The following comments are my opinions. I am not making any claims or allegations against any named individuals. I am simply explaining my own thought process.
Here’s some background on why I chose to participate in the podcast, “Murder at Ryan's Run”. Some of this may not fully make sense until you hear the podcast. :
I’ve tried getting the following things onto paper numerous times and it has proven difficult. There are so many complicated ideas that I need to express, and the people that I’m writing this for have very different levels of background knowledge. I have strong emotions about everything I’m writing about, and I realize that what I’m saying here will affect some peoples’ lives to a great degree. These topics could easily take me a book to cover, so please forgive me if I paint in broad brush strokes and skip over some of the details. Anything that I don’t cover here will very likely be covered in detail on the podcast.
I’m writing this letter to explain why I have chosen to participate in the podcast “Murder at Ryan's Run” about the 2002 murder of John Gilbride in Maple Shade, NJ. I’m also writing to explain how I’ve come to some of the conclusions that I have, as well as to explain how I became so deeply involved in all of this in the first place. Some of you may not be aware of my involvement with the MOVE Organization or that the focus of my life in my late teens and much of my twenties was dedicated to supporting MOVE. Those of you who are aware of this may be shocked or feel betrayed by some of the conclusions I have come to, conclusions which I discuss on the podcast. I can understand feeling that way, I only ask that you please continue reading and try to understand my perspective.
I first encountered the MOVE Organization through the writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1997. I was fourteen years old and had become obsessed with radical politics and social justice through my hometown punk rock scene. When I encountered MOVE in Mumia’s book “Live from Death Row” I was completely taken by their story. I was angered by what I read about the 1985 bombing and the imprisonment of the MOVE 9 in 1978. I wanted to do what I could to fight for justice. Coincidentally my hometown had one of the most active supporter chapters for MOVE. I became involved.
By 1999 I started making trips up to Philadelphia for demonstrations. That same year I became romantically involved with a MOVE supporter six years my senior. At that point I was already in far over my head. The next year I began visiting with the MOVE 9 prisoners who I had already been writing with for a few years. In 2001 my relationship with the older MOVE supporter came to a dramatic end. This was two months before I was to graduate high school. I was heartbroken and confused. By then I had already been seeking regular telephone advice from one of the highest-ranking MOVE members, Sue Africa, for two years. When my relationship ended Sue suggested that maybe I should move up to Philly, just for the summer. I could staff the office of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia and spend the summer hanging out with other MOVE members and supporters.
I graduated from high school in early June of 2001, turned 18 two weeks later, and I was driving up to Philly three days after that. I was passionate about the organizing I was doing and I was having the time of my life. Most of my waking hours were spent organizing for justice for Mumia and the MOVE 9. That summer was like a dream. I was a young man looking for a war, and I found one that felt just. I believed in everything I was doing 100% and there was a kind of ecstasy in working so hard for something I believed in that deeply.
By then I was not just sympathetic to MOVE, I was completely identified. I spent most of my time with MOVE members or supporters and I was enjoying it. It only seemed logical to extend my stay beyond the summer. Soon I was calling the Philadelphia area my home. Meanwhile, nearly the entire time I had been developing an interest in MOVE, a crisis had been brewing below the surface. Around the same time I was gaining an interest in MOVE a man named John Gilbride was trying to find a way out.
John grew up in South Jersey. He became obsessed with MOVE when he was 17, on the day that they were bombed by the city of Philadelphia, May 13th, 1985. The atrocity that he witnessed on the news; 6 adults and 5 children dead, and 62 homes burned to the ground, shocked him and made him question his own worldview. He could see the smoke across the Delaware River and he needed to take action. He began writing letters to the MOVE prisoners and attending court dates. It didn’t take too long before he began making trips to the prisons to visit incarcerated members.
Not long after that John began a romantic relationship with Alberta Africa who was twenty years older. John was a Temple Student, around 20 years old, and Alberta was 40 and recently released from prison. Alberta was also the widow of MOVE’s founder, John Africa, and was the new de-facto leader of MOVE (MOVE claims to not believe in leaders, but at least until recently Alberta was the unquestioned leader of the group). Eventually John married Alberta and in 1996 they had a son named Zack. John left the group and Alberta in 1998 and soon after that he filed for custody of Zack.
The custody battle between John and Alberta was an incredibly vicious one. Alberta declared that she would never allow John to have her son without being present. She said that it was against her religion (MOVE Law) to separate a child from their mother. I became aware of the custody battle in 1999. It wasn’t of particular interest to me but it seemed to be of growing concern to MOVE. I hadn’t even met Alberta Africa at that point and I was much more concerned with MOVE’s philosophy and the legal struggles of Mumia and the MOVE 9.
