Ramona Africa: The MOVE organization is a revolutionary organization, and our interpretation of revolution is not this system’s interpretation of revolution. When MOVE speaks of revolution, we’re speaking about freedom and equality for all life, all living beings. You see, this system that we live under has papers called the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. They have the words that say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” but that’s all it is, is words. When they say in a constitution, you know, that you have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to protest, freedom of association, freedom of the press, all of these freedoms, it is just words. When MOVE talks about the principle of freedom, we mean it; we live it; we fight for it. And as Dave told you, in the very early days of MOVE, our founder, John Africa, brought people together from all different races, social and economic backgrounds, various religions, brought us together and made us a family. And John Africa cemented the bond of family in MOVE with one single principle: respect for all of life, and to defend all of life against enslavement, mistreatment and abuse, inequality—and that is what MOVE believes in.
That’s the foundation of our belief, and contrary to this system’s image of MOVE—you know, the way they portray MOVE—our first demonstrations were at the Philadelphia Zoo; was at the Barnum and Bailey Circus; at furriers, where we demonstrated against the enslavement of animal life. You know, when this system imprisons and encages humans, they say they do it because these people are criminal. They committed a crime. But what crime has the bears, the tigers, the lions, etc., committed to deserve life in prison? What crime did they commit, you know? How can a furrier substantiate clubbing baby seals to death, slaughtering minks, seals, foxes, you know, rabbits en masse, skinning them of their coats, and selling them to people, so that people can hallucinate that the seal’s fur looks better on our back than it does on the seal that the God of Light put it on, you know?
These are the confrontations MOVE had with this system, and we put out simple, clear information based on our belief to substantiate our position. We had demonstrations against boarding homes for the elderly, where elderly people were being physically and emotionally abused; where their social security checks were all but stolen from them; where the boarding homes that they were living in were virtual fire traps, and you know, elderly people were being burned alive regularly. We protested these things. We demonstrated at big conferences for chemical companies like DuPont, you know, or Dow Chemical, and confronted them about poisoning our environment, because that air, and the water, and the earth that feeds us, is just as alive as any living being you see walking around, and we can’t live without it. Can’t live without the air, the water, the earth that feeds all life. And we can’t live with the poison that is put in the air, the water that feeds all life.
Our lungs are coordinated to breathe clean air, pure air, the way God intended. The same with the water. We cannot eat and be healthy with food that comes through earth that has been poisoned with toxic waste, you know? These are the things that MOVE confronts in this system, and because MOVE people demand that, you know, we have clean air to breathe, that animals are not abused, and imprisoned, enslaved — because we demand that the earth that feeds all life not be poisoned, this system feels threatened by MOVE, because not only do we say it, but we back it up, you know. We explain our position, and they can’t justify their position. And they can’t shut us up. They can’t stop us.
You know, initially, when MOVE started confronting this system about what it’s doing to all of life—they realized that they had a problem with MOVE. And the first thing they did was approached us with money, you know, offering us funding, offered to set us up in an office to make our work easier. But we knew what that was. We knew what was behind it and we made it clear that MOVE cannot be bribed, cannot be bought, you know. They cannot co-opt us and get us to abandon what we know to be right. So, when they saw that we couldn’t be bribed and bought off, that’s when the brutality and attempted intimidation started. When we would go to set up a peaceful demonstration, the cops would come and tell us that we had to pack up and leave; we had to cease and desist and we would not just accept that. We questioned them. We were like, “What are you talking about? Isn’t this America, where you tell the world that in America, you know, American citizens have the right of freedom of speech, you know, freedom to protest, you know? Isn’t that what you tell the world? What are you talking about? Does the Constitution say, ‘Except the MOVE organization?’ What’s going on here?” And we wouldn’t just go away.
