Uncover - Introducing: The Africas VS. America

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

To those that remember, it’s known simply as the bombing of West Philly. In the spring of 1985, the City of Philadelphia became the first in U.S. history to drop a bomb on a family of American citizens. The attack killed 11 people, including five children, and the ensuing fire set a neighborhood to ruins. The targets that day? A family of Black radicals known collectively as MOVE, who found themselves ensnared in a city — and nation’s — domestic war on Black Liberation. Over seven episodes, host Matthew Amha investigates the events that culminated in the MOVE bombing, and the long afterlife of a forgotten American tragedy. Through intimate conversations, The Africas VS. America offers an unseen look into the MOVE's origins and dynamics while looking ahead to the group's uncertain future.

This is a CBC Podcast. In the summer of 2020, I watched the biggest protest movement in American history inspire the belief that change might finally arrive. The Black Lives Matter movement felt like a reckoning. But despite that energy and all of the conversation it inspired, there remained little mention of one of the most disproportionate uses of police violence in American history. We will never get a chance to embrace our children and hug them and kiss them. Because they're not here.

Because this government took them away from us. On Mother's Day 1985, the city of Philadelphia did something unthinkable to its own citizens on its own soil. I got a call around 3 o'clock in the morning. Lynn, get over here. It's going down. Click. For more than a decade, the city had been engaged in a standoff with a radical organization called MOVE. And the Philadelphia Police Department were now here to resolve the MOVE question for good. The police commissioner gets on his bullhorn and says, attention move, this is America.

You have to abide by the laws and rules of America. There were so many bullets in that morning shootout that they were ricocheting off the sidewalk like hell. And then? The helicopter takes off. It flies around. It circles. And then you hear an explosion and the neighborhood shook so violently. I mean, it seemed like the ground moved. The city of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on MOVE's headquarters, a house in the heart of a residential community,

a black community, killing 11 people, five of them children, and burning 61 homes to the ground. My daughters were taken away by this government. They dropped a bomb. Their aim was to kill us, plain and simple. Why is it that nearly 40 years on, so many have never heard of the move bombing?

And what does this cultural amnesia say about us? From CBC Podcasts and Confluential Films, the story of an American family's fight against the system. A family targeted by the U.S. government's war on black liberation. And what this forgotten American tragedy tells us about racism, power, and the price of change today. Black people will never get justice in America. I ain't talking about an individual person here and there.

I'm talking about people, Black people, who will never get justice. It wasn't made for us. I'm Matthew Amha, and this is the Africa's vs. America, a seven-part podcast series coming soon on CBC Listen and wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.