Every time I teach the MOVE bombing, students are shocked. And when I teach the aftermath involving an anthropologist who hoarded some of the remains and used them as teaching tools, they are even more shocked. And I teach in Pennsylvania. Even some students from Philly are unaware of this history

“The report concluded that the remains … were used twice in Princeton courses – once in a small graduate-level seminar taught on the Princeton campus in 2015, and once in a video recorded for an undergraduate course offered in 2019.” Unconscionable. www.princeton.edu/news/2021/08...

I was in high school when it happened. To this day I remember the MOVE bombing but I did not hear about the crime against the victims' remains until quite recently. It is horrifying that the city of Philadelphia could bomb and burn down one of its own neighborhoods to inflict punishment on an

Seems like a good time to re-share this, which addresses the usage of skeletons of teaching, which was especially relevant as it was published after news broke of remains from children killed in the MOVE bombing were used in an online class: www.sapiens.org/archaeology/...

thread 🧵 about the MOVE bombing. 1985 is not that long ago! And wtf Princeton & Penn 😬

Today is the 41st anniversary of the MOVE bombing, one of the most painful events in Philadelphia history. Last year, I wrote about the long fight to lay some of the youngest victims to rest. www.inquirer.com/news/philade...

In many ways, the MOVE bombing should be viewed through the lens of things like the attack on Black Wall Street, as much as the lens of per se violent law enforcement overreaction. Was there some calculated conspiracy when it started? No, probably not. But it played out that way for a reason.

"I've never heard of another case where a government has dropped a bomb on citizens in America. This is not something that you can repair back to normal. You have to find other ways to cope, and that's what I've been doing for the last 40 years." ✊ […]

May 13th: anniversary of the MOVE bombing, in which Philly cops killed 5 adults and 6 children in the Black liberation and environmentalist group and destroyed 61 of their neighbors' houses too. Their names were Katricia, Netta, Delitia, Phil, Tomasa, Rhonda, Teresa, Frank, CP, Conrad, and John.

MOVE is such a perfect Philadelphia story, in that there are approximately zero sympathetic adults in the entire story, including in the decades that have followed. From the bombing itself to the embezzlement of rebuilding funds to the misuse of the victims' remains, this one has it all!

For a higher resolution version "in the wild", this is a 2021 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer. www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...

The Philadelphia Inquirer put together a great podcast about this event. www.inquirer.com/move-bombing

Today is the anniversary of the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, where the police dropped a bomb out of a fucking helicopter onto a house of Black revolutionaries, burning down 2 city blocks. This is the painting I did inspired by it last year. #movebombing

And as those examples demonstrate, I'm only talking about my OWN experience in the 1970s; I would imagine it's even worse nowadays. The MOVE bombing happened several years after I graduated high school.

in the months before the MOVE bombing, the Philly Police Department groomed the public by printing daily newspaper articles about how the MOVE members were some kind of "degenerate savages who abused their children and refused to use soap"