The last time Mike Africa Jr stepped across the threshold of 6221 Osage Avenue in Philadelphia 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.
This time, it was not so easy. On a recent afternoon, he gingerly unlocked the front door using keys he had just acquired and cautiously pushed it open.
Then he edged forward, placing one foot inside the hallway, before coming to an abrupt halt with a visible shudder.
“Oh man, the memories,” he said, recoiling back and out of the house. “The fact that 11 people aren’t here any more is so unfair. They didn’t do anything wrong, they didn’t deserve what happened.”
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.
It was on that same roof, 38 years ago on Saturday, that one of the worst incidents in America’s long history of racial atrocities was perpetrated. At 5.27pm on 13 May 1985, a state helicopter commissioned by Philadelphia police flew low over the property and dropped a bomb made of C-4 plastic explosives directly on to it.
The device ignited a fire that turned into an inferno that was then notoriously allowed to burn by Philadelphia authorities intent on driving the Black radical organization out of the city. Eleven people trapped inside the Move house at 6221 Osage Avenue died in the conflagration.
Among them were five children, Mike Africa’s friends – Tomaso (aged nine), Netta and Little Phil (both 12), Delisha (13) and Tree (14).
“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. In 2020, he persuaded the city council to create an annual day of “observation, reflection and recommitment” marking the anniversary.
Now he has gone one step further. He has purchased the row house that was rebuilt out of the ashes of 6221 Osage Avenue with the intention, in time, of converting it into a memorial for those who died.
“It’s about setting an example, sending a message,” he told the Guardian in his first visit to the house since he obtained the keys. “A message that a bombing like this by the government against its own people must never happen again.”
It is fitting that Mike Africa is now the titleholder of 6221 Osage Avenue. It was his great-aunt Louisa James who owned the house at the time of the bombing, having lived there since the 1960s.
James’s brother, John Africa (born Vincent Lopez Leaphart), founded Move in 1972 and was the revered head of the organization. The group, which regarded itself as a family in which each member took the last name Africa, was committed partly to Black equality and racial justice and partly to early notions of environmental protection and animal rights.
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 siege and shootout at the Move headquarters in Powelton Village in which one police officer was killed and several Move members arrested.
Both Mike Africa’s parents were rounded up and imprisoned for decades. Mike Africa himself was born in a cell just days after the siege, and would have to wait until he was into his 40s to be united with his parents outside prison.
By 1981, remaining Move members who had not been arrested following the siege began to reconvene in Osage Avenue. Conflict with Philadelphia police quickly began anew, and by the start of 1985, city chiefs, including the city’s first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, were looking to forcibly evict the group once again.
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.
Inside the Move house at 6221 Osage Avenue, John Africa, as well as Louisa James’s son Frank – Mike Africa’s great-uncle and second cousin, respectively – were among the six adults burnt to death.
Mike Africa said he was motivated to buy the Osage Avenue property because it had been his great-aunt’s dying wish. In 2019, with just weeks to live, Louisa James had appealed to him to one day get the house back.
Following the fire, 6221 Osage Avenue was commandeered by city authorities under eminent domain, stripping James of her ownership of the property. She was offered $60,000 in compensation, but refused to cash it, Mike Africa said, insisting that all she wanted was her home back.
Yet once the block of Osage Avenue had been reconstructed, she was the only resident who not allowed to return. For years afterwards, a 24/7 police presence was maintained at 6221, with officers billeted inside the property in order to prevent James or anyone else connected to Move from reoccupying the address.
In addition to fulfiling his great-aunt’s dying wish, Mike Africa also has ambitions to memorialise the victims of the 1985 bombing. He hopes to place photographs of each of the 11 inside the row house in commemoration.
He also hopes that the city will help compensate for the debt he has taken on buying the $382,000 property. “My great-aunt should never have been stripped of Osage Avenue,” he said.
Jamie Gauthier, the council representative covering the Osage Avenue district, was supportive of the desire for remembrance. “You have to confront the heart of things in order to move past them and make sure they never happen again. We need healing in our city,” she said.
George Duncan, who was born on the corner of Osage Avenue overlooking the site of the bombing and who still lives there today, also backed the idea of remembrance. “Those people killed 11 Black men, women and children. They killed my people. Imagine how much hatred was involved in trying to kill us like that.”
Mike Africa will be back at 6221 Osage Avenue for the anniversary on Saturday. This time he is determined to go inside.
