast series. Infamously racist and an overt advocate of brutal police repression, Rizzo aggressively targeted MOVE in 1978, ordering a siege on the organization’s base in Powelton Village. The ensuing crisis ended in a firefight and the arrest of nine MOVE members. Indeed, it was Rizzo’s relentless antagonism and harassment of MOVE and the hatred along with his utter disdain for Black Philadelphians in general that further inflamed the animosity between Philadelphia’s governmental apparatus and MOVE as the two entities continued on a collision course into the 1980s.
Episode Five (“The Bomb”) podcast deals extensively with the events of May 13, 1985, from the initial police engagement to the police deployment of military explosives, to the “stand down” orders that effectively barred the Fire Department from knocking down the ensuing holocaust. What emerges – both in the reflective aspects of the final episode (Episode Six: “The Aftermath”) and through subsequent reflection on the series as a whole – is a stark picture of how the United States treats marginalized people when they get organized.
MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy is not a Marxist-Leninist project and does not offer substantive political analysis or critique in that respect. However, the series provides extremely valuable primary research and perspective on fundamental questions of race, class struggle, and political power in America, both past and present. The Editors of MLRG.online recommend this series for its contribution to a better understanding of these dynamics.
MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy is available on most major podcast platforms, including Spotify. Complete transcripts of each episode are published online by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
