Was talking to a 70 year old security guard at my university yesterday and I liked what he had to say to me and a couple of the younger freshmen chatting him up. I think you should hear it. I’ll paraphrase him (cutting out my half of the conversation);
“For people like us [POC] it’s always been a fight against the latest dude. Reagan and bush and Obama and trump. You know what they did when we started scaring them? They bombed American soil because they were about to piss themselves at black power. You know I can’t say out loud I was a part of that but that’s what you kids gotta do. Stay calm and build that black power, that neighbor power, that low class power against the latest dude, and when they bomb this neighborhood again that’s when you can panic, but you’ve gotta fight til then. The president was never on our side. Neither one.”
context for the unaware:
I feel like it’s important to know that the University of Pennsylvania had parts of the bones of one of the MOVE bombing victims without the consent of the (living) family, and they had them for like… nearly 40 years. Then fucking lost them. The ME gave Penn the bones, and they used them for teaching classes.
It’s become a huge issue bc a local reporter broke the story - Billy Penn is a Very Local Paper - and the public outcry has led to a cascade change of the way a lot of Philly institutions handle human remains, which to me says two things: they won’t even respect your corpse if you don’t make them, and local reporters are fucking important. It was Billy Penn that broke who the bones might be & went to interview their childhood friends. The potential people were Tree, 14, and Delisha, 12. (For context, I turned 8 a couple weeks after the bombing.)
All the content warnings, but like, I think knowing that the disrespect continues for a long time after is important to know, too. The work keeps on.
Remains of children killed in MOVE bombing sat in a box at Penn Museum for decades