Word: philadelphia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Einhorn, executive director of the Philadelphia Sun Day Committee and a social activist, said that although protest movements of the sixties, which he helped lead, had failed to seize political power, they succeeded in convincing people that change is necessary...
EARLY ONE MORNING in mid-August, 400 Philadelphia policemen milled outside a ramshackle Victorian house five blocks from the University of Pennsylvania campus, awaiting orders from their superiors. The policemen knew roughly what task was expected of them before the cool morning became a sweltering summer day; they were to rout about 20 members of an organization formed by former college professors, drunks, and poets from their headquarters-home, located in an area of the city known for its semiradical population largely composed of students and working-class blacks. The police looked forward to this confrontation with this hard...
...white community reacted with outrage over the shoot-out. The Philadelphia papers were filled for days with endless details concerning the dead officer's funeral arrangements, his wife's tears, and his son's grief. One thousand members of the Fraternal Order of Police came to the funeral. In the meantime, there was outrage in the black community--not over the death of the white policeman, but over the vicious way the police handled the entire situation. Despite claims by Mayor Frank Rizzo and his political hacks that the MOVE organization was universally hated in Philadelphia, most of the black...
MOVE sympathizers insisted that the entire tragedy resulted simply because the MOVE members were black and subscribed to an uncommon ideology. Pictures of police maliciously beating unarmed MOVE members after they had surrendered substantiated the accusations of racism and fueled racial antagonism. Once again, Philadelphia was split right down racial lines. The anger of the black community was matched only by the outrage of the whites, who felt a white police officer had died because of the recalcitrance of what they considered to be nothing but a bunch of lazy black hippies...
PERHAPS THE MOST discouraging aspect of the Philadelphia fiasco was the editorial response from the local media, whose members are composed primarily of white, cautious newswriters and editors. These papers make money because of the numerous middle-class white subscribers throughout Philadelphia and its expansive suburbs. The media reflected the moral casuistry of its readership, failing to face the essential moral question that begged to be raised throughout the days surrounding the event: What is wrong with a society that causes alienated, frustrated groups of people such as the members of MOVE to arise? If our society is as perfect...