May 11–18, 2000

cover story

Whose MOVE? Part 3

	Keep on MOVing: Prior to joining MOVE in the ’70s, Pam Africa was among the few Powelton neighbors who sympathized with the group.

by Noel Weyrich

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

John Africa was born Vincent Lopez Leapheart in 1931. By the early 1970s, Leapheart was an itinerant carpenter possessing a third-grade education, his own homespun philosophy about the order of life and, to some, a magnetic personality. In the ferment of the post-’60s Powelton Village counterculture (just blocks from where hippie guru Ira Einhorn lived and would later murder his girlfriend) that was enough, evidently, to ensure a following when Vincent Leapheart started calling himself John Africa.

With the help of a disaffected white Penn graduate student named Donald Glassey, John Africa’s beliefs were compiled in a 300-page book of his teachings. The following excerpt is typical of the book’s declamatory reasoning:

"…Since you lawmakers see yourselves as so superior to life, since you think of man as the most powerful species existing, feel that everything that comes from man is law, why do you find yourselves inadequade (sic) when faced with the law of life, if your laws are so powerful, so necessary, levy the rain when you want dry weather, subpoena the snow when your towns and cities are being tied up by this force… since you think you have the law, sentence the weather you complain of as nasty, when you see your weather as bad it’s because you have acted ugly…."

By 1976, a small group of people were living in a house at 33rd and Pearl Streets, abiding more or less by John Africa’s naturalist philosophy. As Pam Africa remembers it, "the people in the house took in strays — stray animals, stray people."

They also worked hard, she recalled, supporting themselves, for instance, by operating a curbside car wash on Pearl Street. It was during that time that she shed her birth name — Jeanette Patton — and was accepted as a MOVE member.

Complaints from neighbors mounted, however, about building and health code violations at the property as smells of garbage and human and animal waste grew increasingly unbearable. For more than a year, tensions mounted between MOVE and the police as the MOVE members armed themselves and built a virtual stockade around their house. Police intent on serving arrest warrants for previous incidents finally moved in on Aug. 8, 1978, precipitating the gunfight that left one police officer dead, and eventually led to the sentencing of nine MOVE members to 30- to 100-year terms for murder. (One of the nine has since died in prison.)

By the time of the gunfight, John Africa had gone into hiding, and didn’t resurface until 1981, when he managed to beat serious federal charges of possession of bombs. After a failed attempt to relocate to a farm in Virginia, much of the MOVE family ended up moving into Louise James’ two-story rowhouse on Osage Avenue. By 1984, MOVE had barricaded that house and started harassing the neighbors through an outdoor speaker system. The stage was set for May 13.

Ironically, Louise and LaVerne, John Africa’s sisters, were both gone from the MOVE house by the time tensions escalated to the breaking point between MOVE and the police. Today, they say they were simply tired of the work demands put on them, but at the time, they told police that their brother had gone insane, threatening to kill members who didn’t obey him, or even threatening to test their loyalty by having MOVE members kill each other.

At dawn on May 13, prompted by complaints from MOVE’s neighbors, police evacuated the entire block of Osage Avenue and tried to force the MOVE members out of their house. Gunfire erupted as it had seven years before. Fearful of being shot at from a wooden bunker on the roof of the building, police dropped an explosive charge from a helicopter, hoping to knock the bunker to the ground. Instead, the bomb ignited a gasoline container on the roof, and the entire block was in ashes by the next morning. Among the 11 dead were John Africa, Louise James’ only son, Frank, and four small children. A subsequent grand jury found no criminal grounds for prosecuting any of the officials involved in the police action.

To Robin Wagner-Pacifici, who has written three books on radical group confrontations with law enforcement, certain elements of MOVE’s distinctive culture in the past may have all but ensured its clash with the police. In her analysis of a wide range of groups, including the Christian Branch Davidian sect and the Freemen of Montana militia group, there are "cultural themes" — central elements of each group’s belief system — that put them on a collision course with violent police actions, and MOVE has typically ranked on the extreme edge of all four: territorialism, religion, guns and family.

