lit a candle 2h agoMy dad used to clip her pieces out of the Inquirer and leave them on the kitchen table, I was maybe six when he showed me the Osage Avenue coverage years later and said this is what real reporting looks like. Still have the clipping somewhere in Illinois.
Their story
Maida Cassandra Odom was a Philadelphia journalist, teacher, playwright and documentary maker whose career bridged the newsroom and the classroom. Believed to be only the second Black woman to work as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, following Charyn Sutton, she joined the paper in 1978 and stayed until 2000.…
Maida Cassandra Odom was a Philadelphia journalist, teacher, playwright and documentary maker whose career bridged the newsroom and the classroom. Believed to be only the second Black woman to work as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, following Charyn Sutton, she joined the paper in 1978 and stayed until 2000. She is best remembered for her reporting from inside the cordoned off block of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia during the May 1985 confrontation between police and the MOVE organization, and for the year of coverage that followed, work that made The Inquirer's MOVE team a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting.
She was born on December 12, 1952, in Louisville, Kentucky, and grew up in Akron, Ohio, where she was a talented writer and a straight A high school student. Her parents, whom she credited with inspiring her interest in social activism and academia, steered her toward a life of public service. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Illinois and later did extensive graduate work in Africana studies and other subjects at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her first newspaper work was community reporting for the Akron Beacon Journal. At the Dayton Daily News she covered Jimmy Carter and the 1976 presidential election. At The Inquirer she covered school desegregation in Wilmington in 1978, a spectacular armored truck heist in Philadelphia in 1981, AIDS, the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, the death of former U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan, local businesses that employed ex-offenders, and a 1997 visit by the South African activist Winnie Mandela. Colleagues called her tough, intimidating, fearless and exacting.
On May 12, 1985, the city evacuated the 6200 block of Osage Avenue ahead of a police attempt to evict MOVE. The Inquirer sent Odom, then 32, because she could pass as a neighbor going home. She spent roughly 20 hours (Temple University accounts say more than 28) reporting secretly from a nearby house as police fired thousands of rounds and poured water on the MOVE rowhouse. She and a colleague were discovered and escorted out shortly before a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the house. The resulting fire killed 11 people, including five children, and destroyed 61 homes. She spent the next year as a key member of the paper's MOVE reporting team.
After leaving The Inquirer in 2000 she worked in public relations and as a newsletter editor for the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, and she coproduced the 2002 documentary 1199 at 25: The Power of Collective Action about that union's labor struggles in Philadelphia. She also served on the board of Scribe Video Center.
From 2005 until her retirement in 2019 she was an assistant professor in Temple University's Department of Journalism. She taught public affairs reporting and elements of writing, directed internships, and created Temple's high school journalism workshops, which paired college students with Philadelphia high school students. Former students credit her with opening doors to their first jobs and internships.
In 2025, ahead of the 40th anniversary of the bombing, she returned to the story. Her archival tape was used in MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy, a six part podcast produced by Temple's Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting and The Inquirer, and she joined a panel at its launch. Her play MOVE Mocks Us All, directed by Ontaria Kim Wilson, received a staged reading at Temple's Tomlinson Theater on May 17, 2025.
Odom was a legacy member of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and a Sunday school teacher and trustee at St. Matthew AME Church. She loved reading and travel, especially the beaches of Jamaica. Her brother is the retired 6abc Philadelphia reporter Vernon Odom.
She died on Saturday, October 24, 2026, at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, of complications from metastatic breast cancer. She was 73. Services were announced for 11 a.m. on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, at St. Matthew AME Church in West Philadelphia, and the family asked that donations be made to the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.
Biography adapted from The Philadelphia Inquirer obituary (Oct 29, 2026); Philadelphia Tribune (Oct 30, 2026); 6abc Philadelphia (Oct 31, 2026); Temple University Klein College and Temple Now (2025); Inquirer podcast MOVE: .
In their own words
“What I learned most from all of this is when you sow seeds of hatred, you can't control how they grow.”
On the MOVE bombing, to The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2025
“MOVE may have had many issues. They may have been, they probably, very likely were unjustly jailed. But at 32 years old, I was not prepared to give them my life for a cause that I did not understand or appreciate.”
Recalling May 1985, MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy podcast, episode The Standoff, 2025
“It's part of an overarching notion of community-based education where a lot of your learning doesn't take place in the classroom. And I think that's very important, particularly for journalists.”
On Temple's high school journalism workshops, Temple News, 2014
“There were no flowers, no hymns, no sorrowful tears.”
Opening of her Inquirer report on the burial of MOVE co-founder John Africa, December 6, 1985
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1by People Forever
that's a hell of a thing to pass down