New exhibit chronicles little-known history of MOVE before and after 1985 bombing

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Thirty-nine years ago this week, the city dropped a bomb on an Osage Avenue row home in West Philadelphia that housed the Black liberation group MOVE, killing 11 people — including five children — and destroying 61 homes. To commemorate the anniversary, MOVE organized a weekend exhibit showcasing the group’s history before and after the tragedy.

In the exhibit, titled “ MOVE: The Old Days ,” newspaper articles, letters, photos and other archival pieces of history tell the story of MOVE members leading up to and following May 13, 1985.

“It helps us to see beyond the bombing of MOVE, beyond the imprisonment of the MOVE 9, to understand the origins of the organization, the ways that MOVE was trying to advocate for life and for justice,” said Krystal Strong, the MOVE activist and archive director who helped put the exhibit together.

The rooms are filled floor to ceiling with artifacts chronicling the organization’s founding to its conflicts with police, prison time, and modern-day — all told through the eyes of MOVE.

“These are people. They went through struggles, and this is the history of the struggle,” said Mike Africa Jr., MOVE legacy director.

He has held onto items from his family’s history for decades. Some stories, he said, are not well known to the public. For instance, they found documents that Africa says detail police surveillance on the group.

“Like learning about people while they’re just living,” he said, adding that police officers were “watching them eat a peach or watching them exercise or watching them walk to the store.”

“It’s just such an eye-opening experience and it shows the deep and rich history that MOVE has, far beyond the images that we’ve seen on the news for the last 40 or 50 years,” he said.

“A lot of times you don’t even know what their names were, right? They were individuals that had beliefs, dreams, aspirations, and it’s our hope that with this exhibit you get to see more of the human relations,” added Strong. “You get to see who they were as people.”

Guided tours of the exhibit will be held on May 18 and 19 at the Paul Robeson House and Museum in West Philadelphia. All proceeds will go to Reclaim Osage, a campaign that is trying to pay off the homes that sit at the site of the bombing and preserve the neighborhood.