By 2000 the custody case was becoming a prime concern for MOVE. Some of the energy that I was putting into the movement was diverted to participate in strange protests against John Gilbride and his extended family. MOVE claimed that John’s intention in marrying and having a child with Alberta had been to create a confrontation the entire time. They said that he had actually been a CIA or FBI agent, and that this entire custody case was a government plot to try to provoke another confrontation. This seemed quite strange, but I was 17 and I loved everything about MOVE. I did whatever I was asked to do.
When I moved up in 2001 the custody case was settling down a bit, but in August of 2002 the intensity increased dramatically. After a long and protracted battle John was awarded partial custody. MOVE’s response to this was to board up their headquarters at 45th and Kingsessing in West Philly and declare that if anyone tried to take Zack from his mother then the city would face another confrontation similar to May of 1985 or August of 1978. At 11 pm on September 27th, 2002 John Gilbride was murdered, shot multiple times in his head and chest at close range, while sitting in his car in front of his apartment in Maple Shade, NJ. He had just arrived home from work. It was the night before his first scheduled unsupervised visit with his son.
John’s murder hit all of us MOVE supporters like a bus. Everything became real very quickly. However, Alberta told many creative and conflicting stories (he was still alive, but he had also been murdered by the government or the mafia) about what had actually happened to John, eventually the detectives stopped asking questions, and the case went cold. I think all of us tried to forget about all of it. I doubled down on my political organizing and my dedication to MOVE even increased for quite a while. It needed to increase or it would crumble. Occasionally a difficult thought would find its way in, but with enough effort I could find a way to make my world make sense.
I continued regular prison visits with the MOVE 9 and Mumia, and I continued to consult Sue and Alberta Africa for advice about nearly every aspect of my life. Maiga and I had started dating in May of 2002 (four months before John’s murder) and Maiga was pulled into MOVE even more quickly than I had been. In the winter of 2006 Mike Africa Jr. and I started a landscaping business. As I was driving home from a long day of landscaping in the fall of 2007 a thought hit me so hard that I had to pull my truck to the shoulder. It felt like a lightning storm inside my head. “They killed John.” Of course I had thought about it before, but this was different. Something about my entire point of reference had flipped completely upside down. Five years of cognitive dissonance had broken something in my brain and I would never be able to see the world the same way again. John’s death wasn’t the only thing that I allowed myself to question. There were growing gaps in a lot of the stories I had been told and I was finally allowing myself to explore them.
Nearly every time I’ve told this story to someone they’ve asked me “Well then why were you still around MOVE ten years later?”. Even though I had serious problems with some of the elements of MOVE, that didn’t make the relationships I had with people meaningless. I loved a lot of people in MOVE very deeply and I still do. Maiga also had her own relationship with MOVE that rested on a different foundation than my own. My initial fascination with MOVE came from its mission, and the meaning and purpose that it provided for my own life. Maiga’s initial interests were more relational. She was also just beginning to get to know MOVE when John was murdered and didn’t take part in that terrible campaign in the same ways that I did. It took us a long time to understand each others’ experiences.
It may seem like I’ve been skirting around the word “cult”, and there’s a reason for that. I’m comfortable using that word to refer to MOVE, and based on the definition of the term and the structure of the group it is accurate. However, I bristle a bit when other people use that term, not because it isn’t true but because of the associations that people have with that word. When people talk about cults, and especially when they are portrayed in documentaries and podcasts, there’s often a degree of voyeurism which emphasizes the outlandish, scandalous, and potentially dangerous elements of the group. These elements are often all true, but by overemphasizing them they risk obscuring the whole story.
One reason I’ve been so happy talking to Beth McNamara, the producer of the podcast, is that she has worked hard to understand the experience of someone entering a group like MOVE. Her reporting of this story has led her to understand John’s experience, and how he found himself in the position that he did, in a way that few people who haven’t been through the experience could. Many people commenting on John’s conflict with MOVE, including the Philadelphia Police Department and some in the media, acted as if John must have been crazy to have arrived where he did. There was little effort to understand his experience, and other than his family he was totally alone.
I must admit that part of my participation in this project is selfish. The loneliness I experienced in 2007 when I stopped being a true believer and struggled to find new foundations for my own worldview are hard to describe. Talking about these events with more people who understand has been cathartic and maybe these conversations will be helpful to someone else as well. One of my hopes for this podcast is that it may serve as a resource for people in group dynamics they are uncomfortable with, or for people with family members in such a situation.
Over the years I’ve thought a lot about how I ended up on this path, and in retrospect I have a lot of sympathy for the idealistic teenager I once was. Our culture doesn’t provide many healthy channels for young people who are seeking meaning. Many of the institutions that used to serve this purpose no longer seem like viable options. Coming of age in our culture is an alienating affair for many. I didn’t see the meaning or purpose in the traditional paths and wanted a path so meaningful that it would be worth giving up everything else to follow. I wanted something that would test me, mold me, and strengthen me.
