Policing the City of Philadelphia
Frank Rizzo, a century of racial terror, and the enduring legacy of state violence
There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.
—Angela Y. Davis
A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
On the afternoon of October 26, 2020, officers Sean Matarazzo and Thomas Munz drew their service weapons on 27-year-old Walter Wallace Jr. outside his family’s home on 61st and Locust Street in West Philadelphia. Wallace’s family had called for an ambulance, not the police, because what was happening to him was a mental health crisis, and they understood, the way Black families in Philadelphia have always understood, that calling the police carried its own set of risks. Wallace held a knife at his side while pacing in evident distress. His mother pleaded with the officers to stand down. Within seconds, they discharged approximately fourteen rounds, striking him in the chest and shoulder, and Walter Wallace Jr. died on the street outside his family’s home while his mother watched.
What happened to Walter Wallace Jr. was not a surprise. That is the thing about Philadelphia that requires sitting with, not that the violence happened, but that no one who had been paying attention could honestly say they did not see it coming. Police violence in this city has never been a rupture in the order of things. It has always been the order of things, and every encounter between a Black Philadelphian in distress and the force the city sends to manage that distress is connected, whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not, to every encounter that came before it.
Just five blocks from where Wallace died stands Osage Avenue, where on the evening of May 13th, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a satchel bomb from a helicopter onto a house where people were living, in an attempt to remove members of a Black organization called MOVE. The bomb killed eleven people, five of them children between the ages of seven and thirteen, and the city watched the neighborhood burn and did not put out the fire. The question of how a city arrives at bombing its own people has haunted Philadelphia ever since, though haunted may be too generous a word for a city that has spent forty years finding ways to not fully answer it.
These two moments, Wallace on 61st and Locust and the children on Osage Avenue, are not exceptions to the story of Philadelphia. They are the story, two points on a line that stretches back more than a century, and every attempt at reform in the years between and after them has managed to leave that line intact. To understand why, you have to go back further than most people are comfortable going, back to where the institution was built and what it was built to do and who it was built to do it to.
That history becomes especially visible during Frank Rizzo’s tenure as police commissioner from 1967 to 1971 and as mayor from 1972 to 1980, years during which white supremacist practices were not merely tolerated within Philadelphia’s institutions but codified, reinforced, and shielded from any accountability that might have slowed them down. Rizzo did not invent the violence. He inherited it, perfected it, and made it into policy, and the city rewarded him for it at every turn, which tells you something not just about the man but about what Philadelphia had already decided it was and wanted to remain. What follows is not simply a history of one brutal man. It is a reckoning with the institution that made him possible, and with the city that built itself around him and has refused, generation after generation, to honestly confront what that building cost.
I. Creating & Strengthening a Racialized Climate
In 1915, American film director D.W. Griffith released one of the first major blockbuster films, and the country received it with something that can only be described as gratitude. The Birth of a Nation played to packed houses across the United States, billed on posters as the greatest picture of all time, and President Woodrow Wilson held a private screening at the White House and called it history written with lightning. What Wilson meant, and what the audiences filling those theatres understood, was that the film had given them permission to believe what many of them had always wanted to believe — that the story of Black people in America was a story of savagery and unfitness, that the violence done to them was not a crime but a correction, and that the men doing the correcting were heroes.
Griffith’s film did two things simultaneously. It confirmed the story that white America had been telling itself about the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a story in which Black people were cast as animalistic, criminal, and fundamentally unfit for citizenship, and it foreshadowed how that story would continue to be weaponized in the years to come. Every image of a Black person in the film was constructed to produce disgust, to make the viewer feel that what they were seeing needed to be contained, controlled, or destroyed, and the Ku Klux Klan, the Protestant-led white supremacist terror organization founded during Reconstruction, was cast as the force heroically doing that work. The film was almost directly responsible for the Klan’s resurgence, and with that resurgence came a new wave of racial terror across the country that would leave its mark on every city in America, including Philadelphia.
Philadelphia felt the reverberations almost immediately. On September 23, 1915, The Birth of a Nation made its debut at the Forrest Theatre, and more than 500 Black Philadelphians, having watched cities across the country erupt in protest against the film, decided they were not going to be any different. Local ministers gathered that morning at A.M.E. Book Concern, a Black printing establishment and home of the oldest African American newspaper, The Christian Recorder, and organized a demonstration against the premiere. For most of the evening the protest remained orderly, until a brick went through the theatre’s front window shortly before ten o’clock and the police responded with the full force of what they had always been willing to do in defense of white supremacy — drawing revolvers and batons on a crowd of predominantly Black protesters, beating those who could not run fast enough to escape their clubs. Several people were sent to the hospital with head wounds and deep lacerations. Others were arrested. The city had shown, on the very night Black Philadelphians tried to say that a film celebrating their dehumanization was unacceptable, exactly what kind of city it intended to be.
