MOVE: 40 Years Later

Forty years after the city of Philadelphia bombed a home in an eviction that went off the rails and killed all 11 people inside, there is still interest in the story as evidenced by a number of developments in 2025. Tom Kranz, who covered the story at the scene on May 13, 1985 and wrote a book about it, reports on another book in the works by a university professor, a middle-school project on the rights of the MOVE children and an adaptation of the MOVE story for an episode of a prime time TV series.

Tom's book, Liveshot: Journalistic Heroism in Philadelphia

Link to the episode of FBI: MOST WANTED on CBS/Paramount

Transcript

MOVE Update 2025 4-4

(0:04) Hi folks, Tom Kranz here, happy spring. (0:08) My backdrop for this, this episode is a fairly old skyline picture of Philadelphia. (0:15) You see the old PSFS building behind me there.

(0:19) This is the skyline of Philadelphia that I remember when I was living there. (0:23) I lived in, I was born and raised in Philly and I was educated in Philly and I went to Temple. (0:27) And then I lived downtown and I lived in the suburbs for a couple of years before finally moving to New Jersey.

 (0:34) But this was the downtown skyline that I remember. (0:38) And I just thought I would pay a little homage to it in this episode. (0:41) I'm here on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the second biggest story I covered during my news career.

(0:49) And that was the May 13th, 1985 move disaster in West Philadelphia. (0:57) I call it the second biggest story. (0:59) I'd have to say the biggest story probably was the 9-11 attacks.

(1:04) But in terms of a local story that affected me at the time and for years later, (1:10) nothing comes close to what happened on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia on May 13th, 1985. (1:19) I'm not going to belabor and relitigate the facts that led up to this, the opinions, the pros and cons, (1:29) the debate about the factors and the social situations that led to it, the way it was resolved. (1:36) If you want to find the facts of this, they're readily available online.

(1:39) If you just search Move Philadelphia, you'll get the very detailed Wikipedia page. (1:45) There are magazine articles, there's video on all kinds of places where you can find the facts and you can make up your own minds. (1:56) My purpose today is to kind of give you some updates on some things that are occurring or have occurred just even this year, 2025, (2:06) to show that this story will never dies. 

(2:09) I wrote a book about this 35 years ago when I was still working at WCAU-TV. (2:14) And that book sells a couple of copies here and there. (2:17) It never was, you know, really a money-making thing for me.

(2:21) I just thought that our station did such a great job covering it. (2:24) And that was validated by winning the Columbia DuPont Award. (2:29) There are some things happening now as we speak, as of May 13th, 2025, that are keeping the story alive.

(2:39) Just this past week, and I'm talking about the first week of May of 2025, (2:46) Philadelphia City Council introduced a resolution that would create Move Remembrance Day on May 13th of every year. (2:54) Within the last couple of years, the City Council, you know, at long last, finally apologized for what happened. (3:01) The former mayor apologized, Mayor Good, that is.

(3:06) And the mayor at the time, a year or two ago, apologized, you know. (3:11) So there has been an acknowledgement, certainly by the city, that this was a gigantic, gigantic catastrophe, (3:20) and that the city played a major role in making it happen. (3:25) There is a history professor named Dr. Abigail Perkis.

(3:30) She's associated with Kean University in New Jersey. (3:33) And she is currently writing a book about the press coverage of Move. (3:40) And based on her interview with me, you know, she's been writing this book for quite a while now, (3:47) but based on her interview with me, it appears that she's going for not, you know, kind of like the timeline and kind of the nuts and bolts. 

(3:56) I think she's going more for a deep dive on what was going through the minds of the reporters. (4:04) What role did our backgrounds play in the way that story was covered? (4:09) You know, I told her and I've told other people that I grew up on a row home street almost exactly like Osage Avenue. (4:17) So I went in kind of with that perspective and kind of maybe a more sympathetic ear to the residents of that street, (4:26) because I've lived on a street that was very compacted like that.

(4:30) And we experienced bad neighbors at close quarters. (4:33) So she's in the process of writing that now. (4:36) I know she's interviewed a lot of people.

(4:37) I loaned her my box of of research materials for the book I wrote in the mid 80s at a time when there was no Internet, there was no cell phones, there was no Google. (4:52) You know, I did all that research at the Free Library of Philadelphia and by interviewing people and taking handwritten notes and writing down handwritten quotes from air checks. (5:02) So Dr. Perkins's book, I'm hoping will come soon. 

(5:07) I think she took time off from teaching to write that. (5:10) And I think that's underway now. I'm looking forward to that.

(5:14) Speaking of education, I was contacted some months ago by a trio of middle school students in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, north and west of Philadelphia. (5:27) And these three kids decided to enter a national competition called National History Day. (5:35) National History Day is actually a nonprofit organization that promotes learning history for school kids in grades six through 12 by creating a theme for a project that is kind of like a year long project that these these teams of school students put together.