When I first encountered MOVE I was so impressed with their holistic vision. I was independently interested in self-sufficiency, human rights, racial justice, voluntary poverty, and animal rights, and their worldview seemed to encompass all of these things. I was initially less interested in the political struggles of MOVE and more interested in living a Thoreauvian lifestyle and becoming stronger and more self-sufficient. In a group like MOVE (yes, you can say it, cult) idealism brings one into the group and personal relationships keep them there. Even as the shiny veneer of MOVE faded for me I still cared deeply for the members of MOVE (and still do). Many people in cults are woven into the group by relationships that would be unbearably painful to sever by the time they figure out what’s going on. Maiga and I talk about these issues frequently and she has had the helpful insight that a cult is an incredibly complex network of co-dependent relationships.
Some of the people I met in MOVE were also incredible people. If you listen to “Murder at Ryan's Run” you will hear about terrible things that have happened within MOVE all the way back to its foundation in the early ‘70s. I have read Beth’s source material closely and studied MOVE’s history, and all of what she is reporting is true. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that there is an internal beauty within MOVE. In-group and out-group relationships are complicated and within a cult an ends justify the means way of seeing the world can twist one’s moral compass and make people behave in ways that are very difficult to understand from the outside. However, within MOVE there are some very kind, compassionate, and brilliant people who have simply found themselves tangled in a confusing web.
One of the key factors in ending up in a cult is timing. If John had been a bit older or a bit younger when he was so shattered by the bombing of MOVE in 1985 then he would have responded very differently than he did. If I had been a few years older or a few years younger then I wouldn’t have been susceptible in the way that I was. As the timing aligned for me and I moved further into the group I was rewarded immediately. I felt a closeness with people that I had never experienced. There is an intimacy that you can feel with people when you share a cause and when you are fighting alongside one another that can’t be experienced in any other way. I think we are likely evolutionarily programmed to desire this closeness, after all an individual at odds with their tribe doesn’t survive long. There are aspects of cult dynamics that seem to be more natural for our psyche and leaving them can feel like a type of death.
The years following 2007 were almost unbearably difficult for me at times. I had decided to play a very long game that I was unlikely to win. Each time I tried to talk about any of these issues with Maiga directly it went very badly. One time Sue and Carlos Africa were alerted about how I felt and they were in my house talking to me about it within a half an hour (they had a key and let themselves in). A few days later Sue asked me directly if I thought they had killed John. I was so tired of lying and said yes. Somehow we were able to move on from that and I continued going on prison visits and spending most of my time with MOVE members and supporters. I was lonely and had no one to talk to about my experience. At the same time I still wanted justice for Mumia and the MOVE 9. I also still really enjoyed the company of many in MOVE. Years passed fairly quickly.
A decade passed in this way. I was playing a waiting game and making some progress. By 2018 Maiga had her own frustrations with MOVE leadership (Sue and Alberta Africa) that she could no longer ignore. She became pregnant with our daughter and we both decided that we needed to put some boundaries between us and MOVE leadership. In May of 2019 (one month before my daughter was born) I sent an open letter to Sue Africa regarding some concerns I had with MOVE leadership. This letter had nothing to do with John’s murder, but it did give us space and some boundaries away from MOVE leadership before our daughter was born.
John had been on my mind fairly frequently in all of the intervening years. When our daughter was born I started thinking about him all the time. Having a child made me understand the position he had been in on a level that I never could have understood before. When my daughter was a month old I was driving her around to try to get her to fall asleep. As I was driving through Maple Shade, New Jersey I pulled into Ryan’s Run apartments without any conscious awareness. I knew that was where John had been murdered. I had thought about it many times as I drove past his apartment complex over the years but I had never had the impulse to pull in. As my daughter slept I looked up a newspaper article and found his apartment number. I drove around the circle and pulled into the parking space in front of his apartment - 304.
I sat there for a very long time. I was processing a lot of things I’d tried not to think about. I imagined the night of the murder. I thought about his son Zack, who throughout my years in MOVE I had come to know, love, and have my own relationship with. The Ryan’s Run apartments became a regular stop on my routine drives to try to get my daughter to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about the murder and about what John must have been feeling as he tried to fight for his relationship with his son.
Then on June 26th of 2020 I got a call from an L.A. number. I let it go to voicemail. I still have the message. “Hi Kevin, my name is Beth McNamara. I am a documentary producer and I am working on a project looking into the unsolved murder of John Gilbride and would like to talk to you.” I was incredibly nervous. I asked Maiga what she thought. “You know you have to talk to her.” She knew how much I’d been thinking about this, and the timing was so strange. Before the call came in I was about to take my daughter to the park. After talking to Maiga I left for the park. As I pushed my daughter in the stroller I called Beth for the first time.
