I’m not sure if you remember the bombing of the group Move in Philadelphia back in 1985, or if you have even heard of it. At the time, it was a WTF moment for me, and I especially remember being disturbed by the ways in which police and government officials spoke in self-justifying ways about the incident. This morning I read a news story about how the remains of the Move victims had been tossed out by the Philadelphia health commissioner. Now I’m having a WTF moment about how those remains had never been returned to family or given a dignified funereal rite of some sort. Imagine the hoopla had those been the remains of, let’s say, members of the US Armed Services. The story also got me thinking about a prison-related observation: the majority of people I knew behind the razor wire were not simply perpetrators of crime. Rather, they have also been the victims of crime along the way. That is to say that they cycle of criminality is, indeed, circular, and that we need to think about it not as a one-way, dead-end street that we can arrest our way out of. Still, I know that most of us don’t want to think about that thin line between the criminal and the innocent and whether it might behoove us to redraw it.
The article also got me thinking about one of my favorite poems, written by one of the truly great human beings I have ever had the pleasure to meet. The late Lucille Clifton and I were friends. Not besties, but after I first met her we made it a point to try to see each other whenever geographically convenient. I have always been blown away and inspired by the talent that could take the Move bombing and do this with it:
On May 13, 1985 Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first black mayor, authorized the bombing of 6221 Osage Avenue after the complaints of neighbors, also Black, about the Afrocentric back-to-nature group headquartered there and calling itself Move. All the members of the group wore dreadlocks and had taken the surname Africa. In the bombing eleven people, including children, were killed and sixty-one homes in the neighborhood destroyed. “move” by Lucille Clifton they had begun to whisper among themselves hesitant to be branded neighbor to the wild haired women the naked children reclaiming a continent away move he hesitated then turned his smoky finger toward Africa toward the house he might have lived in might have owned or saved had he not turned away move the helicopter rose at the command higher at first then hesitating then turning toward the center of its own town only a neighborhood away move she cried as the child stood hesitant in the last clear sky he would ever see the last before the whirling blades the whirling smoke and sharp debris carried away all clarity away move if you live in a mind that would destroy itself to comfort itself if you would stand fire rather than difference do not hesitate move away
Rather than give a lengthy reading of the poem, I’ll just point out how that final stanza has always given me the shivers. How often, under what circumstances, and for what reasons do we live in minds that tear themselves apart for the sake of the ease of the status quo or some misbegotten notion of a perfect past? Clifton, I think, captures something about the American psyche that reaches far beyond one day in Philadelphia, and I don’t believe that many of us are up to the challenge she poses. How many of us would rather burn — or burn others — than live with difference? She is not describing a unicorn. People talk to me a lot about my “criminal thinking,” but they can’t grasp why I am always suppressing the urge to yell at them, “Move away!”