That willingness would be tested again three years later, when thousands of African Americans migrated to Philadelphia during the First World War in search of work in the war industries, settling in neighborhoods in South Philadelphia that white and Irish immigrant residents had long considered their own. The presence of Black families was enough to produce rage, because what white Philadelphians were protecting was not just their neighborhoods but their understanding of the order of things, their sense of who the city belonged to and who had the right to move freely within it. That rage reached a breaking point on July 26, 1918, when a Black woman named Adella Bond moved into the neighborhood and white residents gathered in a large crowd outside her home. When a rock came through her window, Bond fired her gun into the air in a desperate attempt to call for help, unintentionally striking one of the men in the crowd, and what followed was five days of mob violence against Black residents that would come to be known as the 1918 Race Riot, a showcase of what happened when the city’s white residents and its police force were given, or gave themselves, license to terrorize.
For five days, mobs attacked Black residents by gun, lynching, and kidnapping, and the police offered minimal restraint, offering encouragement at times instead. One incident drew particular attention: the arrest and death of Riley Bullock, a 38-year-old Black man whose last hours revealed everything about the culture the Philadelphia Police Department had built for itself. On the third day of the riots, officer John Schneider spent the entire day moving through the South Philadelphia community, assaulting Black residents with a methodical brutality that suggested he understood he was operating with permission. He beat a Black man named Preston H. Lewis until he was semiconscious, followed him to Polyclinic Hospital, knocked down a nurse who tried to intervene, and beat Lewis again until he lost consciousness entirely. Later that same day, Schneider and his partner Robert Ramsey encountered Riley Bullock. What happened next remains disputed, though the accounts agree on the essential fact: both officers beat Bullock severely before bringing him to the station, and the moment he arrived, Ramsey shot him. Newspapers reported that the bullet had come from an unknown Black man in the crowd who had fled the scene. Evidence would later prove it was Ramsey who pulled the trigger.
Both officers were fired and brought to trial, and the trial lasted thirty minutes before both were found not guilty. Officers who had witnessed Ramsey shoot Bullock, including Black officers, took the stand and swore under oath that they had never seen Ramsey before in their lives. This was the system, a culture within the Philadelphia Police Department that not only carried out violence but protected the people who carried it out, that used the very law it was sworn to uphold as a shield against accountability, that had learned, over years of practice, that it could do what it wanted to Black people and the city would look away. T.D. Adkins, pastor of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in West Philadelphia, wrote a letter to the editor of The Philadelphia Tribune in the aftermath of the riots that named what he had witnessed with the clarity of a man who understood that what he was describing was not an outburst but a policy:
Afro-Americans of this city are tired of legalized murder, we are sick at seeing death carried on by acts of legislation, we are heart-sick at seeing men killed with law, homes ruined, children robbed of comfort, love and affection by law, society outraged, morals under-minded by the law.
Adkins was describing a system, one that would continue producing the same results long after the riots faded from the headlines, so long as the institutions that enabled them remained intact. That is the thing about systems: they do not need the same actors to keep running. They only need the same permissions.
II. They Do Not Fall Far From the Tree
Frank Rizzo did not stumble into police work. He was born into it, raised inside it, shaped by it long before he ever put on a uniform. The Rizzo family had come to Philadelphia from Calabria in Southern Italy, a region that had known poverty for generations, and Ralph Rizzo, Frank’s father, had looked at the Philadelphia police force and seen in it exactly what his family needed: a way out, a foothold, a path into the kind of stability that had never been available to them in the world they left behind.
What made that path possible was not simply ambition. It was whiteness, or more precisely, the way whiteness was being constructed and distributed in Progressive-era America, where social scientists used crime statistics to draw a line between the ethnic groups that could be assimilated into the American project and the ones that could not. Italians, they argued, belonged on the assimilable side of that line. African Americans did not. They had been cast, in the language of the era, as congenital criminals, as people whose capacity for lawlessness was not a product of circumstance but of nature, which meant that no amount of opportunity or integration could change what they fundamentally were. This was the architecture of a lie that would take generations to fully reckon with, and it was a lie that benefited the Rizzo family enormously. As historian Thomas Guglielmo found in his research on Italians in Chicago:
In the end, Italians’ many perceived racial inadequacies aside, they were still largely accepted as white by the widest variety of people and institutions — naturalization laws and courts, the U.S. census, race science, anti-immigrant racialisms, newspapers, unions, employers, neighbors, realtors, settlement houses, politicians, and political parties… For much of the turn-of-the-century and interwar years, then, Italians were white on arrival not so much because of the way they viewed themselves, but because of the way others viewed and treated them.