That’s when the beatings started; the brutality started. The cops would beat our men, our brothers, bloody—into broken limbs and unconsciousness. They would beat the women the same. They beat pregnant MOVE women: beat, stomped, kicked them into miscarriage, you know. Our children were attacked, thrown over banisters. I mean, you know, the cops are this system’s first line of offense—I won’t even say defense—offense. And, I mean, it was like open season on MOVE people. And MOVE people made our position clear, you know? I mean, there were like seven MOVE babies, you know, murdered into miscarriage by this system’s cops.
My sister, Sue Africa, you know, was like six months pregnant, and was beat and brutalized in a courtroom, right in front of the judge, and he did nothing. My sister, Rhonda Africa, was eight months pregnant, and beat, you know, horribly by cops and her baby was born shortly after that, with black and blue marks on him. Now you know that there is something wrong anytime a baby can be victimized by police brutality before he’s even born. Rhonda’s baby was born with black and blue marks on him, and died shortly after that. My sister, Alberta Africa, was several months pregnant when she was arrested at a peaceful demonstration at the zoo. And she made it clear, repeatedly, that she was pregnant. And when they took her to the police administration building and started processing her, four big, tall, beefy male cops came and drug her out of the cell, held her on the floor with her arms and legs spread-eagle, while a Black woman cop kicked her, repeatedly, in the stomach and the vagina until she suffered a miscarriage.
My sister, Janine Africa, was standing outside of MOVE headquarters with other MOVE people, welcoming some of our family home from jail—that had been jailed on contempt of court charges, and had just been released—and our family was welcoming them home. Cops came from three different districts—you only live in one police district—cops came from three different districts, talking about, “They got a call that there was a disturbance of the peace, a fight” or whatever. And my family told them, “There’s no fight, There’s no disturbance. We’re just welcoming our family home, you know, and that’s it.” Well, they went crazy, and attacked MOVE people. And in attacking MOVE people, they threw my sister Janine Africa—who was holding her three week old baby—threw her down to the ground, knocking her baby from her arms; trampled over them to get at other MOVE people; and trampled over the baby and crushed his head, you know, and the baby was killed. This is the kind of brutality and viciousness that MOVE people were victimized by. And MOVE said, “Look. We are a peaceful people. We are uncompromisingly opposed to violence, but we are neither stupid, nor confused. We understand the instinct of self-defense. It’s a God-given instinct.”
There is not a species of life on the face of this earth that does not defend itself when attacked, in whatever means that it can, and we are no different, you know. If you are defending yourself, you are not violent. There is no violence in defending yourself. But if you are attacked and you refuse to defend yourself, and allow yourself to be, you know, brutalized and attacked, then you are encouraging violence. You’re endorsing it. And you’re doing nothing to stop it. That is masochistic. That is ultimately suicidal. And MOVE is neither masochistic nor suicidal. If, you know, told the cops, “If you continue to attack us, we will defend ourselves; our family; our babies. We are not going to sit back and allow you to beat, and brutalize us, and murder our babies, without defending ourselves.” Well, you know, that—didn’t sit too well with this system, but they backed off of us, you know. They didn’t attack us anymore. What they did was surrounded our home and watched us for, like, nine months or so, from May of 1977 through March of 1978.
And when we were not intimidated or broke down, Mayor Rizzo, who was the mayor of Philadelphia at the time, initiated a starvation blockade around MOVE. They cut off our water. They refused to allow anybody to bring water, or food, or anything, to us. They stopped the mail. I mean, they didn’t pick up the trash, I mean, they just cordoned that area off. People who lived in the area, the three-block radius, had to show ID to get into their own home, you know, in their own street. And MOVE stood firm. And that put more pressure on the system because, you know, there was all this news coverage about the starvation blockade of, you know, women and children, etc., and made the city look bad. So, they had to back off, and finally they released our family that was in prison, and they claimed they were dropping all the charges, you know, on MOVE people.
But they wanted us to move out of our house. And they misused the issue of housing code violations that Dave was talking about, like not having screens in the window, ridiculous things like that, as if—I mean, let’s be real about this—as if officials in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania, or even in Washington, really care about poor people, especially people of color, Black people, living in homes that have housing code violations.
