“The Blood of Innocent Children”: Race, Respectability, and “True” Victimhood in the 1985 MOVE Police Bombing

Abstract

In 1985, Philadelphia police responded to a stand-off with Afrocentric environmental group MOVE* by dropping a firebomb on their home, killing eleven MOVE members, five of them children. Highly critical of the bombing, the media and the Investigative Commission grieved for the “true victims,” the children who perished alongside adults whose radicalism seemingly made them unworthy of grief. Yet the focus on the children functioned to deflect larger ethical questions—chiefly, if there were no children present, should the state be permitted to bomb its own citizens? Such questions about race, policing, racialized understandings of innocence, and the meaning of childhood, continue to resonate today.