Ralph Rizzo embraced the opportunities that whiteness afforded him, and the ideology that came with it began to trickle down into how he raised his son. He was firm with Frank throughout his childhood, what reporter Greg Walters described as a hard-knock life, and the lessons he passed down were simple and durable: there were goodies and there were baddies, and the baddies were the criminals, and the criminals were, in the colorblind language Ralph used to avoid saying what he meant, the people who had been labeled as such by the institutions he served and believed in. It was a code, and Frank learned to speak it fluently. Ralph had spent over forty years in the Philadelphia police force, carrying out his work within the confines of white supremacy, contributing to the racialized climate that was being built and maintained in the city, and everything he had learned in those forty years he passed on to his son as though it were wisdom, as though it were simply the truth about how the world worked and who deserved what within it. Ralph had been part of the same police force during the 1918 Race Riots that left several African Americans dead, and his son would come to know that history not as a cautionary tale but as an inheritance.
It did not take long for Frank to see his father as the model he wanted to follow. When he entered the Philadelphia Police Department in 1943, he was not merely following in his father’s footsteps. He was stepping into an institution his father had helped build and strengthen, an institution already accustomed to wielding violence against African Americans in defense of a racial order that now counted the Rizzos among its beneficiaries.
III. Anything Goes Under ‘Law and Order’
When Frank Rizzo joined the Philadelphia Police Department in 1943, he was stepping into an institution that already knew what it was for and had spent decades perfecting how to do it. That he moved quickly through the ranks was not a surprise — he was firm, he was loyal to the culture he had inherited, and he understood intuitively what the institution rewarded and what it required. What it required, above everything else, was a commitment to law and order, a phrase that functioned in Philadelphia the way it has always functioned in this country: as a clean and acceptable way of saying something that could not be said plainly in polite company.
Law and order rhetoric was becoming the defining racialized political language of the era, taken up by national figures including Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon, each of them understanding that the phrase did not need to name Black people explicitly to be understood as being about Black people. Mass media narratives did the work of making the connection legible, flooding the public with images and stories that positioned African Americans as the primary obstacle to safety, stability, and civic peace, manufacturing a fear that the police could then present themselves as the remedy for. Rizzo understood, and as he climbed through the ranks of the department he mastered the idiom with the confidence of a man who had been raised inside its logic — invoking the fear of Black criminality to justify aggressive policing, presenting himself as the city’s last line of defense against a threat that he and the institutions around him had spent years constructing.
A few years before Rizzo would assume the commissioner’s office, the Girard College protests of 1965 gave him the stage he needed to make that performance visible to the entire city. Girard College had been founded in 1848 by banker and financier Stephen Girard, who mandated in his will that the school be built as a boarding school exclusively for white orphaned boys, and it had stood for over a century as one of the city’s most enduring symbols of Black exclusion, a sitting institution of materialized white supremacy embedded in the landscape of Philadelphia as though it were simply part of the natural order of things. Though the era of de jure segregation was coming to an end, African Americans were still being shut out of education, housing, and employment opportunities across the city, and Girard College had become a symbol of that exclusion that the community was no longer willing to accept quietly. In 1953, City Councilman Raymond Pace Alexander had initiated the first organized push for the admission of Black students, and when those efforts failed, Alexander joined Cecil B. Moore, who was leading the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, to form a direct-action protest against the college’s segregation that would become one of the most significant civil rights campaigns in the city’s history.
The protest was intended to be peaceful, but Philadelphia had already built a long and well-documented history of turning peaceful demonstrations into violent confrontations, and this one proved to be no different. Moore led an aggressive eight-month campaign against the college’s segregation and was met, at every turn, with Rizzo’s aggressive and violent policing. Rizzo argued publicly that his job, and the job of the police force, was to uphold law and order, not segregation, which would have been a more convincing position if his actions had not consistently served to preserve exactly what he claimed to be neutral about. In practice, his tactics protected Girard’s whites-only mandate and cast civil rights activists as threats to civic peace, which is to say he used the language of neutrality to carry out the work of white supremacy. Protests were met with arrests, shoving matches, and the clubbing of demonstrators by officers who had been given permission, through Rizzo’s presence and example, to treat people fighting for their basic rights as criminals disturbing the order of the city. During one demonstration in July 1965, protesters targeted Rizzo directly, leaving him with a bloodied hand, and rather than seeking medical attention he remained on the scene, which the city’s media and the Fraternal Order of Police received as an act of heroism. The president of the FOP said afterward that Rizzo’s conduct that day had been an outstanding example of one of their best policemen, which told you everything you needed to know about what the FOP considered excellence.