I used to work in housing, that was one of my first jobs out of college and I called the Department of License and Inspection so many times on behalf of tenants who, in the middle of the winter, their landlords would, you know, shut off the heat; or they didn’t have any hot water; or their roof was falling in on them. Did the Department of License and Inspection care? Did they ever do anything to force landlords to, you know, fix up their houses because they were in violation? No. No, they didn’t. But all of a sudden, when it comes to MOVE, because we don’t have screens in our windows or whatever, it’s such a big issue, such a problem that we have to move out of our house because it’s not safe? No, no, no, no, no. Obviously, it was more to it than that. And when MOVE would not just leave our house and move out of it, they used that—or misused it—as an excuse to send hundreds of cops out to our home.
Now, since when do hundreds of cops execute an eviction? And why should we be evicted from our own home, you know, because we don’t have screens in the window? No, you know, it was just the city’s attempt to, you know, really, to attack MOVE and kill MOVE, because it had nothing to do with getting MOVE people out of that house. And to prove it: The warrants were issued on August 1st of 1978. The police attack occurred on August 8th. But on August 5th, because officials knew that all MOVE people were not in that house—some MOVE people had went on an activity in Richmond, Virginia; several of our women, with some of the children, not the babies, not the breastfeeding babies, but older children, went to Richmond, Virginia. Some of our other family members went to Rochester, New York—and they knew that people had left the house, but what did they do? Claim that the issue was MOVE people not leaving our home, but meanwhile, on August 5th, cops went down to Richmond, Virginia, busted in our home there, arrested our two sisters, you know, and took our children, who we had to fight to get back, and we did. But they went down there and arrested them, and brought them back to Philadelphia.
Now, I thought the issue was MOVE people leaving MOVE headquarters. Obviously that wasn’t the issue, or they would not have gone to a whole ‘nother state and brought MOVE people back to Philadelphia. Anyway, that was on August 5th. On August 8th, hundreds of cops were sent out to our home, armed for war. You know, the fire department was sent there to act in cahoots with the police department, and they flooded our house with thousands and thousands of gallons of water; like six feet of water filled our basement. Then they filled our home with tear gas—filled the basement with tear gas—because they knew that’s where all MOVE people were. They had sent three teams of cops into the house, and went from the third floor, to the second floor, to the first floor, and determined that everybody was in the basement.
Then one cop testified that you couldn’t really see good in the basement because of the tear gas, you know, and it was dark in there, but that he and several other cops emptied their guns, reloaded, and emptied them again in corners where they could hear babies crying. So, they couldn’t see good, but you know, they heard babies crying, and that’s where they emptied their guns, reloaded and emptied them again. In their fervor (laughs) to kill MOVE people, and that’s what it was — it was not about an arrest — they came out there to exterminate MOVE people. And in their haste to do that, they ended up killing one of their own brother cops. And I know that people can, you know, be skeptical of this, and say, “Well, yeah, you know, I guess you would say that, that’s your family,” blah blah blah. But understand something, MOVE people did not invent the term “friendly fire.” We did not invent that term. This system invented that term to describe a situation which must have happened, and does happen, fairly frequently, you know, for them to even put a name to it. And it’s, you know, describing a situation where, in a conflict, one side ends up injuring or killing one of their allies.
It happened in the Iraq war, with this football player who, you know, gave up his career in football, and went over to Iraq to fight, and got killed. And initially, the government acted like he was killed by Iraqis, but meanwhile it came out that he was killed by friendly fire, you know, from Americans. So, MOVE did not invent this term, you know. We did not invent that scenario, you know. This is something that happens, and the trajectory of the bullet, the way this cop was shot—in the base of the neck with the bullet traveling downward—indicates clearly that MOVE could not possibly; it was physically impossible for MOVE to have shot and killed this cop. And just like I know it, they know it. Officials know it.
