By the 1980s, the number of radical political activist groups in America had begun to dwindle. Those who were most serious about change got more involved in things like lobbying, holding public office, and working in the educational system. Urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground might have been exciting to other radicals, but they largely scared mainstream America away from the Revolution. As African American people moved into the middle class and the mainstream, the Black Panthers and other Civil Rights and Black Power organizations began falling by the wayside. But there were some diehard, holdout groups that refused to go away. One was MOVE, a predominantly African American anarchist faction based in Philadelphia with several communal houses around the city. MOVE did not get along with their neighbors and the conflict ended in deadly violence, perpetrated by the police and the city government. Activist journalist Margot Harry in Attention, MOVE! This Is America! gives an account of the police’s acts against MOVE in a style that is both analytical and incendiary.
In Harry’s book, not much is said about MOVE’s history, beliefs, or practices. They started in the 1970s as a Black Power group, practiced communal living, vegetarianism, organic farming, and preached an ordinary message of ending racial inequality. They wore their hair in dreadlocks, each member changed their last name to “Africa”, and were led by an obscure man named John Africa. They had the outward appearance of a political cult, a perception reinforced by their unwillingness to socially engage with people outside their group. Although they had communal houses in several locations around Philadelphia, it was the one on the south side, located in an upwardly mobile African American middle class neighborhood, where the violent confrontation with the police occurred. Neighbors complained about them to the police because their yard was messy and vermin-infested due to the compost heaps the kept for growing their own organic food. Some neighbors made accusations of child abuse and neglect against MOVE because the four children living in the house were often seen wearing ragged clothes. The worst of it was that MOVE boarded up their windows, built a barracks on top of their roof, and set up a loudspeaker so they could give obnoxious sounding speeches, loaded with profanity, about armed revolution that the whole neighborhood could hear. Sometimes these amplified rants went on all night long. In short, they were bad neighbors and many feared they were planning some kind of violent confrontation with the government.
The conflict ended with the police fire bombing the MOVE house, killing all its members except for one child who escaped.
There are no spoilers in this story. Harry starts her book with the bombing of the MOVE house and most of the story isn’t linear. Most of this book is her investigation into how the government planned the attack, what happened during the day of the attack, and how the government responded to the public outcry that resulted. The whole issue started in 1978 when police raided a MOVE house in another part of the city. The result of the raid was humiliating to the police and Harry’s unproven claim is that the bombing, which happened in 1985, was a retaliatory attack for that humiliation. The whole story is complicated by the fact that the mayor of Philadelphia at that time was Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor who also organized the military-style assault on the MOVE house. The author tests Goode’s claims that the operation was poorly executed, the bombing was a mistake, he had no knowledge of the bombing when it happened, and he had not worked with the police in any way to plan an attack the group. She digs deeply into publicly accessible records to disprove all of these claims. Not only had the mayor lied about his role in organizing the action, but he had also been planning and preparing it with the police for over a year before the killings took place. She also digs deeply into why the local police force had access to military grade weapons, including bomb making materials, that were heavily restricted to anybody outside the armed forces.
Harry’s account of the police attack is just as harrowing as you can imagine. They raided the house before sunrise with snipers located all over the neighborhood. They used water hoses, tear gas, and explosives to drive MOVE out of their home. It is impossible to know why they decided to hide in the basement rather than come out, but one can conjecture that since the house was surrounded by cops with rifles pointed at them, they were probably afraid of getting killed. Such fears could later be justified since after the bombing, the house caught fire and the four children ran out the back door to escape, only to be shot dead by police in the back yard. Fortunately, one boy did survive the shooting and ultimately was the only survivor of the massacre. The fire then spread from the MOVE house, burning down 66 other homes in the neighborhood. And all this happened while the fire department was on the scene with firehoses ready to be used. The police later claimed that they were afraid of an armed confrontation with MOVE, but after looking through the wreckage, investigators found only four guns, not the arsenal they claimed would be there and certainly not enough fire power for eleven adults and four children to use against an army of police using military tactics and weapons.
Margot Harry can’t be accused of not taking her opponents’ positions into account. In fact, almost this whole book is an examination of their accounts and her dismantling of their excuses for the onslaught. If anything, Harry can be accused of not taking her own side into account, at least not to the extent that she could have. She says very little about MOVE as an organization. She doesn’t say much about who they are, their history, their beliefs, or their practices. That’s not to say she portrays them in a positive light either since she never holds back in saying that they were not the kind of people you would want to live next door to. A more complete explanation of MOVE would have done more to make this book more rounded and probably would have made it more gripping as a story too. But her intention in writing this was to prove the government’s role in the injustice and that is something she accomplishes with ease.
So MOVE were bad neighbors. There is no death penalty for being a bad neighbor. Even if there was, the members of MOVE still have a Constitutional right to due process of law. Their neighbors should not have had their houses burned down. And no matter what crimes the adults in MOVE might have committed, there is no justifiable reason for murdering three of their children when they tried to escape the burning house. Even worse, there are so many other non-violent ways the police could have gotten MOVE to vacate their home. Negotiation with them was never even considered. In the end, nobody from the police or the government who were involved in the attack were found guilty of any crimes and many of them even claimed to be proud of what they did. If you can read Attention, MOVE! This Is America! Without getting angry, then obviously there is something wrong with you.
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