MOVE

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This article is about the organization. For other uses, see Move.

MOVE is an organization formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1972 by John Africa (Vincent Leaphart) and Donald Glassey described by CNN as "a loose-knit, mostly black group whose members all adopted the surname Africa, advocated a back-to-nature lifestyle and preached against technology." The dreadlocked members also disrupted meetings and lectures by personalities as varied as Jane Fonda and Buckminster Fuller.

Philadelphia Portal

1 Confrontations With Police
- 1.1 Powelton Village, 1978
- 1.2 Osage Avenue, 1985
2 See also
3 External links
4 Further reading

[edit] Confrontations With Police

[edit] Powelton Village, 1978

Glassey owned a large twin house at 33rd and Pearl Sts. in the Powelton Village neighborhood of Philadelphia, and it became the first home base for MOVE. The members erected a fence along the front and sides of the house and established a curb-side carwash business. Neighbors allegedly began to complain about the sanitation aspects of their back to nature philosophy and their use of bullhorns to lecture and admonish authority.

MOVE refused access to health inspectors and other state and city officials. The situation escalated until the members one evening marched along the fencing carrying rifles. In response, Mayor Frank Rizzo ordered a blockade of the immediate neighborhood, in order to prevent food and supplies from reaching MOVE and thus force the members out of the house. However, since the blockade was announced in advance, supporters were able to bring in large supplies of food. (It was also later discovered that MOVE members had dug a tunnel through to Powelton Ave., outside the police perimeter.)

The blockade lasted several weeks, during which time residents of a roughly two-square-block area had to show identification to reach their homes. Several hundred members of the police department were involved in the action. The MOVE members ultimately refused to meet the city's demands, and on August 8, 1978, Philadelphia police attempted to clear the house by force. One of their first tactics was to turn fire hoses on the house. Eventually, the violence escalated into a shoot-out.

Who began shooting is disputed; MOVE claims that they never fired a shot. One police officer, James Ramp, was killed. The autopsy of James Ramp revealed that the bullet had entered his body in a downward direction. At the time, the inhabitants of the house had reportedly been in the basement. Leaphart and eight other MOVE members, known as the MOVE 9, were sentenced to prison for the murder. None of the MOVE members that were arrested were taken into custody with weapons.

Following this incident, Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo had the house demolished as it was deemed uninhabitable due to health code violations.

[edit] Osage Avenue, 1985

[edit] Background

The MOVE group then moved to a house in West Philadelphia owned by Louise James, a relative of a MOVE member. They continued their back to nature philosophy, and added a new agenda – freeing the MOVE 9. In a change from their previous tactic of staging protests downtown, MOVE began to pressure their neighbors, in predominatly African-American working-class West Philadelphia. The Osage Avenue houses were connected, and their roofs formed a convenient jogging track for MOVE. Neighbors listened to the MOVE physical training program through their bedroom ceilings in the morning; this was soon joined by MOVE's loud speaker system, broadcasting political diatribes for hours at a time that were laced with profanity. Mayoral candidate W. Wilson Goode promised to correct the problem ; however when he became Philadelphia's first African American mayor in November of 1983 the situation on Osage Avenue did not change.

[edit] Confrontation Leads Police to Bomb MOVE House

On May 13, 1985, in a failed attempt to serve arrest warrants on four members of the group, Philadelphia police became engaged in a gun battle at MOVE's communal residence. The mayor had, in response to pressure from the neighborhood that included a threat to use "vigilante justice," turned over the situation to the police commissioner with the instructions to find a way to arrest the MOVE members. At this point it became a police matter and an entry plan was drawn up under the direction of Police Commissioner Sambor.

The plan called for a mixture of civilian and military explosives to be dropped on the fortification that had been built by MOVE on top of the house in order to destroy it. The satchel of explosives, alternately characterized as a "bomb" and an "entry device," was to be dropped on MOVE's rooftop structure. The fortification was also described as either a "gun turret" or a purely defensive fortification. The structure was unoccupied at the time the bomb was dropped, although there were a number of people living in the house.

The bomb did not significantly damage the rooftop structure, but did ignite several barrels of gasoline, clearly marked "fuel," starting a fire which destroyed the entire block and killed eleven people. City hoses, deployed as a part of the original entry plan, were not turned on until 40 minutes after the fire started burning. Ironically, the city's best firefighting equipment had been trained on the rooftop bunker all morning, but "the decision was made to let the fire burn" in the words of Sambor. About 10,000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the police in to the house. 62 houses burned to the ground; only Ramona Africa and Michael Ward (aka Birdie Africa) escaped alive. Six adults and five children in the MOVE house were killed.

Police initially said they had been fired upon first with automatic weapons, but only a small number of non-automatic weapons were found in the burned-out home. MOVE supporters have described the raid as a revenge attack for the 1978 shooting.

[edit] Aftermath

In the aftermath of the catastrophe the city launched a special investigation which found, among other things, that "Dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable." The mayor was re-elected in the next election, and no police officer was fined, fired or suspended (Ed Rendell, who was the DA at the time of the MOVE incident, later became Mayor of Philadelphia after Goode and later Governor of Pennsylvania).

Philadelphia has paid over $32 million to the victims, including $840,000 to Michael Ward, $1.5 million to Ramona Africa and the relatives of John and Frank Africa, and has been ordered to pay $29 million to residents of Osage Avenue and Pine Street whose homes were destroyed by the fire, and their replacement had to be torn down later. (The city of Philadelphia, now under former Philadelphia City Council President and now Mayor John F. Street, is appealing the latter award.)

On December 1, 2005, U.S. District Judge John P. Fullam cut the original jury verdict of $12.8 million in more than half, to $6 million.

[edit] References in Music

The song lyric "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire / We don't need no water / Let the motherfucker burn" used in several musical pieces by a variety of bands (including The Bloodhound Gang's "Fire, Water, Burn" and "Sway" by Coal Chamber) was first produced as a Rap lyric shortly after the Osage Avenue MOVE incident in the 1985 track "The Roof is On Fire" by Rockmaster Scott and the Dynamic Three. This lyric directly references the 1985 Osage Avenue bombing and was used as a chant by onlookers and protesters during the MOVE firestorm that watched in outrage as the Philadelphia Fire Department and Philadelphia Police chose to let the MOVE house burn to the ground. The chant dates back to at least the Vietnam war as a US Army marching cadence/chant.

In the song Sunset on 32nd, the Virginia-based punk band Strike Anywhere references the assault on the MOVE house in the line "When they dropped the bomb on the building to kill a MOVEment / Did they care where the rights of the murdered went?"

Operation M.O.V.E by Leftöver Crack is about the events surrounding the group and the fire. "Friendly fire kills officer dead / The M.O.V.E. nine are framed up instead".

Mumia's Song by Anti-Flag also mentions the MOVE 9. MOVE9, Mumia Abu Jamal, and others are mentioned in Aus Rotten song, No Justice, No Peace.

Also, in the song Untitled by Jedi Mind Tricks, Vinnie Paz states "Jedi Mind bombin' your MOVEs like John Africa."

[edit] References in Print

Pamphlet Architecture 23 - Move: Sites of Trauma by Johanna Saleh Dickson

Philadelphia Fire, by John Edgar Wideman, is a novel published in 1990 in which Cudjoe, a writer and voluntary exile, returns to his old neighborhood to track down the one survivor of the fire, a young boy.

[edit] See also

Ramona Africa
Green Anarchism
Anarcho-primitivism

[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading

20 years on the MOVE, MOVE, Philadelphia. 1996, 72p.

Categories: History of Philadelphia | Philadelphia Police Department | Imprisoned anarchists | 1985 in the United States