From 1986: A MOVE story for the children

This story was originally published on May 14, 1986.

The service was slow on Mother’s Day, and the kids were fidgeting while we waited for dinner.

“Tell them to bring us some bread,” said Andrew, who is 6.

“I want my dinner,” said Jeff, who is 8.

So I tried to get their minds off their hunger. I told them that Tuesday was the one-year anniversary of MOVE and that on the previous Mother’s Day, some families had to leave their homes.

All right, maybe it wasn’t an appropriate subject for a Mother’s Day celebration. But they stopped talking about food for a while.

There was no point in trying to tell them what the group MOVE is about. Besides, I don’t know what MOVE is about. I don’t think MOVE knows what MOVE is about.

So I told them about something they could identify with. About the 61 houses that were ruined by a bomb and a fire. And one year later, I said, most of those people don’t have their homes back.

I told them to imagine that in our neighborhood. Our house would be gone. Up and down the block, all the houses would be gone. Nobody would own anything.

Your toys would be gone. Your books and school projects. Your tennis shoes. The beds you slept on. The pictures from your first birthdays.

The kids seemed shocked. Dinner came, and we dropped the subject, which was fine with everybody. But I think that was the first time we had tried to imagine what it would have been like in our neighborhood.

Imagine it in your neighborhood. Imagine discovering, after it happened, that the planning was even worse than the execution. Imagine watching the people who run the city contradict each other - if not lie - in public testimony.

Imagine reading that Ernest Edwards had walked off the rebuilding job. Imagine watching the rebuilding tab mount because of bad management and cost overruns.

Imagine reading that the cop who made the bomb had misled everyone for weeks about what was in it. In this city, when a cop becomes a suspect in the FBI corruption probe, he is suspended immediately. The cop who made the bomb is still on a beat.

Imagine having no recourse.

How would you explain that to your children?

One year ago, the day before Mother’s Day, two days before their houses would be gone, I talked to children on Osage Avenue.

“I dream bad things,” said Chantee Bond, who was 6 at the time. “I dream about the time one of the MOVE people was climbing on the house.”

Her 8-year-old brother, Aasin, said:

“It’s OK to live how you want, as long as you’re not mean to anyone.”

Rodney Ford, 8, said:

“It’s crazy, because you don’t know what they might do.”

That same day, Ramona Africa sat on the stairs outside 6221 Osage Ave., the MOVE corral. As neighborhood children listened, she told me and another reporter that if MOVE members were not released from prison, MOVE would ‘’destroy the entire Democratic Party, the police, the mayor and the image and economy of Philadelphia."

It was in that environment that Clifford Bond tried to teach his children about justice and the American way. He said he believed tension on the block was helping his children learn tolerance.

“I tell them there is a system,” said Bond, who sat on his front porch across the street from MOVE. “We have rights when things do not go according to the law, and ways to complain about it.”

What can he tell his children now?

Bond got home from work at 3:30 yesterday afternoon in International City, his temporary home, and waited for his kids to come home from school. He stood outside with Robert Ford and his daughter, 3-year-old Kiona, who also are displaced from Osage Avenue.

I asked when they were scheduled to return home.

“Who knows?” Ford said. They don’t listen to the city’s pronouncements anymore. Not since the Christmas deadline passed.

But Aasin Bond, 9, said he’s counting the days. Twenty-seven more days until he goes home, he said.

“I’m just real mad,” he said.

At whom?

“The one who dropped the bomb. And I’m really mad at MOVE.”

Does Bond still tell his children there is a system, and rights, and avenues for complaint?

“It’s not the system that’s at fault,” Bond said. “The problem is with the people in the system.”

One year after the bomb, that is the legacy and the moral of May 13. And we are still paying for it.

This story was originally published on May 14, 1986.