A Brief History of MOVE

The MOVE Organization is a group mostly made up of Black naturalists who formed a collective in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia in 1972. MOVE’s founding philosophies were rooted in environmentalism and principles that center interdependence with – and respect for – all life forms, plant, human and animal alike. Some of their most notable practices were working toward raw whole food diets; maintaining physical fitness routines; aiming to live in harmony with animals and without the conveniences of modern technologies. Some members lived collectively, and many took the surname ‘Africa’ as an expression of chosen family bonds. Their respect for life also informed their deep commitments to challenging policing, prisons and other forms of racial and class oppression. As a result of political organizing and affronts to the social, political and environmental systems in the city, MOVE encountered regular police surveillance, brutality, and eventually large scale violent attacks at the hands of police that were sanctioned by city officials.

The film opens with Mike Africa Jr. standing at the site of the first large scale police attack on the organization. The building is the site of the August 8, 1978 police raid and razing of the first MOVE headquarters and home. Police responsible for the raid were said to be carrying out an eviction order. After the police raid, a group of MOVE adults known as the MOVE 9 were arrested. The MOVE 9 were a group of political prisoners in Pennsylvania incarcerated in the wake of their political activity with the organization, seven of whom served 40-42 year sentences after an armed confrontation with police. The violent raid was legitimated after MOVE was criminalized during a months long standoff with police wherein they refused to be displaced from their home; even in light of disputes with the city and some neighbors over their unorthodox lifestyle and protest practices. The raid also came in the wake of Drexel University continually displacing other Black residents in the area in order to build university housing and facilities. On August 8, 1978, hundreds of Philadelphia police staged an attack on members of the organization living communally in a Victorian-style home at 309 North Thirty-Third Street. Within a few hours of the predawn police raid, officers fired thousands of rounds of ammunition, dispensed tear gas, and destroyed the home with water deluge guns and cranes—all while MOVE adults and children were inside. Afterward, twelve MOVE adults were beaten and arrested after a single police officer was fatally shot in the exchange of fire. After the death of an officer, those adults known as the MOVE 9—Delbert, Janet, Eddie, Janine, Michael, Merle, Chuck, Debbie, and Phil Africa—each received sentences of thirty to one hundred years in prison. Though police initially denied brutalizing unarmed group members, Delbert Africa was brutally beaten by police upon surrendering and the incident was caught on tape by local media. Still no police officers were held accountable.

Later in the film, Mike Africa Jr. walks down Osage Avenue, the second and perhaps most memorable site of police violence against MOVE in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philadelphia. In 1985, the Philadelphia police and fire departments, under the mayoral leadership of Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, dropped a bomb on MOVE’s newly established headquarters and home at at the 6200 block of Osage Avenue. The attack came as MOVE’s confrontation with the city escalated following the 1978 attack and the political incarceration of MOVE members went unaddressed by elected officials. On May 13th police deployed ten thousand rounds of ammunition, tear gas, and water deluge guns directly targeting MOVE headquarters. The attack culminated when the city dropped a bomb on the home and police and firefighters actively chose to let the resulting fire burn out of control. During the fire, when MOVE members and children tried to escape the inferno, they were shot back inside by police. Eleven MOVE women, men, and children were murdered. Only two members escaped to survival— one adult, Ramona Africa, and one child, Birdie Africa. In the aftermath, the entire city block was burned down, and other Black families living on the block were displaced.

The city’s attack on MOVE was carried out on Mother’s Day and is sometimes referred to as the Mother’s Day Massacre. However, several mothers of the five MOVE children who perished were incarcerated at the time of their children’s murders. Because they were incarcerated at the time, their ability to mother their children was denied by virtue of their inability to protect or even memorialize their children. Postmortem, the city’s violence against the organization, and the mothers and children especially, was exacerbated. City officials and the medical examiner's office worked in concert with local institutions to desecrate the remains of MOVE children and show their disregard for the lives of MOVE members and Black people and children generally. The remains of two girl children killed on Osage Avenue were obtained and used by the University of Pennsylvania museum for research, without the consent of their then incarcerated parents.