All the radical groups that come in conflict with government tend to have extremist positions in these four areas, she says. They typically stockpile weapons, stake out their territories and have unique or nontraditional concepts of family and religion.

"The farther they are from a common image of what is normal [in each of these respects], it may contribute to the violence. I’m not going to say it causes it."

In this respect, Ramona Africa’s comments about the commonalities shared by these groups may be more apropos than she realizes. In fact, Wagner-Pacifici almost echoes Ramona’s complaint about why MOVE has been seen as such a threat.

"There are a lot of people in this country who do things that could be considered criminal," Wagner-Pacifici says. "And a lot of people live lives that are unusual. So why do [law enforcement agencies] focus on these groups?

"It can’t be from any rational calculus of their threat to others," though she is quick to add that MOVE has seldom been easy to live near. "From my understanding it has to do with the way in which they move around in these cultural themes."

When police or federal agents, she says, take their standard operating procedures of surrounding a property and demanding unconditional surrender, and use it on people who she says "have a different sense of what it is to be a human being in the world," the frequent result has been death and catastrophe — usually involving children.

A cult, it’s been said, is what a religion is called when it’s young and at odds with the political mainstream. Certainly that was true of the Quakers before they came to Philadelphia, or the Mormons before they got to Utah. To paraphrase one thinker on the subject, philosopher Leo Pfeffer, a religion is what you believe in, a sect is what you dismiss and a cult is what you hate and despise.

In the faith business, few things succeed like success, and it is fairly clear that the MOVE schism, such as it is, will likely die with Louise and LaVerne. At 69 and 63, respectively, Louise and LaVerne are loyal to the end to the spirit of the brother they could not abide while he was alive. On the computer in LaVerne’s dining room, they print out letters to Attorney General Janet Reno, begging for a federal investigation of the 1978 MOVE confrontation, in the vain hope that their imprisoned loved ones will be set free. The letters, punctuated with quotes from John Africa about the nature of truth and justice, have gone unanswered for months.

The activities, the blasphemies, of the "new" MOVE people are a source of constant pain for them. Recently, MOVE sponsored a "hip-hop fundraiser" for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s defense fund. The event was co-sponsored by a local tavern. Alcohol and dancing at a MOVE event. Louise moans, "Oh, it’s enough to stop your heart." They will do what they will do, Louise says, but she wishes they would stop doing it in her brother’s name.

But even LaVerne and Louise have clearly moved on in their own way from their days with MOVE. They make soup now, for instance, despite John Africa’s prohibition on cooked foods. Besides the computer, there is a television in the house, appliances that are hardly an easy fit with John Africa’s primitivist doctrines. Of course, as in all splintered spiritual sects, each splinter defines itself by declaring what is and isn’t in keeping with the old texts written down by men who have long passed away.

The more important question is what will happen if John Gilbride is granted custody of his 4-year-old son. Ramona says she remains suspicious of Gilbride’s motives, that he may indeed be part of the government’s next strike at them.

"We don’t know what’s fueling him," she says, "but the government has always targeted white people in MOVE, so it wouldn’t be far-fetched that they would target or pressure a John Gilbride, to try to seduce him away from his wife and child, or through coercion and intimidation."

But what if Gilbride wins his case? Will MOVE "fight to the death to protect its babies?" Would they risk another confrontation with the law — considering that this latest one would probably be beamed around the world live on CNN?

On Sunday, Pam Africa and Ramona Africa shared a podium with former New York mayor David Dinkins and actors Ossie Davis and Ed Asner in the 5,000-seat theater at Madison Square Garden for a special sold-out fundraising event to benefit Mumia Abu-Jamal. The inescapable fact is that after two violent clashes with police, with its founder and 10 other members killed, eight members in prison for up to 100 years and perhaps its most eloquent defender sitting on death row, MOVE has never been more widely known, and never more warmly received among the Western world’s radical chic set.

MOVE has indeed secured a place at what might be called the far left-hand corner of the political mainstream. But the spot wasn’t won with raw carrots, dreadlocks and the respect for nature espoused by John Africa. It required merely a steady supply of victims and martyrs.

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

For more information
Move Alert! concerning the Gilbride custody case.

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