The MOVE bombing stands as a monumental marker for the power of human forgetting — though it happened just 31 years ago, today, most people in the United States wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you mention it. And that should be a grave concern for us all, explained journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal from prison in an essay last year.
“May 13th at [then] 30, why should we care about what happened on May 13, 1985?,” Abu-Jamal wrote. “Why indeed? I’ll tell you why. Because what happened then is a harbinger of what’s happening now all across America. I don’t mean bombing people — not yet, that is. I mean the visceral hatreds and violent contempt once held for MOVE is now visited upon average people, not just radicals and revolutionaries like MOVE […]
“If it had been justly and widely condemned then, there would be no now, no Ferguson, no South Carolina, no Los Angeles, no Baltimore. The barbaric police bombing of May 13, 1985, and the whitewash of the murders of 11 MOVE men, women, and children opened a door that still has not been closed. We are today living with those circumstances.”