Sometimes it seems the most appalling episodes in history
are the ones most destined to fade into obscurity. Only if we are lucky does some skillful
writer or filmmaker find the means to bring such neglected stories to our attention.
Director Jason Osder spent a decade assembling “Let the Fire
Burn” (10) a documentary about a shameful event in 1985, in which a longstanding
feud between the city of Philadelphia and a radical separatist group of mostly
African Americans called MOVE culminated in a deadly stand-off. When the
group’s members defied attempts to evict them from their home, police
tear-gassed the group, fired into a house full of women and children, and then
dropped a bomb. The resulting fire left 61 mostly African American working
families homeless and 11 people dead, including five children. City officials’
direction to firefighters to“let the fire burn” becomes a fitting title for
Osder’s riveting account of police power run horribly amuck.
The film, Osder’s first feature, holds us in the grip of
unanswerable questions regarding how such a thing could have happened. Having
interviewed several of the protagonists, Osder found that even the passage of
time did not provide them with illuminating perspective, so he wisely elected
(with the help of an exceptionally skilled editor) to tell the story using the
wealth of archival footage of the escalating conflict, the final horrifying
confrontation, and the hearings of a commission convened afterwards to
investigate the events.
The result is appropriately painful and riveting. A
combination of early footage and later testimony conveys a sense of how MOVE’s
antagonistic stance sent authorities into a tailspin. The group attempted to
live off the grid right in the middle of an urban setting, eschewing
electricity and sanitation service in favor of a technology-free,
“anarcho-primitivist” lifestyle. MOVE
rhetoric (some of it impressively recited by the group’s children) denounced
“the system” and its attempts to subjugate them.
Police and city leaders—notably Mayor Frank Rizzo, making no
attempt to temper the racism that fueled his aggression—quickly labeled the
group a terrorist organization and set off an escalating series of arrests and
confrontations. Even if you doubt MOVE’s accounts of beatings in police custody
(and the film doesn’t give you any reason to doubt those accounts), the sheer
number of repeated arrests of such a small number of people is
mind-boggling.
While MOVE’s leader John Africa may well have intended to
provoke the escalating confrontations that followed over a period of 13 years,
one marvels at the failure of city leaders to wonder for even a moment about
what in the life experience of these African Americans would make the
movement’s philosophy so appealing. It’s a stunning example of people in power
failing utterly to recognize their own roles in creating a community with so
little to lose.
Conflicts between police and MOVE culminated in an exchange
of fire that resulted in a police officer’s death in 1978. Bafflingly, nine
MOVE members were convicted of shooting that one officer (they insist he was
killed by friendly fire) and received long sentences which they are still
serving. The rest of the group set up a new headquarters after being evicted
from their first house, and they proceeded to antagonize their mostly
African-American neighbors by broadcasting profanity-laced rhetoric at all
hours, creating sanitation problems, and leaving their children to run wild.
The city’s first black mayor was elected in 1983, but lacked either the skill or
wisdom to deescalate the conflict that had been set in motion under Rizzo’s
administration.
In this retelling, the tragedy seems inexorable. Although
one official commends the police for their “admirable restraint” in the 1978
confrontation, footage had captured several officers savagely beating one MOVE
member. The particularly repellant police commissioner narrates how police were
required to “outgun” the group as though he is describing a large guerilla
army.
In that final 1985 confrontation, in which a handful of MOVE
members including women and children were holed up in a row house while police
unleashed tear gas and fired 10 thousand rounds of ammunition into the house,
the commissioner suggests that children might have fired on police and opines
that the group was in an “enviable position” that necessitated the police
response. One wonders whether he would have traded places with them.
The film’s most powerful moments involve Birdie Africa, the
one child who survived the bombing and who was deposed in connection with the
inquiry that followed. He describes his experiences growing up in the commune,
including how he rebelled against the group’s raw food diet and wanted to run
away so that he could ride bikes and watch TV like other children. His plain-spoken
description of how he and the other children huddled under wet blankets during
the 1985 siege and their desperate attempts to escape stands in contrast to
officers’ nonsensical accounts.
Birdie, with burn scars visible on his face, is asked at the
beginning of his deposition what happens to people who don’t tell the truth,
and he responds that they will be hurt. One is struck by the irony of that
response as one listens to officers deny having shot at MOVE members, including
children, as they emerged from the house and then ran back inside. When an
admirably restrained minister expresses incredulity at the description of
people running back into a burning house, an officer’s response conveys the
inhumanity that the government had allowed itself: “How could you [understand]?
They’re MOVE members.”
Without voiceover or commentary beyond limited screen
descriptions of some key facts, the film wisely allows participants in this
tragedy—including Birdie and a small handful of MOVE members, but also police
and city officials—to describe what happened from their perspective. Most of
the government witnesses (not one of whom was ever criminally charged for the
actions that led to the deaths of so many civilians) damn themselves,
particularly from this 30 years’ distance.
Only one officer took actions protective of the people
inside, and his testimony is particularly poignant. Visibly agonized, he describes how he was
restrained by a superior officer from assisting Birdie as the boy attempted to
escape the burning house. The officer finally assisted the boy—and later found
his locker decorated with the words “N-------- Lover.” He eventually left the
force suffering from PTSD.
Filmmaker Osder’s careful compilation of this history—so
recent and yet already so neglected—is an important lens on how drastically
government power can assume the characteristics it ascribes to its errant
citizens.
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