But see, my family is not in prison for the accusation of murder, for real. They are in prison for being committed MOVE members, and for surviving; surviving that August 8th, 1978 police attack on MOVE. That is why they are in prison. These officials know; know clearly; know better than we do, that MOVE did not kill that cop. But meanwhile, they arrested my family, known as the MOVE 9—charged them all with murder. Now, how do nine people fire one bullet from one gun and kill somebody? If they said one of the MOVE 9—Phil, Debbie, Merle, Jeannine, whoever—any one of the MOVE 9, is responsible for killing this officer, and the other eight are guilty by conspiracy, that might be a little understandable. But they are saying they don’t know who killed that cop.
The judge who sat on the trial, sat throughout the whole trial—at the end of the trial, after he had sentenced nine of my family members to 30 year minimums and 100 year sentences each, 100 year maximum sentences each—said publicly on a radio talk show, a few days after sentencing my family, that he didn’t have the faintest idea who killed that cop. But yet, my family sits in prison convicted of it, and have sat in prison 29, going on 30 years for this murder.
They arrested my family, and within hours of arresting my family, the city of Philadelphia sent a demolition team out to our home and completely demolished it. I mean, knocked it down; knocked the trees down that were in our yard in front of the house. I mean, demolished everything. Now understand, this was evidence. This was the scene of a crime. They accused my family of shooting and killing a cop from that house. Now, cops are trained to preserve evidence, not destroy it. There is no way in the world any of you can believe, that if they really thought MOVE people killed a cop, that they wouldn’t have preserved every bit of evidence they could get their hands on to prove that. They would not be destroying evidence. They would not be destroying the scene of the crime. Destroying evidence is a crime, you know, but they did it anyway. Why would they do that if they really believed that MOVE people killed the cop? They wouldn’t.
Nevertheless, my family sits in prison for this bogus accusation. And after our family was sentenced, you know, we didn’t go crazy, you know, we put out information about their innocence and the farce of a trial that they went through, and we filed the necessary appeals for them, but we also took to the streets.
John Africa, MOVE’s founder, initiated a newspaper called First Day, where, you know, we could get information out to people. We were out in the streets all the time, talking to people about this situation, getting them to question how nine people can be convicted of shooting one cop with one bullet from one gun. How they could destroy the evidence. How the judge could say, you know, he didn’t have any idea—”the faintest idea”—who killed that cop, and yet my family sits in prison for it. And people did start questioning it.
We got them to call officials and demand some answers, and it was becoming more and more of an issue. And officials were feeling some heat behind this, because they could not answer people’s questions, not without indicting themselves and opening a whole new can of worms that they didn’t want to open. So, feeling the kind of heat that they were feeling from these questions, they decided that they needed to do something to relieve the pressure, to stop what was going on. And they only had two options, I mean, either do the right thing, and do whatever you gotta do to release innocent MOVE people from prison, or, the only other option was to try to shut us up; stop us from calling so much attention to it. Well, they chose the latter. And that is what the May 13th, 1985 bombing of MOVE was about. It was their attempt to silence our righteous and unrelenting fight for the release of our innocent family members.
Officials, through the media, tried to convince people that the whole thing happened May 13th of 1985, because some neighbors had some complaints about MOVE. Now, I’m sure some neighbors did have complaints about MOVE. I can’t think of one neighborhood in this entire country where some neighbors don’t have complaints about some other neighbor—but are you telling me that the solution to a neighborhood dispute is to bomb the neighborhood and burn it down, and burn babies and adults and animals alive? That’s the solution to a neighborhood dispute, you know? And again, I ask the question: since when did this government start caring about Black people complaining about their neighbors? When did that become a big issue with this government, you know? They don’t care about white people complaining about their neighbors, or anything else.