(6:00) The theme that these kids from Kutztown picked was children's rights and the children they decided to pick were the move children, the five children who were killed at 6221 Osage Avenue in May of 1985. (6:18) And they put together a 10 minute essentially video mini documentary. (6:24) And I've seen kind of the draft version of that in which they interviewed.

(6:29) They interviewed journalists. (6:30) They interviewed Mike Africa, who actually took them on a little tour of the Osage Avenue neighborhood. (6:38) They interviewed at least one police officer.

(6:40) They got a hold of all the relevant archival footage. (6:42) They the 10 minute version I saw is really quite good. (6:48) You know, they did a lot of research and they interviewed all the right people specifically to look at how these kids rights were essentially trampled and marginalized.

(6:59) So that project has already won regional prize and they're going now for the final competition in mid June of 2025. (7:10) And they promised to get back to me with that. (7:12) And once that happens and they're done, I will show you that project they did.

(7:20) The National History Day is one of many projects whose federal funding has been cut off by the Trump administration. (7:30) I'm told that they have enough funding to finish this year's competition, but next year's competition, of course, is in question. (7:36) And this is one of those projects that I mean, this project is all about teaching history to school kids and getting them involved by doing research and preparing, you know, some kind of multimedia project.

(7:49) It involves the kids. (7:50) It involves their parents. (7:51) It involves teachers.

(7:53) You know, what could possibly be the downside of that? (7:55) I have no idea, but that's another podcast. =

(7:59) Finally, it was brought to my attention in January of this year that the CBS primetime series FBI Most Wanted did an episode with plot points based on the 1985 move disaster in Philadelphia. (8:18) It was the Philly mayor in 1985.

(8:21) The move bombing happened. (8:25) What happened again? (8:28) Move is a communal black liberation and environmentalist organization founded in 1970s by a man who renamed himself John Africa. (8:38) Yeah, my dad wasn't a member of move, but he liked parts of their cause, their religious pro nature community.

(8:43) As soon as I heard that this was that that event was kind of co-opted by the mainstream entertainment business, I rolled my eyes because there's this constant thirst for storylines and plot lines for, you know, all kinds of series out there. (8:57) It's like a kind of an industry machine cranking out these industries. (9:02) I looked at the episode and I saw that it involves the FBI search for a person who is setting fires and killing people.

(9:15) It turns out that some of the victims have ties to Philadelphia in 1985. (9:20) One of them was a police officer. (9:22) One of them was a firefighter.

(9:23) And so the episode ends with them finding out who the arsonist and murderer is. (9:31) And it turns out his parents owned a home, one of the homes that was burned down during the conflagration that followed, you know, the bombing of the move house. (9:43) Did you ever talk about the 1985 move bombing? (9:45) A little.

(9:46) I always wished he'd open up more. (9:48) It's what broke us up. (9:49) Did Jerry and his family belong to move? (9:53) No, Jerry has nothing to do with that.

(9:55) His family lived on that block. (9:57) What happened in 1985 destroyed them. (10:00) Their house burned down, right? (10:01) Yes, but it wasn't about losing the house.

(10:02) It was about losing his home. (10:04) Jerry's parents never recovered. (10:06) I guess what I found interesting was that a series like FBI Most Wanted would dig that deeply into this, you know, this horrible chunk of history in Philadelphia to come up with a plot line for a primetime TV series.

(10:23) If you want to watch the episode, I'm including the link in the notes for this episode, both the video and podcast episode. (10:33) You'll see the link in there. (10:34) The good news is you can watch the show.

(10:37) You can actually fast forward through portions of the episode to find the portions where they talk about move. (10:44) The downside is you cannot download the episode and you cannot skip over the commercials, right? (10:52) CBS Paramount, their, I guess, in their diabolical way of coding these online on demand episodes is you got to sit through the commercials to watch the show. 

(11:03) So, you know, as I've said before, and as my good friend, the late Harvey Clark, who was the main reporter on the story at the time said the last time he was approached to talk about, you know, move.

(11:17) And he basically said, you know, I'm done with move. (11:20) This happened so many years ago. (11:22) He was much more concerned about, you know, what's going on in our country today.

(11:26) You know, the discrimination that still exists, not only against black people, but against all kinds of people. (11:31) You know, that often ends up in violence. (11:35) You know, why don't we worry more about figuring that out? 

(11:38) Move does enter my consciousness every year at this time, mostly because of what happened to those kids.

(11:43) Let's remember it's 2025 now. (11:46) We have a lot of today problems to worry about.(11:49) Never taking our eye off the fact that the rights of children cannot be marginalized and that, you know, our children really are our future.

(11:58) Thanks for listening. (11:59) Thanks for watching. (12:00) I appreciate all of your support for the Type Tune Tint podcast and video casts.

(12:07) Be well.