Maiga's story about how she came into contact with MOVE is a good companion piece to today's episode of Murder at Ryan's Run, which is about how John Gilbride was pulled into MOVE.
by Maiga Milbourne
When I first met MOVE, I didn’t know that they were MOVE. I had joined some West Philly activist groups as a new-to-West-Philly 21-year-old. Berta, of the International Action Center, and I were going to drive around with a bullhorn on the roof of the car to announce an upcoming action. We stopped by a big house on 45th and Kingsessing and a gregarious young man with locks bounded out to install the sound system. He was charming and fun. I would later learn that he was Mike Africa Jr.
Berta protected MOVE’s identity as I was new and people were still sorting me out.
My friend, Au, and I began to meet to run a lap around Clark Park. We met Carlos one day as he was walking dogs. He seemed friendly and silly, like a very sweet uncle. After he left Au explained that he was MOVE. “They’re my political family.”
My ears perked.
I was at a particular desperate point in my life and the thought of a political family-- a network who would hold you but also hold justice in the world-- sounded like the most beautiful fantasy.
Pieces of my own upbringing and experiences became particularly intense beginning years before when I was in high school. The resources that I was given felt really intellectual and not rooted, grounded, based in emotional literacy, nor feeling. I desperately needed that aspect of my experience tended. I felt an urgency to learn healthy relating and have a community around me. I didn’t know what I felt most of the time, so it governed me, and I didn’t know how to feel such intensity nor sort out what would trigger those experiences.
As I hadn’t been able to sort through filling out that part of my experience and getting on more solid footing, I went to college. That was the path most open to me. It was familiar. I didn’t feel ready nor stable enough to set off on my own as a teenager who hadn’t been exposed to much beyond my suburban upbringing. I enrolled in Mount Holyoke College in 1999 and studied Critical Social Thought.
What I was muddily trying to process in my emotional life was projected onto political theory and leftist activism. My experience at Mount Holyoke was more of the same, meaning, there wasn’t much emphasis on any aspect of life other than the intellect. That one piece of my experience was overemphasized and I didn’t know how to bring the rest of myself and my life into balance. I had friends but struggled with community. There were resources, but somehow I still couldn’t find the ones that would help me locate a sense of stability. I focused on leftist organizing because I began to think that if I could be a part of organizing the outer world more justly, that my inner world would know peace.
I felt like I needed to see a more just social organizing system so I enrolled in study abroad in the fall of my junior year in Cuba. This was 2001 so I was in Cuba when the twin towers were hit. There were so many intense and memorable moments from my semester studying at the University of Havana. For sure, I did not see anyone homeless nor hungry, and that made a favorable impression on me. But I did see more than those on one-week tours with the Venceremos Brigade. I saw sex workers and the inequity brought on by tourism. I saw racism, as my roommate was a Black American and the two of us would go together to hotels to use their internet. I would be admitted; she would be stopped. I heard of prisons and political prisoners. I saw animal abuse and severe environmental crisis. Many of the challenges were absolutely due to the US embargo, but not all.
I felt utterly demoralized. I had pinned so many hopes on Cuba being a utopia. Without it, I didn’t know what to do. I was losing hope in humanity and my place in the world. It may seem dramatic, but I was 20 years old and still enduring the effects of trauma without much support.
After that semester, I withdrew from Mount Holyoke. On my 21st birthday that winter, I quietly moved into a room that I rented off of 49th street in West Philadelphia. I got a job waiting tables and I began going to activist organizing meetings. I was really lonely and scared but I felt like I had to try a different path.
When I met Kevin, I officially met MOVE.
On May 22, 2002, I went to an organizing meeting at the American Friends Service Center on Cherry Street, to help plan a protest of then-President Bush. Au was there and Betsey Piette. Kevin was there and passed around a sign-in sheet. Kevin and Au knew one another so after the meeting he invited us to scout out a location for a Mumia protest coming up in July.
Kevin and I continued to meet and then date. I was impressed with him as an organizer (he’s truly excellent) but also at the depth of his relationships with MOVE people. I remember the first time that he brought me over to MOVE headquarters he would tell me about each person as we met. I remember encountering humble Mo, and Kevin explaining that he had been John Africa’s codefendant in the federal trial. I wasn’t super well versed in MOVE’s history, but I knew the general outline. What kept reaching me, internally, was what Au had said earlier: “This is my political family.”
Because they were treating me that way.
I had felt utterly alone when I first moved my few boxes up the stairs in my rented room in West Philly. Suddenly, my phone had so many numbers in it of MOVE people, who were genuinely available to me and kind. I called them. I wanted to know them. Their experiences were so far from mine and I wanted to learn.
I threw myself into organizing work and integrating into this new community. I had been planning to return to Mount Holyoke for my senior year. Late in the summer, in the heat of the MOVE custody battle, I decided to officially withdraw. I never returned nor graduated.
While internally, I was deeply shaken as college is my family’s religion, MOVE people congratulated me. I remember Ria especially began taking an interest in me and drawing me under her wing. I really wanted to learn how to become an anti-racist ally. That was especially important to me. I had close friendships with Black women in college and often inadvertently hurt them due to my ignorance and lack of awareness. I wanted to learn how to be in community and do better. I saw Ria, a white woman, living in a house with primarily Black people, who had served in prison alongside them and suffered together, as an example of how to become a better human in a white body. As she drew me closer, I looked to her as a mentor.
As she and I talked more she would share about her own struggles as a young woman, which closely mirrored the confusion and alienation that I was facing. She helped me sort out a lot of what I was feeling and explained that John Africa had done the same for her. At the time, I thought she was my friend and this was a type of mentorship. I began trying to help her, both in offering donations from my meager waitress wages and in taking her to do errands or sending money to the political prisoners.
Looking at it now, I see I was being groomed as she had been groomed to enter into a cult.
There were red flags. The custody battle didn’t make sense to me but I accepted what I was told that Alberta, a Black woman, was being victimized by John, a white man. I didn’t see Pixie (June) much at that time, but I do remember one time being picked up and seeing her in the back of the van— a young, shy, very quiet, pregnant 12-year-old girl. I remember activists debating her young pregnancy at the time but what I heard from them-- these adults who had known her since she was born-- was whether or not she should get an abortion. I don’t remember any of them questioning if she was being harmed. Nor asking her what was happening and how she felt.
I remember the implied terms were that activists either: support her mother, Pam, by extension support MOVE, and condone/ignore June’s young pregnancy OR condone state violence.
It’s not much of a choice.
It’s the same straw man crafted today. Any criticism of MOVE, no matter how warranted, is seen as buttressing the state’s attacks. Kevin and I are accused of enabling state violence for speaking out on behalf of MOVE survivors. In my experience, activist self-censorship, coercion, denial, and avoidance went back to the absolute beginning.
I was bewildered by it all. And there was so much momentum and energy.
Even in the midst of what felt troubling-- I became aware that MOVE was both homophobic and against abortion (at least officially). Like Pam said in her recent Facebook statement, at that time, I thought that these issues would be sorted as we moved collectively towards revolution. I felt the choice of either confronting MOVE, and likely being estranged, or hoping that in working alongside one another these views would be reformed. The latter felt more strategic to me, but it began to be an excuse and justification.
Like Kevin wrote, even as my own views and even politics evolved, the hook was the relationships. As Kevin and I met issues in our marriage because we felt differently-- and were manipulated-- we were both still deeply connected to this community of people.
I helped Whit learn to drive and spent time with her kids. Later, I tutored them for a few months. I went on prison visits. I remember being really excited when I was in the car with Mike because he was always so silly and singing loudly with the radio. Kevin and I traveled with Ramona to Spain to go on a speaking tour throughout the north of the country. It felt like we were doing really important work.
When I was in Cuba, I tried to figure out what the political work was. I felt that MOVE had answered that question: it was relationships. I felt like by forming relationships and community, we were helping each other heal. As MOVE said, it was the revolution of self. I believed that would fortify ourselves for larger struggles with the state. I found myself having more strength and endurance. I was physically more capable but also less spooked when things happened like being arrested for flyering about Mumia’s case on South Street. I felt like I was becoming more of an anti-racist ally to the Black people in my life, who I love.
As I saw more and more that troubled me in MOVE, I didn’t know how to reconcile that. I didn’t want to do anything that would support a racist state. I didn’t want to justify any racist beliefs.
Over time, especially as I learned what had happened and was happening to Black children, I couldn’t passively stand by. I couldn’t knowingly turn a blind eye to Black women to be forced into marriages and pregnancies. I couldn’t know what was happening to these people and pretend it away, based on political theory, despite the reality.
This has been the hardest season of my life, but I’m fortified imagining a future where I get to witness June, Josh, Whit, Salina, Sara, Maria, and many others live self-determined lives beyond MOVE.
Maiga Milbourne was a dedicated MOVE supporter from 2002-2018. She distanced herself from the group as she began to note troubling patterns within MOVE. In 2021, June Stokes AKA Pixie Africa disclosed severe abuse suffered within MOVE. Together with Maiga’s husband Kevin Price, “Murder at Ryan’s Run” podcast producer Beth McNamara, podcast researcher Bob Helms, and former MOVE members Josh and Whit Robbins, a plan was crafted where June publicly left MOVE with her 5 children and went into hiding. Publicity from both the podcast and this blog has been used to keep her and her children safe.
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