May 11–18, 2000

cover story

Whose MOVE?

	MOVE was here: On May 13, 1985, the 6200 block of Osage Avenue was engulfed in fire after police bombed the MOVE residence at 6221. The block has since been rebuilt, and MOVE activity is centered elsewhere.

by Noel Weyrich

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

Louise James Africa is so angry she can barely speak.

She is seated in the immaculately furnished living room of her sister’s rowhouse on a narrow hardscrabble block of Mantua, in West Philly. It is a warm spring afternoon, and the sunlight glistens off a heavy soapstone chess set that dominates the small coffee table. Along the wall leading to the stairs is a long array of framed family pictures. Most of the people in the pictures wear MOVE’s characteristic dreadlocks. Some wear orange prison garb.

Louise James and her sister, LaVerne Sims, both siblings of deceased MOVE founder John Africa, are enraged, perched at the edges of their chairs, desperately trying to explain how just how grievously MOVE’s current incarnation has departed from John Africa’s teachings.

"They socialize," Louise utters in disbelief. "They have birthday parties and Christmas trees for the children." John Africa, they explain, taught that whenever you were socializing, there was work that wasn’t getting done. After 16 years on that block of Reno Street, LaVerne says proudly, not one neighbor has ever been invited through her door.

"They have flowers in pots," she says of the current MOVE home — both halves of a three-story twin on Kingsessing Avenue near 45th Street. John Africa, she claims, didn’t believe in confining flowers to pots.

But MOVE exists today in a condition that John Africa would barely recognize. It is a largely female-run organization now, one that claims an Internet-organized support network spanning North America and Europe. Led by 45-year-old Ramona Johnson Africa, MOVE’s spokespeople have become sought-after speakers on college campuses on both continents. The hulking stone-faced houses on Kingsessing are also a home for the international effort to spring MOVE supporter and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal from death row. Previous MOVE headquarters often featured wooden slatted gun portals in the windows. The windows at 4506 Kingsessing have curtains.

Yet there is something far more serious on Louise and LaVerne’s minds than just some potted plants and Christmas trees. Both had just read a City Paper story that detailed the bitter ongoing custody battle between a prominent MOVE member and her ex-husband ("No MOVE-ing On," March 16). According to an official "MOVE Alert!" on an affiliated Web site, the courtroom struggle threatens to spill over into yet another confrontation between MOVE and law enforcement authorities. But that’s not even LaVerne and Louise’s biggest concern.

They are sickened, they say, to learn that longtime MOVE member Alberta Africa, a onetime mate of their brother John, had conceived her child via in-vitro fertilization, using a donor egg implanted in her uterus by medical technicians. To a movement that worships nature, test-tube babies are an unspeakable abomination.

"That’s poles apart from the teaching of John Africa!" Louise exclaims, her voice rising. "It’s totally unnatural and it’s insulting to us as the sisters of John Africa!" By John Africa’s way of thinking, they say, Alberta Africa has no claim to the child at all.

And, they add, to threaten "another May 13," as the Internet MOVE Alert does, based on a custody battle involving such a child, brazenly dishonors what transpired on that date 15 years ago.

By that day, May 13, 1985, MOVE had already reigned in Philadelphia’s consciousness for nearly a decade as an enigmatic "back-to-nature" cult with a seeming grab bag of paradoxical beliefs and oddball practices. All the members took the surname Africa, and most, but not all, MOVE members were African-American. They obeyed as law the edicts and writings of their founder and "coordinator," a self-educated handyman who called himself John Africa. They worshipped living in harmony with nature to the point of not combing their hair and refusing to corrupt their children with reading and writing. But their desire to proselytize and win new supporters always led them to live in some of the more confined sections of one of America’s largest cities. They armed themselves for "self-defense," and they lived in an on-again, off-again state of antagonism with their neighbors and city government.

In 1978, a gunfight between MOVE and Philadelphia police had left one police officer dead and nine MOVE members imprisoned for murder. Almost seven years later, on May 13, 1985, a bungled police effort to serve warrants on several MOVE members resulted in more shooting and a raging house fire that incinerated an entire city block, leaving 11 MOVE members dead, including founder John Africa, and 250 people homeless. Until the federal government’s disastrous 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, TX, it was probably the worst debacle in American law enforcement history.

Says Police Commissioner John Timoney, "Before I got here, when I thought of Philadelphia, what did I think of? I thought of MOVE."

Now on the 15th anniversary of the fiery death of MOVE’s founder, there is a bitter and growing generational divide over just who should rightly tend to John Africa’s legacy— Ramona on one side, LaVerne and Louise on the other. In the past year or so, both MOVE factions have held raucous, profane demonstrations in front of each other’s houses, although Ramona clearly has the upper hand.

More troubling, though, is the not-so-vague threat of yet another round of MOVE-related unrest, this time involving custody of Alberta Africa’s son.

Are those curtains at 4506 Kingsessing quite literally window dressing for an organization that is still capable of violence in the name of self-defense?

"MOVE people," says the MOVE Alert, in a sentiment repeated by MOVE’s current leadership, "will fight and die for their babies."

part 1 | part 2 | part 3