The Shame Of The City

I knew this had to become a blip, since I tell every single visitor about it, right off the bat, when I'll meet them at a friend's party or when they visit with me. They all express shock.

Here are the basics: The group's name is MOVE. It doesn't stand for anything, but politically it's a vague, unique form of Anarchism, now existing as a family rather than an attempted movement. In the 1970s a man named John Africa taught the evils of industries and about cruely to animals, and his followers all took Africa as a surname. They protested at zoos and various other places, and the police hated them, but one thing was unexpected: MOVE never backed down, no matter how brutal the police got, nor how obvious it was that they were being framed. Tragicly, the state of Pennsylvania never backed down either.

On August 8th, 1978 an extended confrontation on Powelton Village came to a head, and during the final hours a policeman was shot to death. The bullet came from a nearby house, but Nine MOVE members were later convicted of murder, sentenced to 30-100 years. Eight are still in prison, one has died there. Their innocence is simply not debatable.

On May 13th, 1985 the MOVE group lived at 6221 Osage Avenue, the end of which is pictured here. They had been protesting at their home, which they fortified, by shouting through bullhorns about their innocent relatives, all day and through the night. Every resident of Philadelphia of the time remembers what they were doing when the police dropped a military-only C4 bomb on the MOVE house. I was working at a factory in the suburbs.

Here's how it went: after closely watching the house for months or even years, the police evacuated all the houses of this block and the row behind MOVE's, and they blocked access to those two streets. At this corner, the police let nobody in or out, except when MOVE women took their normal outing with the children to the park for exercise. The police then moved the wooden barrier aside, let them out, and then let them go back in. That's what tells me that it was a very deliberate murder of innocents. All they needed to do was say, "No you can't go back in." But in they went. In the afternoon, police dropped the bomb from a helicopter while blasting the house with machine-gun fire, and the Fire Department did nothing to extinguish the fire. Two people escaped the house but eleven died in the fire being trapped by the hail of bullets. Five of the dead were children, some as young as seven. Then the fire consumed about sixty-five houses. That's right, the police bombed the house and watched as the whole neighborhood burned dow. The Mayor did not go to the scene because he was warned that the police intended to kill him and blame it on MOVE --but he waited till after the adult survivor (Ramona Africa) spent 7 years in jail for rioting before he said so!

No police or city official was ever punished for anything relating to MOVE. The houses were very incompetently rebuilt and many years later the city offered to buy them all back and almost all of them are empty now.

I know several MOVE members and they live around the corner from me now. Nicest neighbors you could ask for. I've visited three of them in jail and acted as an info-pipeline between them and French supporters.

The City of Philadelphia murdered eleven MOVE people right on the street you see in the picture.