Girard College was desegregated in 1968, when the first Black child was admitted as a result of the sustained pressure applied by civil rights leaders and protesters who refused to stop showing up, and the city absorbed this as a victory, a sign of progress, evidence that the system could reform itself when pushed hard enough. But it is worth asking what the protests had actually produced, and for whom. Because what the Girard College campaign revealed, in the end, was that what appeared to be a civil rights gain had also been, simultaneously, a political launching pad for Frank Rizzo. White, blue-collar Philadelphians, already anxious about the changes happening around them, had watched Rizzo hold the line at Girard and decided that he was the man they had been looking for, the embodiment of everything they wanted the city to be and stay. That support carried him to the police commissioner’s office in 1967 and to the mayor’s office in 1971, which means that the same struggle that produced integration at one institution also produced the man who would spend the next decade making sure the city’s deeper commitments to white supremacy remained exactly where they had always been.
IV. The Myth of the Black Officer
Law and order rhetoric and its alignment with white supremacy were not exclusive to white people. Many African Americans who joined the police force enforced the very racial hierarchy that oppressed their own communities, and they had been doing so for longer than most people were willing to acknowledge. The pattern was visible as early as the 1918 Race Riot, when the Black officers who witnessed officer Ramsey shoot and kill Riley Bullock took the stand during the trial and denied knowing who he was. That moment of complicity — of Black officers protecting the machinery that ground down their own people — would become a recurring feature of twentieth-century policing in Philadelphia, a wound that the community kept reopening every time it placed its faith in representation as a solution to something that ran much deeper than representation.
African American communities recognized that racism, violence, and police brutality were devastating their neighborhoods, and many believed that the remedy was straightforward: employ more Black police officers, put Black faces in the ranks, and the killing would slow. Afro-American columnist John Lewis captured the logic plainly when he wrote, angered by an incident in which a white officer killed a Black man for crossing the street at the wrong time, that Black policemen do not shoot Black jaywalkers. It was a reasonable thing to want to believe. The claim even gained federal endorsement through President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, chaired by Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, whose 1967 report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, concluded that the relationship between police and the community was so personal that every section of the community had a right to expect that its aspirations and problems, its hopes and fears, were fully reflected in its police force. The report went further:
If there is not a substantial percentage of Negro officers among the policemen in the Negro neighborhood, many residents will reach the conclusion that the neighborhood is being policed, not for the purpose of maintaining law and order, but for the purpose of maintaining the ghetto’s status quo.
Philadelphia responded with billboards urging residents to cop in, don’t cop out and to join Rizzo’s team. For a moment, it was possible to look at those billboards and believe that something was changing, that the city was extending a genuine invitation, that the institution was capable of being reformed from within. Reality quickly undercut that promise.
African Americans grew hostile toward Black police officers in Philadelphia, reporting that those officers were as brutal as white officers, sometimes more so, and that even the ones who thought of themselves as pro-Black, or at least not anti-Black, engaged in aggressive encounters with Black Philadelphians they viewed as threats to law and order. The truth was more complicated and more painful than the reformist vision had accounted for, because most Black officers were not joining the force to fight white supremacy — they were joining because they needed a job, and police work offered stable income and good benefits, and what came along with those benefits was the requirement to uphold the violence the institution had always maintained. For Black officers navigating that reality, the calculus was pragmatic and grim: the job paid, and it paid well, and the cost of it was something each of them had to find their own way of living with.
Rizzo, for his part, was happy to use their presence as cover. In an interview with journalist Greg Walter, he proclaimed that if there was one thing he was not, it was against somebody because they were a Negro or an Irishman or anything else — hell, he said, I’m an Italian, I’ve known a lot of good Negro cops. Reading the billboards welcoming Black Philadelphians onto his force with open arms, one might have been tempted to take him at his word. Many African Americans knew better, because they understood something the billboards were not designed to communicate — that an institution does not change its nature simply by changing the complexion of the people it employs to carry out its work, and that the work, in Philadelphia, had always been the same.
V. Get Their Black Asses: Testing the Limits of Power
Frank Rizzo understood something about power that most men in his position never had to articulate, which was that it was not enough to hold the title — you had to make people feel it in their bodies, in the way they moved through the streets, in the quiet calculations they ran every time they considered whether to speak or stay silent. When Police Commissioner Edward J. Bell retired in 1967 and Mayor James Tate gave Rizzo the acting commissioner’s post, Rizzo treated it the way he treated everything — as an opportunity to remind Philadelphia exactly who he was and what he was capable of, to show a city that had already begun to love him for his ruthlessness that it had not misplaced its faith. He had already orchestrated raids on the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, had already stood down protesters at Girard College and made himself into a symbol for the people who wanted someone to hold the line, someone who understood that the real threat was not disorder itself but the particular people who had grown tired of being ordered around. Now he had a city under him, and he intended to use every inch of it.
