was almost four decades ago, when he was six years old and went bouncing into the house to greet friends and extended family, eager to play.
As a child, Mike Africa was a regular visitor to this row house on the west side of Philadelphia, spending time with his great-aunt and uncle, cousins and friends – all members of Philadelphia’s Black liberation group known as Move. He remembers gathering with the other kids on the roof of 6221 Osage Avenue, eating fruit as the sun went down.
“There is so much trauma, and retrauma, in this house,” Mike Africa said, unable to bring himself to enter the property despite the passage of so many years. “This should never have happened. A bombing. It should never have happened to anyone.”In recent years Mike Africa has been at the forefront of efforts to ensure that Philadelphia, and the rest of the US, do not forget the tragic events that unfolded from this address 38 years ago.
Move’s unconventional and noisy way of living – members would stand on the roof shouting lengthy political screeds through a bullhorn – attracted the hostility of the then legendarily brutal Philadelphia police. Confrontation culminated in 1978 in a This time they left nothing to the imagination. The fire that ravaged Osage Avenue and the adjoining Pine Street on 13 May 1985 razed 61 houses to the ground. About 236 people – all but one of them African American – were left homeless.