I mean, it’s impossible to get a good response from the government when you have a complaint, and everybody knows it, you know? But they want people to believe that a handful of Black people complained about their MOVE neighbors and got that kind of response in May of ’85; got the local, the state, and the federal government involved because they were so concerned about these neighbors and their complaints that they dropped a bomb and allowed a fire to burn and burn down the whole neighborhood? I mean, it’s absolutely ridiculous, and it’s an insult to any thinking person’s intelligence. May 13th was about our unrelenting fight for the release of our family, our innocent family members. And they didn’t care what they had to do to stop us, to shut us up, to take the pressure off. That’s what May 13th was about.
And when they came out to our home on Mother’s Day, May 12th—Sunday, May 12th of 1985—setting up their high-powered weaponry, their intent was to kill everybody in that house, you know. They didn’t have to go and send for the C4 explosive that they used in that bomb. They brought it out there with them, along with .50 caliber machine guns, and 60 automatic rifles, sniper rifles with silencers on them. What did they need silencers for, you know? Silencers are the weapon of an assassin, you know? But they had sniper rifles with silencers. This is the kind of weaponry they brought out there, you know, for a handful of people. They only had warrants for four people—four people—and this is the kind of weaponry they brought out there. And they knew that there were children and animals in that house. They knew it was people in that house that they didn’t have any warrants for, you know. And even people they did have warrants for, I mean, according to this system’s legal laws, you are supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty” in a court of law. We had not been found guilty of anything. Yet this is how they attacked us; came at us, you know, the same way they did in ’78, because their intent was the same. Except in ’85, because they were so puzzled and frustrated that they had not killed MOVE people in 1978, when they came in ’85, they came with the makings of a bomb, because they were determined to do in ’85 what they had failed to do in 1978.
Ask yourself: what had MOVE done? What were we, you know, so violent about? What was it about us that caused them to come out there with all of that artillery and a bomb? What were we accused of: rape, robbery, selling drugs, kidnapping—what? None of that. None of that, you know: disorderly conduct, they charged us with in the warrants. They charged us with terroristic threats, which was absolutely ridiculous, because the incident that they charged us with terroristic threats on—the cops that filed the charges against us stood on our steps talking to us for over an hour. Now you’re telling me that a police officer who feels threatened, who you threaten terroristically, is going to stand right there on your doorsteps and talk to you for over an hour? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But these were the kinds of charges they put on us. But even if that were true—that we were, you know, guilty of terroristic threats or disorderly conduct—does that warrant the kind of firepower that they came out there with? Did that warrant dropping a bomb on us? A bomb which ignited a fire that the fire department, who had aimed four deluge hoses that they say pump out 10,000 pounds of water pressure per minute—that’s 40,000 pounds of water pressure per minute from four hoses—aimed that at us for hours and hours when there was no fire. But when they dropped that bomb, and the bomb ignited a fire, they made a conscious decision that they were not going to put the fire out; they were going to let it burn, you know. Since when do you know firefighters that are at the scene of a fire, knowing that there are living beings in the building—men, women, babies, animals—and they do nothing? They make a conscious decision to just let the fire burn? When has that ever happened?
That’s what they did, May 13th of 1985. And what we’re saying is, they did it deliberately. And when we tried to get our children, our animals, and ourselves out of that blazing inferno, we were met with a barrage of police gunfire deliberately aimed at us, you know, in an attempt to prevent anybody from escaping that fire and surviving that massacre. As Dave told you, myself and one little boy are the only survivors of that, you know, police attack on the MOVE family. Both of us were burned pretty badly. I still bear the scars from the burns I suffered that day. And I am the only person to ever be charged with anything, convicted of anything, and to go to prison as a result of the events of that day. Five babies and six adults were burned alive that day. Nobody has yet to be held accountable in any way for that.