What was the line he was holding, exactly, and what was the order he was so committed to preserving? Because it was not about crime — it was never really about crime — it was about who the city belonged to, who was permitted to make demands upon it, and what happened to the ones who forgot or refused to accept their place within it. Rizzo had built his entire career on the answer to that question, and every raid, every arrest, every nightstick drawn in the street was a lesson in the same curriculum — that Philadelphia had an order to it, that the order was racial, and that Frank Rizzo was its most faithful and willing enforcer. When Mayor Tate formally named him police commissioner on December 21, 1967, it was not an appointment so much as a confirmation of something the city had already decided about itself, a sealing of a covenant between a man and the white Philadelphia that had created him.
But before that appointment came, the students had something to say, and what they had to say was not radical — it was the kind of thing that, in any honest country, would have simply been listened to and taken seriously. They were fed up with schools that taught them nothing of themselves, with curricula that treated the entire history of Black people as a footnote or an absence, with administrators who expected them to sit quietly inside rooms designed to dissolve them into whiteness, to make them forget or deny what they carried. They wanted Black teachers, people who brought something of their world into the classroom with them, and they wanted their history returned to them whole rather than offered as a sidebar to someone else’s story, and they wanted the freedom to exist openly and without apology as the people they actually were. These were the demands of children who had been told, in a hundred different ways across the entire span of their young lives, that the institution meant to educate them did not actually believe in them — and who had finally, collectively, decided they were done pretending not to notice. By eleven o’clock on the morning of November 17, 1967, more than 3,500 students and teachers had walked out of their classrooms across the city, gathered and marched through the streets of Philadelphia, and arrived at the Board of Education building in Center City to present their demands to the people responsible for answering them.
Superintendent Mark Shedd had asked Rizzo to stay away, and Board president Richardson Dilworth had asked Rizzo to stay away, because both men understood, in a way that Rizzo either could not or would not, that what was gathering outside the Board of Education building was not a threat but a demonstration — the kind that a democratic society is supposed to be able to absorb without reaching for its weapons — and they wanted the students to be heard and to go home without incident. Rizzo had a different understanding of what the moment required, and so he came anyway, because that is what men like Rizzo do when the city has told them, implicitly and then explicitly, that it will thank them for whatever they decide their power demands.
He came with a busload of officers and then another, until between 300 and 400 uniformed police stood outside the Board of Education building in full riot gear, looking out at children carrying handmade signs, and when Rizzo surveyed the scene — when he looked at thousands of students who had organized a citywide walkout, who had marched in formation through the streets, who had arrived with their demands written out and ready to be heard — he saw, in his own words, a howling, undisciplined, disorganized mob. It is worth pausing on that, worth sitting inside that distance between what was actually in front of him and what he claimed to see, because that distance is where the violence lives, and it is the same distance that has always existed in this country between what Black people are actually doing and what white authority decides to say they are doing in order to justify what it has already decided to do to them. He told his officers to get their Black asses, and what followed was punishment — methodical, deliberate, and personal — visited upon children whose only offense had been asking to be educated in a way that did not require them to disappear.
Richard De Lone, assistant to Superintendent Shedd, stood there and watched it happen, and years later he could still find no other language for it:
They just beat the shit out of those kids who offered no resistance. It was a real stampede. I had seen police brutality before but never at this level. I saw two cops holding a kid while the third hit him over the head. I saw a cop break his billy stick over a kid’s shoulder. They were really pounding the shit out of them. It was totally unnecessary and really bloody. Rizzo just couldn’t keep his finger off the trigger. He started a police riot. There’s absolutely no doubt about it.
Terry Bisson, another witness, described the sound of it — the specific, terrible sound of what it means when the state decides to make an example of people who have asked for too much:
Immediately an army of cops charged into the crowd, nightsticks swinging. Soon the streets were echoing with the nightmarish thwack of oak clubs on young skulls, and the gutters were spattered with blood. Girl? Boy? It didn’t matter to the men in blue. They were just kids, true. But they were Black and they were out of line.
Fifty-seven people were arrested that day and charged with breach of peace, inciting to riot, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct — which is to say they were charged with the standard vocabulary a system reaches for when it needs to criminalize the act of being beaten — and several were hospitalized, and the local and national newspapers, with few exceptions, accepted the police account and reported that it was the students who had turned violent, that the officers had simply responded to aggression they had not started. Superintendent Shedd and his staff said otherwise, and the civil rights community said otherwise, and activists called for boycotts of local businesses until Rizzo was removed, but there were also Philadelphians — many of them, enough of them to matter — who looked at what had happened and decided that Rizzo had done what needed doing, that the children had brought it on themselves, that the order of the city had been preserved. Rizzo would be named permanent commissioner weeks later and would go on to be elected mayor twice, which tells you something not just about Frank Rizzo but about the city that kept choosing him, the city that looked at the blood in the gutters of Center City and decided that this was the Philadelphia it wanted to be.
