Sunday, November 27, 2022

MOVE, Cults, and Stone Soup

In the 1960s and '70s, the number of destructive cults absolutely exploded. As I began the process of intellectually leaving MOVE in 2007, I studied the histories of other cults in order to try to locate my own experience so that I could find a path forward. Two things struck me in this study: the exponential explosion of such groups all during the same era and the almost cookie-cutter-like quality of the structure and beliefs of the groups.

Episode three of the second season of "Murder at Ryan's Run" provides valuable food for thought about both of these issues. It's a fascinating episode that revolves around an interview with Tim Hayes recounting his experiences with MOVE as a resident of Powelton Village in the early 1970s. Before moving to Philadelphia in his early 20s, Tim was already an accomplished activist. He'd become involved in the Civil Rights movement while in elementary school and would go on to found Atlanta's chapter of the Black Panther Party. Tim moved to Philadelphia in 1973 to settle down with his family and that's when he came to know Vincent Leaphart, the man who would soon be known to most as John Africa. 

Tim describes how as he came to know Leaphart, Leaphart would ask him questions about politics and history, and Tim's answers would come to shape some fundamental elements of MOVE's practices and culture. Tim recounts how one day he was getting off the bus and Leaphart saw him with a reggae record in his hands. Leaphart had never seen dreadlocks before and asked Tim about them. Dreadlocks soon became fundamental to MOVE's aesthetic and belief. This is reminiscent of Don Glassey's wife, JoAnne, recounting in Episode 2 that MOVE members took the last name Africa almost by accident. As MOVE supporters, we were always taught that MOVE members took the last name Africa because all of humanity is originally from Africa. However, JoAnne remembers that Leaphart initially intended for MOVE members to take the places of their ancestral homelands as their last names. So many of the things that we were taught were carefully envisioned by John Africa were actually based on the coincidental encounters of Leaphart. 

When Tim encountered Leaphart, Leaphart would lean in and stand a little too close when he asked a question. Once he had obtained the information he was seeking he would move on, and often incorporated that knowledge into the corpus of MOVE's belief. Though I became a MOVE supporter over a decade after Leaphart died in the fire on Osage Avenue, this behavior is intimately familiar to me. Ria and Bert created a false intimacy in the same way. They often extracted bits of information, knowledge of history, etc., and used them as weapons to keep the children who were born into MOVE in their place. I never knew why I was being asked what seemed like an off-the-wall question until I saw my answer being used against someone else later. 

Tim goes on to recall how, not long after these initial encounters, he began seeing Leaphart surrounded by young people who seemed to be accepting every word he said as gospel. As the number of MOVE members grew, Leaphart receded into the background, while his young disciples followed his every direction. Both episodes two and three of this season of "Murder at Ryan's Run" illuminate how haphazard the foundation of MOVE was. This again leads me back to the question of why so many groups like this were popping up in that era, and why their structures are so similar.

Hundreds of groups followed this exact pattern in the late '60s and early '70s. I've come to think of the founders of these groups as pathological versions of the beggar from the folk tale, Stone Soup. In the folk tale, a hungry beggar hikes into a town and begins regaling the townspeople with tales of his delicious stone soup. He tells them that he has the most important ingredient, the stone, and that he simply needs a few additional things from each of them. After all of the townspeople throw in their contributions they're all able to enjoy a hearty pot of soup together and the beggar is able to take his stone and move on to the next town. A relatively harmless deception brings the community together, and the beggar-- a trickster figure-- navigates a moral gray area for what could be argued is the greater good. 

In the destructive cult version of this story, a person decides that they have all of the answers to the world's problems. However, they can't fully reveal all of their secret knowledge until those around them pledge absolute loyalty. Once a few dozen people fully devote themselves to this savior, incredible things begin to happen; community projects are started, houses are renovated, communal bonds are formed, and it feels like the group is on the verge of something incredible. The idea that the group possesses the answers to all of the world's problems is the stone that allows everyone to come together and pour their gifts into the pot. Functionally, it doesn't even matter if the beliefs of the group haven't been fully articulated, so long as everyone believes that the leader has the answers. In this version of the story, the cult leader isn't able to continue along to the next town because this would cause their psychological pyramid scheme to come crashing down. The founder knows that if they stick around too long, their lack of real solutions will be laid bare. In order to prevent this they often steer the group towards self-destruction through direct confrontation with the system they've set themselves in opposition to. 

The 60s and 70s were fertile ground for this pattern to emerge because the cultural revolution of the late 1960s dramatically weakened faith in the institutions that had been holding things together; the family, patriotism, the church, etc. There were valid reasons for trust in these institutions to be eroded, but when the institutions were destabilized they left voids that were filled by people like Leaphart. Of course, destructive cults existed before this era, but not nearly to the same degree as they did after the cultural revolution. I don't think that a figure like Leaphart would have been given the time of day by many Philadelphians if he'd been putting forth the same ideas only twenty years earlier. 

That brings us to the second question of why these groups follow such similar forms. I believe that there are natural patterns in the human psyche and that when healthier ways of meeting these needs aren't available, cults can feel irresistible. I think about it like the rock candy experiment that many of us did in middle school; sugar is added to hot water and it's stirred vigorously, a string is placed in the center of the jar, and as the sugar water cools the sugar clings to the string in a consistent crystalline pattern. We all have similar needs and desires for safety, familial love, community, meaning, etc. When the larger social structures that used to provide for at least the base level of needs of the majority of the population break down, this is the rapid stirring of the sugar water. Figures like Leaphart become unstable strings that people can cling to when nothing larger and more stable is available. 

The interview with Tim, in episode three, and the interview with JoAnne, in episode two, demonstrate that MOVE had no fixed structure or plan. Leaphart was simply putting out feelers and going where he felt drawn. This process created an interesting hybridization of a diverse array of philosophies and religions, and this syncretic philosophy worked to draw followers. As Leaphart gained power he increasingly believed in his own divine mission and was blinded to his own inner demons. Once he came to believe that he was a perfect being he had to project any imbalance inside of himself out onto the outside world. He was blinded to his own capacity for evil. 

Cult leaders in Leaphart's position become intoxicated by the blind allegiance of their followers and begin believing that nothing they say could possibly be wrong. Their counter-cultural critique pushes back against social mores, often justifiably. But because they have lost sight of their own capacity for evil, they fall into the basest and darkest of human desires while claiming to challenge the status quo. In episode three, Tim discusses witnessing adult MOVE members force children to have sex with each other. His window looked directly into the yard of MOVE headquarters, and he is very sure of what he saw. Tim's account supports the claims made by many of the survivors who came forward last year. This sexual abuse, which is common within cults, is a good example of important social protections being disregarded with horrific results. 

Tim also discusses how Leaphart faded into the background once MOVE was fully established. Last summer I talked to an early MOVE member who said that they almost never saw Leaphart. Leaphart and Alberta had their own well-furnished apartment in Powelton village and they mainly kept to themselves.  There are many close supporters who were at MOVE headquarters regularly from the late '70s until 1985 but never met Leaphart. Some members only met him a few times. Leaphart was careful about who he allowed in his presence for extended periods of time. He had to ensure that those who spent the most time with him were the type of people who could justify his own inconsistencies while still believing that he was God. In my experience, the MOVE members who spent the most time directly with Leaphart are those who have the most clearly recognizable psychological issues. 

I appreciate the way that Tim points out that no matter how wrong MOVE was, nothing can ever justify the bombing on May 13th, 1985. He also points out that as a result of the horror of the bombing, everything else about MOVE, including the information on this blog and in "Murder at Ryan's Run," will always be a footnote. I've argued many times that what happened on May 13th is exactly what Leaphart intended to happen. On May 13th, Philadelphia officials played into Leaphart's apocalyptic vision, with tragic results. Leaphart predicted that the death and destruction on May 13th would help to trigger a global uprising that would eventually topple civilization and lead to an Edenic world. With this last move, Leaphart fulfilled the final pattern of most destructive cults. May 13th was Leaphart's way of ensuring that his name would live on and that he would not have to live up to his own self-created mythology. 

Vincent Leaphart/John Africa



Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Prayers for the Dead

 *Season two of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” began last week. Here are the first two episodes - Ep1 - Small But Deadly and Ep2 - Guidelines and Guns*

 From late June through October of 2021, I posted to this blog 73 times. In the last year, I've posted twice. I didn't intend for the dropoff to be so extreme, but it became difficult to hold it all in balance. When we launched this blog it felt like a matter of life and death. This week I listened to the first episode of season two of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” and the visceral feelings of immediacy and danger came rushing back to me. 


Towards the beginning of the episode, there’s a clip of a recording from early June of 2021, a few weeks before we began our public campaign. In the clip, June is laying out our plan; for me to release the first blog posts, for the first teasers of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” to be released, and for June and her kids to go into hiding while MOVE leadership was already disoriented by the onslaught of inside information about the group being released publicly. Those were difficult months, and we really didn’t know if things would end peacefully. We had significant concerns that June could be killed for publicly exposing MOVE, based on MOVE's leader, Alberta, telling her that this is what would happen if she ever told anyone the truth about her life.


The intensity of the situation, of trying to get enough information out there to protect the survivors who were coming forward, demanded all of our full attention. Once things settled a bit, it was difficult to continue to think about MOVE-related things while keeping the other areas of my life in balance. I was well aware of this danger going into this project, and it's something I worked hard to avoid. People who leave cults often develop a cult-like obsession with exposing the cult and getting justice. It's an understandable response, but one that often ensures that they will waste more years of their life fixated on the cult, rather than living their life in liberation from the group. 


In the second post I made to this blog, I wrote about how one of the purposes of the blog was to provide a first-hand account of what it's like to leave a cult, in the hope that it might be helpful to another person who finds themselves in that situation. Finding that balance is part of the process, even all these years later, so it seems worth at least mentioning that here. If I’m not careful, it's easy for my own obsessive tendencies to rise up and get the best of me, causing me to miss the things in my life that are most important. 


I regret that I didn’t prepare a blog post acknowledging the 20th anniversary of John Gilbride’s murder on September 26th, 2022. I intend to keep this site active in order to keep John’s memory alive, to acknowledge the experience of children who were abused within MOVE, and to work toward justice. The fact that John Gilbride's murder remains unsolved, and that the abuse of children in MOVE has still largely gone unacknowledged, provide valid reasons for me to want to continue to write. I’m hoping to begin posting occasionally again, so long as I can do it in a balanced fashion. I have no foreknowledge of what information will be released on this season of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” and I’d like to use this space to process that information, as well as to reflect on some other MOVE items that have been in the news since I was last writing regularly. 


Episode two of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” is mostly an interview with JoAnne, the woman MOVE’s co-founder, Donald Glassey, was married to at the time of MOVE’s formation. There’s a lot to comment on in her stories, but one of the things that stood out as I was listening was just how absurd much of MOVE’s history is, and how much coincidence and happenstance went into the making of a group that has led so many to destruction. As MOVE supporters, we were taught that everything Vincent Leaphart/John Africa did was strategic and brilliant. Hearing JoAnne reflect on how Leaphart originally wanted MOVE members to take on the last names of their countries of ancestral origin, and only later prescribed that all MOVE members should take the last name Africa, highlighted the degree to which he was just making it all up as he went along. 


Everything looks so different in hindsight, at the age of 39, than it did when I first encountered MOVE when I was 14. Hearing JoAnne talk about how Leaphart was 44 when he began MOVE with Glassey, who was 24 is a good example. As a young MOVE supporter, I viewed Leaphart as a wise old man. Now, as I imagine him, it seems so sad that a man in his mid-forties was spending all of his time with teenagers and people in their early 20s, LARPing at being a revolutionary while causing little but destruction. As a father now, reflecting on the ways the children were put in danger and used as props in order to advance an agenda aimed toward nihilistic chaos is more and more difficult to think about.

 

When I reflect on MOVE’s history my mind often toggles back and forth between seeing it as one of folly; the story of a man with charisma, and some degree of poetic genius, but without the wisdom to navigate the power he gained, or the story of a man who grew increasingly evil as those around him submitted their will to him. Hearing the first-hand accounts of the children raised in MOVE, some of the patterns are so diabolical that no other word but evil can describe them. The murder of John Gilbride, the deaths of the children on Osage, the suspicious deaths of other MOVE members, and the patterns of manipulation and control, all clearly support this interpretation. When I reflect on the leadership of Ria and Bert I feel the same duality. At times it seemed like the destruction that follows them is the product of incompetence and delusion. Much of the time I simply think of them as having been possessed by evil. Being certain that you alone possess all of the answers to all of the world's problems seems to open individuals to this path in ways that almost nothing else can.

 

One consistent feeling that arises as I reflect on MOVE’s history is that of grief. My wife, Maiga, and I have had our own experience of deep grief and loss this past summer. This, and the events that led to that loss, is one of the reasons for the radio silence from this blog. In working with grief, I've found nothing to be as helpful in feeling grounded and connected as offering prayers for the dead. Even before our personal loss this summer, I often found myself praying for peace for the soul of John Gilbride, or for the children who died on Osage Avenue. Lately, I even find myself offering prayers for the souls of those who were complicit, not in order to exonerate them, but in recognition that we’ve all been a part of a pattern much bigger than ourselves, and in the interest of healing as we continue to seek justice and reconciliation.


As I finish writing this first post in several months and begin attempting to reflect on these histories while keeping my balance, it feels appropriate to start out in this way; Delisha Orr, Zanetta Dotson, Katricia Dotson, Tomaso, Little Phil, John Gilbride, Life Africa, Vincent Leaphart, James Ramp, Conrad Hampton, Raymond Foster, Theresa Brooks, Rhonda Harris Ward, Frank James, Ted Williamson, William Whitney Smith, (and many more, known and unknown), eternal rest grant unto them…..

A sign at Eden Cemetery marking the resting place of some of the children who died on Osage Avenue in 1985.