Now this is the system that demands your respect, your loyalty. This is the system that says that in this country—you know, in various states—that anybody who murders should be on death row and should pay for it with their lives. Not one single official is sitting in prison next to my family, doing 30 to 100 years for murdering their babies—my family’s babies, you know? Nobody, not one official, is sitting on death row next to our brother Mumia Abu-Jamal for the accusation of murdering my family. Not a one. But this is the system that demands your respect; that tells you their interest is justice and equality and freedom. It’s an absolute lie. It’s an absolute lie. And I don’t say this to turn anybody against the system. I’m saying it because it is a simple fact and unless we deal with it—unless we face it, and deal with it, and work, you know, to put things right, none of us is safe; not a one of us is safe from it. And that’s the issue. That’s what people are going to have to deal with.
Right now, our priority in MOVE is the release of our family. Their 30 year minimum is up in August—August 8th of 2008—and they will be seeing the parole board early next year. And we are determined to put whatever pressure is necessary to push the parole board to go ahead and release our family on parole, while still fighting to get their conviction overturned. Because even if they are paroled next year, they would be on parole for the rest of their life, because they have 100 year maximum sentences; they will have done 30 if they are paroled next year. That leaves 70 years of parole, which is the rest of their life. Which means that, you know, government officials will hold that over their head; and anytime they felt like it or felt threatened by MOVE, they would, you know, drag them in and throw them back in jail on any little excuse. And that is not a good thing; that is not something that we’re willing to just accept. So, our priority right now is gaining the release of our family, and also our brother Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is innocent; who sits on death row, not because he is a murderer—because he’s not—but because he dared to use his journalistic skills to expose this system, not only when it came to MOVE, but with issues across the board concerning police brutality, or homelessness, or, you know, judicial corruption, you know. That is why Mumia sits in jail; because he would not compromise himself or his journalistic skills to just, you know, write things the way the system wants him to write it. He told the truth and that’s why he sits on death row. And you know, we’re working very hard to save his life, too.
So, this is the work that the MOVE organization has involved ourselves in for the last 35 years or so. That’s the work we do externally. But I want to make it clear, too, that the MOVE organization, we are committed to putting things right, but that commitment, we understand clearly, starts first with ourselves. We have to do the work to get ourselves right; to get ourselves strong, and honest and right before we can influence anybody else. And that’s the work that the MOVE organization is committed to, as well. You know, we have family meetings where we talk about things. Not only upcoming activities, or whatever, but if there is any problem; if any MOVE person is having trouble with anything; if one MOVE person sees another MOVE person having trouble with something; we have family meetings, and it’s brought out so that that person can get help, because we are as committed to putting ourselves right as we are coming at this system and putting things right externally. So that’s the work that MOVE people are involved in, and have been involved in—like I said—over 35 years now, since the early 70s.
And for being committed to this work, to putting things right, this system have come down on us with everything it has. Because finally, the bottom line is that those running this system have absolutely no intention—no intention—of putting things right, of doing the right thing. They want to keep this system going just the way it is, because they are hallucinating that it works for them. And it doesn’t. It is no more working for them as it is working for a poor Black person in the ghetto; or a poor white person in the ghetto; or Latino, or Asian, you know, person in the ghetto; or for an Indigenous person living on a reservation. This system ain’t working for nobody. Nobody. They may hallucinate that it’s working for them, because they may have money, you know, can live a certain lifestyle, but that doesn’t stop them from getting cancer, you know? That doesn’t stop them from being alcoholics, or their children from being drug addicts, you know? It’s not working for them either, but they’re hallucinating that it is. And MOVE is the constant reminder to them that it’s not working for them. And they don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear it, you know? But that’s not going to make things any better for them.
So, this is the work that MOVE people have committed ourselves to, that this system will never stop us from doing, you know. And that’s why they keep coming at us. So, you know, I don’t want to drag on and on and on, because I’m sure that some of you may have questions or comments. And, you know, I want to give you an opportunity to ask your questions—whatever they are. So, you know, please do not hesitate to ask anything that comes to mind, because, you know, we’re here to answer questions. And if you want to know about MOVE, the best people to ask is MOVE, so don’t pass up this opportunity to ask any questions you might have. Okay, I just want to thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
