"A Violent Clash of Contradictions": Race, Radical Politics, and State Violence in the 1985 MOVE Disaster

In May 1985, Philadelphia police responded to a stand-off with the MOVE organization, often described in the media as a radical black liberationist back-to-nature cult, by dropping a bomb on their communal home, killing eleven members, five of them children, and burning down nearly three blocks of the predominantly African-American neighborhood. Though strangely forgotten today, the MOVE disaster made front-page news locally, nationally, and internationally at the time, prompting journalists and social justice activists to raise pointed questions about race relations, tensions between law enforcement and black communities, and what constitutes excessive force--questions that clearly reverberate today.

Both the media and the city’s Special Investigation Commission (which conducted televised hearings on the tragedy) were highly critical of the deadly police action, but their assessment of MOVE itself was more ambivalent. Many journalists and city officials characterized MOVE members as fundamentally out of place and out of touch--spatially, temporally, and culturally. The organization’s back-to-nature beliefs, raw food diet, communal living, and anti-establishment “rants” were more at home with the quixotic 1960s than the materialist ethos of the 1980s; times had changed, but MOVE had not, the common narrative went. Similarly, journalists also characterized MOVE as out of place within an urban environment, their lifestyle more suited to a rural commune than a city block. This paper resituates MOVE’s ideology within broader radical genealogies, while also examining the difficult conversations the disaster provoked about the country’s threshold for tolerating radical politics, and when, and how, the state should respond.