Harvey Clark, one of the great reporters in Philadelphia television history, died last week from liver cancer. He was seventy-six. Harvey will forever be known for his coverage of the MOVE disaster in 1985 when the city bombed a residential neighborhood and killed six adults and five children who police were trying to evict. MOVE is a back to nature group who wore dread locks, ate raw vegetable, and rebelled against authority. They are black. Harvey said when it was over the city would have never dropped that bomb on that house if they were white. Harvey knew what it meant to be burned out of your house because you are black.
When Harvey was six years old, he lived in a small apartment in Chicago with his parents and his older sister, eight year old, Michele. His parents had met at Fisk University. In a search for a better home, they tried to move into an apartment building in Cicero, Illinois. They were the first black family to move into the all white city. It was 1951. When Harvey’s father tried to move their furniture into the building, a history of the events says police told him, “Get out of Cicero and don’t come back in town or you’ll get a bullet through you.” The NAACP filed a suit and the family moved in on June 26th.
On July 11, 1951 four thousand white racists showed up at the building and set their apartment on fire. They ripped the toilet out. They threw all the furniture out the window and set it on fire. Sixty police officers showed up and watched. None of the rioters were arrested. The governor had to call out the National Guard. It took three days to stop what became known at the Cicero Race Riot. After an investigation, four city officials and three police officers were fined a total of twenty-five hundred dollars for violating the family’s civil rights.
Harvey went on to graduate from Vassar College. His sister Michele became the first African American correspondent at CBS News. In 1972, Michele was killed in a plane crash when her flight from Washington DC to Chicago’s Midway Airport crashed into a house near the airport. Harvey spoke at the memorial service for Michele. He was approached by CBS News President Richard Salant about joining a program to get more minorities into CBS News. Harvey first worked at the CBS station in Minneapolis and then came to WCAU in Philadelphia in 1978.
I worked with Harvey for eleven years. He was a tough, no nonsense reporter. You had to gain his respect. Harvey had worked on the MOVE story for months leading up the final deadly day. The people living on Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek section, a black working class neighborhood, had been complaining about MOVE for months. Their property was unkept. Small children were seen in the yard without clothes. The adult men would get on the roof and harass the neighborhood with foul language through a bull horn. The city’s attempts at trying to negotiate with MOVE failed. On Mothers’ Day, May 12,1985, police went to Osage Avenue and asked residents to pack an overnight bag and evacuate for twenty-four hours.
At six o’clock on the morning on May 13th, hundreds of police officers lead by the Police Commissioner showed up for what was suppose to be an eviction. I was in the station’s control room speaking into Harvey’s ear when all hell broke loose. It was determined later police fired as many as ten thousand rounds into the house. Harvey stood out there reporting as the bullets flew. I and his fellow reporter, Charles Thomas, had to convince him to move to a safer position. Harvey reported all day and all night as the situation grew worse and police decide to drop a military explosive from a helicopter on a wooden bunker on the roof of the MOVE house. Police thought MOVE could have used it as a sniper location. There was gasoline stored in the bunker. A fire started. The Police Commissioner said, “Let the bunker burn”. There was a fear that fire fighters would be fired upon if they tried to put the fire out. By the time they attempted to put out the fire, sixty two homes burned down. Six adults and five children were found dead inside. One adult, Ramona Africa escaped the fire with a young boy called Birdie Africa. Ramona Africa was the only person charged with a crime and the only person to go to prison.
Harvey showed courage and determination that terrible day. He was the best on the city’s worse day. The child who lived through that first fire wanted us all to understand the flames of racism and injustice that burned in the city all those years later.
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