Excessive force by police is not new

By Fred McKissack

Tribune News Service

On May 13, it will be 30 years since a Pennsylvania state police helicopter dropped explosives on the house of MOVE, an anarchist, black liberation group. This killed 11 people inside, including five children, destroying 65 other homes in the process. This anniversary comes as Baltimore endures massive protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the police. It’s a savage reminder of how little trust there is between the black community and those who claim to protect it.

MOVE and the Philadelphia police had a violent history, including a 1978 raid by what some witnesses say was hundreds of armed police officers that ended with one officer dead, 16 cops and firefighters wounded, a MOVE member beaten by police in front of TV cameras as he tried to surrender, and nine MOVE members in jail.

Revolutionary rhetoric

In 1981, the organization moved to a row house in a black, middle-class neighborhood in west Philadelphia. Tensions rose quickly between residents and MOVE, as the latter composted human feces, boarded up windows and blared revolutionary rhetoric on bullhorns. And there was, police believed, evidence of a growing cache of guns.

The neighbors ... wanted action against a problem neighbor. After years of letting the crisis fester, the police launched a military operation, and that’s how a section of west Philadelphia turned into a war zone.

By the evening of May 13, 11 people were dead, the neighborhood was in flames, and Americans, like me, were trying to sort out the truth. We would learn, from a commission that looked into the bombing, that the city acted irresponsibly, some would even say criminally, in its handling of MOVE. No one was arrested for the bombing.

In 1996, a federal jury ordered the city to pay $1.5 million, for the city’s use of excessive force, to Ramona Africa, the only surviving adult member of MOVE, and relatives of two of the victims.

Thirty years ago, as a 19-year-old, I dared to dream that when I reached my parents’ age, America would be a more inclusive place. I am now 49, with a son, and the future looks murky.

Long, brutal story

Baltimore is the latest chapter in the long, brutal story of black America. Those assigned to protect black neighborhoods from criminals are seen as protectors of privilege. A kid is arrested and badly beaten for mouthing off; Wall Street bankers crash the global economy and not one of them goes to jail.

In 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking in Grosse Pointe, Mich., then and now a white suburban enclave of Detroit, observed then what we should observe now.

“I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard,” he said. “What is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

MOVE was born of that failure. Ferguson and Baltimore were born of that failure. Are we doomed by racism or can we ever, finally, overcome?

Writer and editor Fred McKissack lives in Fort Wayne, Ind., and wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary.