The MOVE document posted in full below begins: “On the Move, To all the nuclear resisters, environmentalists, animal rights rebels, Earth liberators and freedom fighters for all of Life.
We of MOVE want to commend you for the extraordinary work you are doing for Life.
I’ve gotten your newsletters and news magazines but don’t always respond to every issue; with the world-wide correspondence it is almost impossible to respond to everybody individually and maintain any regular schedule.
The stand you are taking against this system for the enslaving, torture of animals; uprooting, raping of the Earth; the stand against nuclear tech and environmental danger is right to take and has not gone unnoticed. The dedication you are showing in your effort to protect Life is not in vain and is not taken for granted. This work is urgently important! This system is not taking your work lightly. You are making a difference.”
I’ll post the entire document here and I'll continue offering commentary after the document.
Reading over this document again I have to admit it still has some power over me. I can remember exactly how I felt as I read it while going through a stack of fliers as I was just beginning to do Friends of MOVE (the MOVE supporter network) work in late 1997. I wasn’t a true believer yet, but this particular document electrified me and I was well on my way. This was a letter from Debbie Africa of the MOVE 9 in response to many of the Earth liberation and animal rights groups that were doing work in solidarity with MOVE. I likely copied this letter many thousands of times and placed it on the card table I kept in my trunk as I tabled at punk rock shows, demonstrations, and just about any event where I was allowed to set up. Copies of this letter were often sitting next to threefold leaflets for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, the MOVE 9, fliers against the sanctions on Iraq, in support of the Zapatistas, or advertising meal sharings with Food Not Bombs.
I don’t know why this particular letter from Debbie grabbed me so specifically. I’ve been thinking about it lately, because since yesterday’s post, "M-1 and the Many Faces of MOVE," a few people have asked me what could have possibly attracted me to MOVE in the first place. For people who weren’t in the movement at that time and never heard Ramona speak, or received one of her hugs, or marched behind Pam and felt the force of her energy it may be difficult to understand if all one has read is this blog. I pose this letter from Debbie as a counter to the letter from Ramona to Steven Spielberg that I featured yesterday. After all, people who MOVE is trying to attract would never receive a letter like that one.
I’m also trying to be careful not to caricature MOVE. Much of the subject matter of this blog covers very disturbing things about MOVE; dangerous patterns of cult control that I’m convinced stretch all the way to MOVE’s foundation. But it’s important to understand that that’s not what attracts people to MOVE. I was attracted to MOVE largely due to the spirit of this letter. Mumia’s writings initially made me fall in love with the idea of MOVE, but it was the unifying spirit of this letter that best summarizes what made MOVE feel so different from so many other organizations. I think it was also important that I was doing MOVE support work for more than three years from out of state before I moved to Philly. I had three years to fall in love with an idea in the same way that I had projected so much onto the idea of John Africa, a man who it was impossible I would ever meet.
When I encountered MOVE I had been making my way into radical and anarchist politics by way of punk rock for a bit over a year. When I get interested in things I tend to go very deep very quickly and I read histories of the Black Panther Party, issues of the Earth First Journal, read “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” and learned of the American Indian Movement all before encountering MOVE. I was also interested in animal rights and environmentalism. I had recently gone vegetarian and fantasized about moving out west to do tree-sits with Earth First! when I finished high school.
However, I felt discouraged by how at odds so many of these struggles seemed. Much of what I read in activist circles involved a great deal of in-fighting and competition amongst issues. The unity that MOVE spoke about really resonated with me. That was one of the key things that drew me in. I was also raised Catholic and was frustrated with how institutional religion allied itself with the powerful instead of the oppressed. At the time I espoused anarchist politics and had been claiming to be an atheist for some years, but I've always had a drive towards the theological, and the fact that MOVE had its own theology and philosophy was appealing to me. I wanted a philosophical system to dig into, but something that was embodied, earthy, could be applied in my daily life. Anarchism and much of the political left felt like it had an imbalance toward the merely intellectual and I wanted an idea I could live inside (yes, I’m aware that I just described an ideal cult member).
Over the years I’ve paid close attention to people’s stories about what drew them into MOVE. In the late 90s, there were many middle-class white supporters like myself who were often drawn in through the Mumia movement and most of their experiences were similar to my own. For many of the, predominantly but not exclusively, Black supporters and members who were drawn into MOVE in the late '70s it was May 20th of 1977, the famous “Guns on the Porch Day” that made such an impression.
On May 20th, 1977, MOVE armed themselves with rifles, and handguns in holsters, and stood on a platform, and walked up and down the block, in front of MOVE headquarters at 33rd and Powelton to protest the vicious brutality and racism of Mayor Frank Rizzo’s police force. The image of MOVE men and women taking up arms and challenging the well-documented brutality of Rizzo's police is incredibly powerful. That stand taken by MOVE was absolutely brilliant and served to galvanize many around MOVE who were justly challenging Mayor Rizzo’s racist police. The strong image of MOVE on the platform was something to rally behind. It is almost a reversal of the humiliating image captured when Rizzo, as police commissioner, raided the Philadelphia Black Panther offices and forced young Panther men to strip naked in front of the media (before beating them away from the media) in August of 1970.
All of these things that have drawn so many of us to MOVE have tremendous power because they're tied to causes that are just. For most Black Philadelphians in the 1970s, a militant stand against Rizzo was understandable and righteous. The cause that MOVE had allied itself with by taking such a public stand was just. When I first viewed those images in “20 Years on the MOVE” I was inspired and impressed. I wanted to be so brave as to be able to face down an unjust, and racist police force. The other causes that MOVE had allied themselves with, which are mentioned specifically in Debbie’s letter, also still resonate with me. However, I now understand that the stand that MOVE took on May 20th, 1977 was based on many claims that are in need of some serious reevaluation. Though they were tapping into a just cause, and a cause that already had a great deal of force and energy behind it, I don't believe that the stated goals of the May 20th demonstration, the goals that so many rallied behind, actually had much to do with John Africa's strategy, but much of that will have to wait for later posts.
When one is criticizing MOVE it's easy to be mistaken for criticizing the causes and struggles that MOVE has allied itself with, and that is absolutely not what I am attempting to do with this blog, or what any of the survivors who are speaking out are attempting to do (I expand on some of these points further here and here). One of the major points we've been trying to make is that MOVE has used revolutionary politics, environmentalism, and animal rights as a front and that none of those things are actually the purpose of MOVE.
This gets emotionally complicated for a number of reasons, one of which is that many people, myself included, have had some of the most emotionally meaningful experiences of their life with MOVE. I remember when Maiga and I went on a speaking tour with Ramona Africa in Spain in 2005, there were people who cried while talking to Mona or hearing her speak every day. I know firsthand that her presence, attention, and warmth were remarkable in those situations. I’ve heard from people who left MOVE long ago that sitting in the presence of John Africa could be an awe-inspiring thing, there was just something about him. So how do we hold all of those things at the same time?
This is where I find looking at MOVE through the lens of a cult to be the most effective lens to understand how all of these things come together. Within cults, most people join to serve the just mission that the group is supposedly founded around. Most people who enter these groups are good people who want to make a better world. When Ramona Africa is doing the things that people love her for, I believe that is a very real aspect of Ramona. However, cults also split people. When you're in a group like MOVE the pattern that runs throughout the group, the actual purpose of the group, will have its way. Members will eventually bend to the will of the pattern or they will leave, but there’s not usually an easy way out. That’s why we see such stark opposition between the public face of MOVE, letters like Debbie’s, and the private threats of MOVE, like Ramona’s letter to Steven Spielberg.
While the inspiring Millions for Mumia demonstration was happening in Philly on April 24th of 1999, the war of character assassination and intimidation was happening against John Gilbride and his family at the same time. At the same time that MOVE was taking the public stand on May 20th, 1977 there were kids in that house who were malnourished and abused. There is so much more below the surface that we still need to explore, and there are so many stories that still need to be told. That’s why when we wrote our group statement we felt the need to call on older MOVE members to tell the whole truth about MOVE’s past. That’s why we also felt the need to call out certain MOVE members who know the real history of MOVE and yet continued to try to rebrand MOVE to build their own platform. In order to honor the victims and ensure that the patterns of abuse end, it’s important to reveal all that has been hidden behind the positive faces of MOVE. If someone wants to take all of those positive causes that MOVE has claimed to represent and build a new platform that's transparent and doesn’t romanticize a history that involves so much abuse and suffering, more power to them.
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