This is what must be remembered: that the debate which followed — whether Rizzo had gone too far, whether the protesters had provoked him, where exactly the line was between legitimate force and brutality — missed the point in the way that such debates always do, which is that they center the question of the perpetrator’s restraint rather than the humanity of the people he was unleashing his officers upon. The students were not a mob. They were children who had organized themselves, who had marched peacefully through the streets of their city, who had arrived at the seat of the institution governing their lives with a list of things they needed in order to be treated as fully human within it — and the city answered them with nightsticks and dogs and arrests and the front pages of newspapers that told the story backwards. What Philadelphia was communicating that morning, through Frank Rizzo and the officers he commanded and the press that covered for them and the residents who cheered, was the same thing this country has always communicated when Black people have had the audacity to demand more than survival — that the demand itself was the crime, that wanting to be seen and taught and valued was a kind of disorder that needed to be put down, and that there would be consequences for anyone who forgot it.
VI. Mr. Mayor in Blue
Frank Rizzo did not leave his brutality behind when he left the police commissioner’s office. He instead carried it with him into the mayor’s office, into the machinery of city government itself, where it could do so much more damage because it now had so much more to work with. He was elected mayor of Philadelphia on November 7, 1971, and reelected for a second term in 1975, and both of those elections were a statement, not just about Rizzo, but about what Philadelphia believed in, what it was willing to sanction, what kind of city it had decided it wanted to be. Under his watch, the city abandoned its Police Oversight Board, continued its raids on organizations like the local Black Panther Party, and the deaths of Black Philadelphians at the hands of police officers continued to accumulate, each one absorbed into the life of the city with barely a pause, barely a reckoning, barely a question about what it meant that this kept happening and no one was ever held to account for it.
It was into this Philadelphia, this city that had made its peace with its own violence, that the MOVE organization arrived in the early 1970s. The media and the police labeled them militant, savage, dangerous, reaching for the same vocabulary they always reached for when confronted with Black people who refused to be managed, who refused to make themselves legible and palatable to institutions that had already decided what to make of them. MOVE members thought of themselves differently — as self-revolutionary, as people committed to living according to the teachings of John Africa, which meant natural foods, respect for all forms of life, and an unflinching willingness to organize around the things that the city would have preferred they stayed quiet about: animal rights, housing for those without it, the conditions facing people behind prison walls, and the broad pattern of injustice that structured daily life for Black Philadelphians. When MOVE turned its attention specifically to the police violence being carried out under Mayor Rizzo and his new Police Commissioner Joseph O’Neil, they began attracting the attention of other community groups who wanted to stand alongside them — which meant they had also begun attracting the attention of the Philadelphia police, who would soon launch a concentrated and deliberate campaign of harassment and violence against everything MOVE was and everything it stood for.
By 1975, the clashes between MOVE and Philadelphia police had grown brutal, though the city and Rizzo continued to deny any involvement in abusive practices, maintaining the lie with the same ease and confidence with which they had always maintained it, because the lie had always worked and there had never been any real consequence for telling it. That confidence would be tested on March 28, 1976, when MOVE members released from the Philadelphia Correctional Facility came home to a celebration with the rest of their community — a moment of ordinary joy that the Philadelphia police decided they could not allow to continue, arriving to disperse what they claimed was a disturbance in the neighborhood. Mo Africa, who had picked up the members from the facility, described what happened next in the HBO documentary 40 Years a Prisoner — that the police were swinging their nightsticks so hard on people that they broke them in half. In the chaos of that violence, an officer grabbed Janine Africa, who was holding her three-week-old child, Life Africa, in her arms, threw her to the ground and stomped her until she was nearly unconscious, and the force of what was done to her mother crushed the baby’s skull.
MOVE went to the media with what had happened, and the police denied that the baby had ever existed. The city council called for an investigation, but the investigation could only go so far. MOVE members had their children at home, none of them had birth certificates, and so the city’s denial had the bureaucratic cover it needed to sustain itself. Mayor Rizzo went further than any of them, taking out advertisements in The Philadelphia Inquirer declaring police abuse a myth, running headlines like “Brutality is Against the Cops” that repositioned the officers as the victims in the very encounters where they had been doing the brutalizing — which was not an accident or an overreach, but a strategy, a deliberate attempt to flip the story before the story could flip on him. When MOVE demanded accountability, Rizzo responded in the Inquirer with the clarity of a man who had never once doubted his own righteousness:
As long as I’m mayor, nobody, but nobody, will take advantage of police doing their jobs. I rue the day when anarchists or militants threaten the security of police.
