Studio 2 Extra: Investigative journalist reflects on MOVE bombing

Investigative reporter Linn Washington remembers the MOVE bombing 40 years later .

Air Date: May 13, 2025 3:00 pm

Two city blocks of rowhouses are left in ruin following the worst fire in the city's history, May 15, 1985 in West Philadelphia. The blaze was caused accidently when police attempted to remove a radical group called MOVE from their house by dropping a satchel bomb on the structure a gun battle. (AP Photo)

Forty years ago, the City of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on a row home on Osage Avenue, igniting a fire that killed 11 members of the back-to-nature group MOVE, including five children, and destroyed more than 60 homes.

Investigative journalist Linn Washington was there—and he’s never stopped reporting on the events. “It’s just been painful…the enormity of what happened,” said Washington during a recent Studio 2 Extra interview with host Cherri Gregg. “The double standards of justice and the fact that system could not deal with this group.”

Washington is the narrator of MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy, a new podcast produced by the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at Temple University and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The series explores not just the May 13, 1985 bombing, but the many years of conflict between MOVE, the city, and its residents that came before it.

“One of the myriad of issues involved with this whole MOVE conundrum is that no one has told the whole story, and we tried to do that,” Washington said.

MOVE, founded in the early 1970s, is often described as a Black liberation group, but Washington says that label only scratches the surface.

“They projected themselves as a Black revolutionary group, but for the better part, they were making war on Black people throughout their whole existence,” he said.

Tensions between MOVE and their neighbors on Osage Avenue reached a breaking point in the spring of 1985. On the day of the bombing, Washington was three blocks away. He saw armed men carrying a green satchel get into a police helicopter, watched it take off, and then—felt the ground shake. “My knees buckled,” he said.

Despite reporting on the bombing for decades, Washington said working on the podcast forced him to finally confront the trauma. “I shed the first tear in 40 years,” he admitted. “I thought it rolled off my back like water on a duck, but it stuck. It stuck.”

MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy is available at philly.com/MOVE.

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