I learned that she had started the project two years before. She originally intended to do a documentary on the history of MOVE that would likely have been mostly favorable. During one of her many interviews for that project she learned about John’s murder. As she began to dig a very different story began to emerge.
The first time I talked to Beth I liked her. She seemed sincere and to only be concerned with finding the truth. Over a series of conversations I began to trust her and I decided to talk to her on the record about things I never intended to talk about publicly. I never intended to spend time battling with people over the details of this case. I see how messy it can be when someone leaves a group like MOVE and decides to make it their mission to challenge them (that is still not my mission). However, in the past year a few things have changed for me. For one I have gotten to know the Gilbride family. I had always wanted to apologize to them for taking part in the character assassination that eventually led to John’s actual assassination. Beth was able to connect me with John’s surviving family and as I have gotten to know them I have grown to care for them a great deal. I now feel an even deeper desire for the truth about John’s life to be told. The same desire for justice that led me to MOVE is the same force that is now pushing me to speak out.
I have also decided to go on the record because I don’t think that John and Alberta’s son Zack (now in his mid-twenties) will ever really be able to understand himself and to find peace until he knows who his father really was. The path Zack has before him is an incredibly difficult one no matter what he does. I recognize that by sharing my thoughts I may be increasing his stress and difficulty in the short term. Zack loves his mother deeply. I understand that and hope that he can continue to love his mother while also understanding the full story, and the lengths his father went for him. I can’t even begin to understand how difficult his path is. However, I think that confronting that truth directly will likely be less catastrophic than avoiding it.
The main reason I am doing this is because I want people to understand John’s story. The more I’ve begun to understand John the more that I identify with his experience. John was a kind, compassionate person whose open-heartedness was weaponized against him. John was taken advantage of and when he was no longer useful he was made an enemy and then killed. I want John’s story told because stories matter. The way that we frame the past creates the reality we experience and John’s story has meaning.
I feel that I owe this to John. As you will hear in the podcast, I participated deeply in the cruel and vicious campaign of character assassination and intimidation that Alberta waged against him. I took part in flyering his parents’ neighborhood with outrageous allegations against them. I protested against John in front of the family court house, and I even put flyers in John’s apartment complex alleging that he was an abusive father (he certainly was not) only one week before he was murdered. I deeply regret my actions. MOVE portrayed John as an abuser, a CIA agent, and a racist. The media portrayed John as clueless and in many ways they reinforced MOVE’s narrative. I’m hoping that this podcast can shine a light on who he really was.
Despite everything I’m saying here I still care deeply about many people in MOVE. Up until the last year I never planned to speak publicly about any of this. If I have pulled back or been distant then now you know why. I know that this could feel like a betrayal in many ways, but I am trying my best to follow my own conscience. I understand that by speaking out I am putting some people in uncomfortable positions. I apologize for that and I’m sorry that this complicated mess is shaking out this way. Even if my decision here means that we don’t speak again please know that my affection for people in MOVE was very real. I am still hoping everyday that Mumia will be freed. I am so glad the MOVE 9 are home and I have mourned for those who have passed.
I know that the chances of this happening are effectively zero, but my deepest hope in all of this is that Alberta will admit that what she did was wrong and that she will atone for her actions. I don’t think that she will have peace in her remaining years unless she does so. I do not know for certain that Alberta had John murdered, but I do know that she waged a war of lies that made the last years of his life a living hell. I know that she took advantage of a network of supporters who were mostly interested in fighting for the unjustly incarcerated and she used them to fight her personal war. For this I hope that she seeks atonement, and in that I hope that she finds peace.
For some of you who have supported MOVE for years this may all seem very far off the mark from your own relationship with MOVE. I understand this and I respect that you have your own experience. I am not seeking to change that, I am merely sharing my own experience. I became a true-believer and adopted MOVE’s ways quickly and as a result I had a relationship with MOVE that was different from most people who support on a political level. Most people perceive Pam and Ramona as MOVE’s leaders and have barely heard of Sue or Alberta Africa. I am not trying to dissuade you from the work that you are doing and recognize that Pam and Mike Jr. are doing some very compelling work. I care about them a great deal and I wish them the best.
If anyone reading this has sincere questions or feedback for me I am open to having conversations. I have no interest in having debates or in yelling matches. Please don’t call me out of the blue, but if you’d like to discuss what I’m saying please email me at leavingmove@gmail.com. If you find yourself in a situation similar to what I experienced then I would be happy to talk with you as well. You will also find resources for cult survivors below. If we used to have a relationship and my speaking out now makes that impossible then I understand that too. I wish you the best and maybe our paths will cross again one day as part of a different story.
Peace,
Kevin
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