The language was deliberate. If MOVE could be labeled anarchists or militants, if they could be placed inside the category of criminal, then anything done to them could be justified, the violence could continue, and the city could continue to look away. This was the logic Rizzo had been raised inside of, the one his father handed down with the “goodies” and “baddies” narrative, and it was a logic that Philadelphia had never seen fit to challenge, which meant it was also Philadelphia’s logic and the city’s own way of making sense of who deserved protection and who deserved what they got.
What must be understood is that the incidents between MOVE, the city, and the Philadelphia police were were part of a chain, each one pulling tighter toward what would become the MOVE 9, a large-scale police assault on their home that would send nine of its members to prison for over forty years each. Philadelphia was by this point becoming nationally recognizable not just for its pattern of abuse but for the sheer number of police shootings of unarmed Black people, and when Rizzo was confronted about this, he responded by saying it was a matter of who should be more aggressive — the police or the criminal element — and that if the department was not aggressive, he would fire the police commissioner. One MOVE member captured what this meant for the people living inside it:
If you think that this white racist society will shoot down those white students at Kent State, you think they’ll hesitate shooting down any Black, Puerto Rican, or Chicano brothers here in Philadelphia? No. How many times did you pick up the paper and read about another Puerto Rican, another Mexican, another Black man shot in cold blood cause some cop said “I thought I saw a piece of shiny metal… I thought he’d shoot me.”
At the height of the events leading to the MOVE 9 sentencing, Rizzo moved beyond the familiar violence of the nightstick and the raid into something more methodical, more patient, and in some ways more terrifying — the kind of violence that does not announce itself with a blow but with a piece of paper, with a court order, with the slow deliberate withdrawal of what people need to stay alive. After a ten-month standoff and an around-the-clock police surveillance designed to pressure MOVE into vacating their property, Rizzo obtained a court order on March 1, 1978, from the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas authorizing a blockade around the MOVE house — cutting off their water, preventing anyone from resupplying them, surrounding them with the full apparatus of the state and waiting for hunger and thirst to do what the nightsticks had not finished. This was white supremacy operating not only through the Philadelphia police but through the courts that sanctioned it and the institutions that approved it, and what it revealed was something that should have been plain all along — that Rizzo’s violence had never been about safety, that it had always been about power, and specifically about the power to determine whose life in Philadelphia was worth protecting and whose could be slowly, legally, institutionally destroyed. Janine Africa understood what was coming and she said so plainly:
We sayin’ the door is open cause we know he coming down here to kill. If he come to our front door we know he coming in here with intentions to kill… He gonna murder everyone in here. Not like we want to die, but rather than have a man like Rizzo dictate our lives, make us unhealthy, make us sick, and kill any more of our babies, we’d rather be dead. Cause to be free is not to be so called living on this level. It’s to be free of the oppressive power of a maniac like Rizzo.
On May 3, 1978, a court-approved compromise was reached — MOVE would surrender any weapons, allow an inspection of the house, and vacate the property by August 1, and in exchange none of their members would be arrested. MOVE never left, in part because the timeline they were given was not enough time to actually find somewhere else to go, and in the logic of a city that had already decided how this would end, that was all the justification anyone needed. Hundreds of police officers descended on the MOVE house, flooded the basement despite knowing that children were inside, and the gun battle that followed left one officer dead. Delbert Africa was dragged from the house and stomped nearly to death by the officers who pulled him out — his body made into a message for the rest of the city’s Black community about what resistance cost. The community understood the message, erupting in mass protest, holding up photographs of what had been done to Delbert, because they understood with the clarity that comes from living inside a system long enough to learn how it works that what happened to him could happen to any of them.
The nine MOVE members who went to trial faced what became the longest running trial in the history of the state of Pennsylvania, charged in connection with the death of the officer killed in the crossfire. Judge Malmed sentenced them each to prison, noting in his decision that MOVE members had oftentimes maintained that they were a family and acted together, and that he had therefore taken them at their own word — which is to say he sentenced them for the crime of solidarity, for the crime of having built something together and refusing to let it be dismantled, for the crime of being, in the eyes of Philadelphia’s white power structures, too organized and too committed and too unwilling to disappear. What Malmed and Rizzo and the Philadelphia police and the courts demonstrated — through the years of harassment, the starvation blockade, the trial, and the sentencing — was how white power sustains itself, not only through the blunt force of the nightstick but through the slow institutional work of criminalization, through the willingness to take faulty evidence and the prejudices of a judge and turn them into forty years of a person’s life, and to do it in the open, and to call it justice. If Philadelphia had actually cared about the officer who died in that crossfire, it might have been willing to ask honestly how the violence that killed him had come to exist — who had built it, who had sanctioned it, who had taken out advertisements in the newspaper to defend it. But that was a question Philadelphia had never been willing to ask about itself, and the MOVE 9 were the ones who paid the price for the city’s refusal.
