A West Philadelphia neighborhood after being bombed by the Philadelphia Police Department (1985)

Image from preview.redd.it and submitted by JamesTheMarxist
image showing A West Philadelphia neighborhood after being bombed by the Philadelphia Police Department (1985)

TechDante on December 19th, 2021 at 17:02 UTC »

The bones of some of the child victims were still being used as teaching aids for anthropology at a nearby university.

Edit: one of the many articles available about the bones

Itchy-Profession-725 on December 19th, 2021 at 17:37 UTC »

I grew up in upper darby, could hear the gun shots in the morning, and see the flames on the way home from school. I was 11yrs old

mmoncefzdgd on December 19th, 2021 at 17:57 UTC »

In May, Philadelphia’s then-Health Commissioner Thomas Farley resigned after admitting that he ordered the cremation and disposal of human remains belonging to the victims of the 1985 police bombing of the West Philadelphia headquarters of MOVE, a Black liberation organization.

As of Monday, Farley is an executive in D.C.’s office of community health administration, a segment of the city’s health department that works to reduce health disparities. As the Washington Post noted on Wednesday, Black Lives Matter DC and others are not happy about Farley getting this new gig. To fully understand why, it’s important to understand the history around the MOVE bombing and the remains of those killed.

On May 13, 1985, after a long and contentious standoff between members of MOVE, some of whom were living collectively in a middle-class Black neighborhood where neighbors complained of trash in their yard and other run-ins, and the police, who were initially there to serve an eviction notice, the department dropped an illegally obtained satchel bomb onto the roof of the MOVE house. Officials were aware that children were inside. And for an hour after the subsequent blaze started, the fire department and police conspired to let the fire burn. The blast and resulting fire killed 11 MOVE members, including five children, left 240 residents of the neighborhood homeless, and more than 50 row houses burned to the ground.

Thirty-two years later, in early 2017, Farley learned from the Philadelphia medical examiner Dr. Sam Gulino that a box containing bones and bone fragments from the MOVE bombing victims’ autopsies had been found. “Believing that investigations related to the MOVE bombing had been completed more than 30 years earlier, and not wanting to cause more anguish for the families of the victims, I authorized Dr. Gulino to … dispose of the bones and bone fragments,” Farley said in a statement released from the mayor’s office in 2021. (Those remains, it was later discovered, were not cremated.)

Also in 2021, officials at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University admitted that anthropologists were sharing the bones of an unidentified MOVE victim for educational purposes. Elaine Ayers, who studies the history of science, explained in Slate earlier this year how the remains ended up in Ivy League circles: