Last night I started writing about the potential negative political ramifications of publicly discussing the corruption within MOVE. Many have expressed justifiable concern that the truth coming out about MOVE could cause larger blowback for other liberation struggles, and could embolden racists. I share those concerns, and that is not the goal of anyone who participated in this blog or in the podcast “Murder at Ryan’s Run”. In the piece I was attempting to write, and will likely finish soon, I was acknowledging all of these potential effects while arguing that survivors must be heard, acknowledged, and supported while being given space and resources to heal. Within MOVE revolutionary politics have been used as a smokescreen for the abuse of children, financial corruption, and quite possibly murder. Any political blowback as a result of the truth coming out rests at the feet of MOVE leadership and not their victims.
This is a difficult conversation to have publicly for many reasons, but primarily because MOVE looks completely different depending on where you’re viewing it from. To outsiders, MOVE appears to be a Black Liberation group or at least a revolutionary organization with concern for oppressed peoples. For many born into MOVE, MOVE is their captor. Pixie and many other MOVE survivors have described their years living at MOVE headquarters at 4504 Kingsessing Ave. as their years in prison, with Ria and Bert serving as the judge, the jury, and the prison guards.
For those who have viewed MOVE as a force of liberation, today’s episode of “Murder at Ryan’s Run”, “This is Maria” will come as a shock. As you listen to the brave voice of former MOVE member, Maria Hardy, you will hopefully gain a better understanding of why so many of us who were more deeply involved in MOVE don’t want to reform MOVE but want to expose and dismantle it. As one moves from the edges of MOVE towards its center everything flips. What looked like a revolutionary group led by Pam and Ramona Africa spirals into an insular cult led by a white woman (Ria/Sue) and a Black woman (Alberta) who does not like Black people and often identifies herself as white.
In today’s episode, Maria explains that race politics within MOVE are the exact opposite of what they appear at first glance. I know that this is going to be very difficult for people who have supported MOVE politically to accept. When I became obsessed with MOVE as a teenager it was right on the heels of reading Huey P. Newton’s “To Die for the People”. I wanted to join or support a revolutionary organization that was working for racial justice from a revolutionary perspective. Years later I remember sitting in the living room at MOVE headquarters and hearing Alberta explain how biracial people are weaker because the races should be kept pure, and that African people (at the time she was speaking of the AIDS crisis) are suffering because man’s first “violation” (the MOVE word for sin) was committed by Africans and thus any bad things that have happened to African people, or people of African descent (including slavery) was a justifiable effect of man’s violations against Momma Nature (God).
As I heard these things for the first time my head was spinning. It made no sense for the leader of a group who espouses liberatory politics publicly to have beliefs like this behind closed doors. I did the best I could to lean into the revolutionary politics of Pam Africa and away from the inner circle rhetoric of Alberta. From my perspective now I can see that nothing in MOVE means what it appears to mean at first glance. The politics or the beliefs are not the point. The point is control.
The revolutionary politics espoused externally are an effective means of gaining political support. This support forms a protective shield around the group composed of well-intentioned people seeking to protect a Black revolutionary organization from police repression. The politics and beliefs around race inside the group divide light-skinned and dark-skinned children from one another and make internal control easier to manage. As more brave people like Maria continue to come forward the curtain will continue to be pulled back, and, hopefully, the control mechanisms will no longer be effective.
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