VII. White Supremacy Lives On
The purpose of this history is not simply to catalogue Frank Rizzo’s brutality. It is to ask what it means that a city produced him, celebrated him, and then, when he was gone, went right on being the city that made him possible. That is the harder question, and it is the one that Philadelphia has never been willing to sit with honestly, because to sit with it honestly would require the city to look at itself without the comfort of a villain to blame, without the convenience of a single man to hold responsible for what has always been a collective arrangement.
When Rizzo finally left, Philadelphia did not reckon with what he had done. It simply continued doing it, which is the most honest measure of what his legacy actually was. The city elected its first Black mayor in 1984, Woodrow Wilson Goode, and that same year Philadelphia dropped a bomb on its own citizens, killed eleven people including five children, and watched the neighborhood burn. In 2019, Philadelphia appointed its first Black woman police commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, and shorty after during the 2020 uprisings, protesters were trapped on an interstate and tear gassed by the force she commanded. I was one of those protesters. I know what it felt like to be surrounded and gassed by a police department operating under Black leadership, and what I can tell you is that it did not feel like progress. It felt like the same Philadelphia that has always shown up when Black people have had the audacity to demand to be seen, the same Philadelphia that has always known, on some level, what it was doing, and done it anyway. A few months before Outlaw assumed her role, the department was notified that over 200 of its officers had posted white supremacist and hateful content on social media. Seventy-two were placed on administrative duties. Fifteen were ultimately suspended. The rest remained. The institution remained. The scaffolding, as it always has, remained.
This is what must be understood, and what this history has tried to make plain: the violence was never a departure from normalcy. It was the point. It was not a feature of a system gone wrong but of a system working exactly as it was designed to work, and no amount of demographic change at the top of that system will alter what the system was built to do at its foundation. Rizzo was not the source of the violence, though he was its most willing and most visible expression. The media narratives that covered for him, the residents who voted for him twice, the courts that sanctioned his blockades, the African Americans who made their peace with the system so long as they could find some way to benefit from it — all of them were part of the apparatus, and all of them were left standing when Rizzo himself was gone, because the apparatus does not depend on any one person to keep running. That is precisely what makes it so durable, and so dangerous, and so difficult for a city like Philadelphia to honestly confront.
Angela Davis and W.E.B. Du Bois understood this, which is why their words open this paper. Davis reminds us that reforms which change the appearance of white supremacy without disturbing its foundation will not bring the kind of change that actually matters, that making an institution look better is not the same as making it just, that there is a profound difference between a repainting and a reckoning. Du Bois goes further, insisting that to imagine a world beyond white supremacy one must be willing to build something in its place, to conceive of a system organized around entirely different principles, to reckon with how radical that actually is and resist the temptation to flinch from the radicalism of it. It takes confronting the lies that have been passed down generation after generation in this country — the lies that made Black people into criminals, that gave policing its moral cover, that allowed a city to watch its officers beat children on the steps of a school board building and call it the restoration of order. To some, addressing the roots of white supremacy sounds utopian, and perhaps it does, because it goes against everything this country has taught about itself — against the mythology of its own goodness, against the story Rizzo was raised on, against the entire architecture of a nation that has never been willing to honestly reckon with what it built and what that building cost the people it was built upon.
And yet something in me resists the conclusion that this is hopeless, that the city is too far gone, that the weight of a century of violence is too heavy to lift. A way forward is still possible, not because the institutions will reform themselves — they will not, they have never done so without being forced — but because people have always found ways to build something true inside of a world that was organized around a lie. That work is already happening. It was happening before Rizzo, and it continued after him, and it is continuing now, and the question is not whether it is possible but whether Philadelphia, and this country, will finally decide that the lie has cost too much to keep telling.
This piece publishes on May 21st, 2026, a little over a week after the anniversary of the day Philadelphia dropped a bomb on its own citizens, killed eleven people including five children, and watched a neighborhood burn while the city looked on. The wound is still fresh when you read this. It is meant to be. What happened on May 13th, 1985 had a name and a logic and a decades-long architecture behind it, and the city that dropped that bomb was the same city that had been practicing, for years, on the bodies of its Black citizens — on the students at the Board of Education building, on the MOVE members in their home, on every Black Philadelphian who had the misfortune of crossing paths with a police force that had never been taught to see them as fully human. It is a continuity. And it is living and present and ongoing, carried forward generation after generation by a city that has never yet found the courage to tell itself the truth about what it is, and what it has done, and what it will keep doing until the day it finally does.
Mustafa Ali-Smith is a social justice advocate who has worked around criminal justice issues for several years. His work examines race, justice, and the politics of reform and power in America.