Policing and Political Incarceration

The violence MOVE adults and children have suffered at the hands of city police, elected officials, and even local institutions, is part of a long history of policing in the city—rooted in deeply entrenched anti-Blackness and repression of Black resistance. Many of the MOVE 9 came of age in Philadelphia during the 1960s. During this time, Black residents and organizers alike were subject to intensified police surveillance, repression, and violence. These conditions were enabled by law and order discourses and policies that originated in the 1960s. So-called law and order policies strengthened and militarized police power through increased federal funds for police to obtain military grade hardware and surveillance technologies. These technologies were often used to quell urban uprising and resistance prevalent in U.S. cities during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Elite militaristic police forces like Special Weapons and Tactics Teams (SWAT) emerged from this period of investment in punitive policies, as did the practice of Stop and Frisk policing. Though the language of maintaining “order” seemed race neutral, the policies and practices systematically racialized punishment and legitimized state violence against Black people and dissidents especially.

Philadelphia was ripe with Black Power era resistance groups calling for self-determination. Many of them were met with police violence in the context of national law and order campaigns. Groups like the Black People’s Unity Movement (BPUM), the Philadelphia chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Black Panther Party called for Black economic, political and social power in ways that would dramatically challenge Philadelphia’s otherwise segregated and oppressive conditions. Not unlike MOVE, many of these groups threatened the social and racial hierarchies in the city, often upheld through policing, through their organizing and protest politics. Like MOVE, they were targeted and even obliterated as a result. Each organization met repression under then, notoriously “tough on crime” police commissioner Frank Rizzo’s police force and tactics such as surveillance, police raids, alleged bomb threats and claims of police assasination plots. Perhaps the most memorable raid was that of the Black Panther Party offices in August 1970— just years before the incarceration of the MOVE 9. Officers shot into the headquarters and later forced the Panthers to strip down to their underwear. Rather than addressing structural racism in the city, Philadelphia carried on the aim of “law and order” politics, quelling Black uprisings and radicalism in the 1960s and ’70s and using Black resistance to legitimate violence and incarceration.

Philadelphia still has a long list of Black freedom fighters turned prisoners who have been incarcerated for decades on politically motivated sentences related to how they challenged the city's racist conditions. Among the most famous of them is perhaps Mumia Abu-Jamal, journalist, former Black Panther Party member, and honorary member of the MOVE Organization. Or former Black Panther, Russell Maroon Shoatz who was only recently released after 49 years in prison. Some prisoner’s sentences are political simply by virtue of the racialized nature of mass incarceration. For example, Avis Lee, a Black woman from Pittsburgh, PA was recently commuted after serving 41 years worth of a life without parole sentence (LWOP), which began when she was 18 years old. Black Pennsylvanias, like Lee, are 18 times more likely to be sentenced to LWOP and there are more people sentenced to LWOP in Philadelphia county than anywhere in the world. All of these prisoners’ experiences constitute political incarceration due to punitive laws that criminalize dissent and/or simply because the state punishes Black and poor communities disproportionately. Similar police repression of Black resistance and the racialization of criminality continues today with organizers in and beyond groups like Black Lives Matter Philly.

Mothers and Children in the Prison System

The devastating effects of policing and political incarceration are especially heightened for Black women and their children. When mothers and children are forced into the prison system they experience the loss of communal and familial bonds. The state often deems incarcerated Black mothers unfit to parent. These narratives of Black mothers as unfit or even unworthy are upheld through punitive prison and social service policies that revoke parental rights or coerce vulnerable mothers, who are Black and often low income, to relinquish visitation and parental rights. For example, in 1997, during Debbie’s incarceration, the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act was enacted and reduced the time in which incarcerated women’s parental rights could be terminated by the state. Based on the act, after fifteen months, child welfare agencies are required to file a petition to terminate parental rights for children under foster care or even living under the care of family. This policy and others like it disproportionately punish Black women and families —subjecting them to ongoing surveillance and interfaces with the legal system, continually displacing children while also hindering their abilities to reunite with their mothers.

These barriers to mothering are intensified by the costs, distance and travel time to the few women’s prison facilities housed in U.S. states. Most states only have one women’s facility and these are often housed in rural places, far distances from the mostly urban places where Black women are arrested and sentenced. Debbie and other MOVE 9 women were paroled from the State Correctional Institution at Cambridge Springs, which is located more than 6 hours and 400 miles away from West Philadelphia where Mike Jr. grew up.

Debbie gave birth to Mike Jr. at the House of Correction in 1978, unassisted and among her MOVE sisters. She subverted the prison’s authority over her body and took care of Mike for several days before prison officials discovered he had been born. Mike was taken from her and placed into her mother’s care. Debbie fought to birth and care for her son for those first days of his life, in spite of the multiple challenges facing her as a political prisoner, MOVE member and mother.