From 1995: 10 years after MOVE bombing, a quieter group is no less angry

This story was originally published on May 7, 1995.

Ten years after a siege, bombing and fire leveled its compound on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, MOVE is older, wealthier and far quieter.

Its new headquarters on Kingsessing Avenue apparently has a washing machine, a refrigerator and a TV. Trash cans are put out neatly at the curb. Neighbors discreetly watch as MOVE members shop at the local supermarket or buy a Tastykake Krimpet at a corner sandwich shop.

MOVE members fairly regularly show up for meetings of the Kingsessing Avenue block association. Just last month, Sue Africa and Alphonso Africa attended a meeting to complain about fleas in the unkempt yard next door.

That’s not to say MOVE is a picture of unbridled domesticity. The rhetoric still scorches. Its members swear they remain unyielding about the group’s core demand: freedom for nine fellow MOVE members convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer in 1978. Their earliest release date is now 2008.

Its members have been hardened by long jail terms. Two recently freed from prison are mothers who lost children 10 years ago in the city bombing and siege.

One is Consuewella Africa, who lost her two daughters, Katricia, 13, and Zanetta, 13, on Osage Avenue while she was serving 16 years in prison on a MOVE-related charge.“

We feel bitter, angry,” said Consuewella, 42. “We feel pain. But don’t misunderstand me - we’re not beat. We’re very strong.“

When I went to prison in 1978, I had two daughters. When I came out in 1994, I didn’t have them. They were murdered. Why isn’t anybody getting upset about that, getting outraged about that, questioning that?”

With her was Ramona Africa, 39, thick burn scars from the 1985 fire visible on both arms under the sleeves of her green T-shirt. Ramona’s voice grows sharp and loud when asked if MOVE’s efforts will remain within the law.“

We’re going to do whatever we gotta do to bring our family home,” she said. “We are in a defensive mode. We will defend ourselves. We didn’t start this. We didn’t lock up innocent MOVE people. We didn’t bomb innocent MOVE babies. The government did that. When are people going to stop blaming the victim?”

While the outrage may not have dimmed, the group’s profile has. The organization that was almost constantly in the news from before the 1978 Powelton shootout that left Police Officer James Ramp dead to the 1985 Osage Avenue disaster rarely makes headlines now.

“I think the heart, the kind of messianic drive, is gone from the group,” said playwright Thomas Gibbons, who was granted unusual access to MOVE while researching his 1993 drama, 6221, which was named after the address of the gunport-equipped Osage Avenue compound.“

They don’t really seem interested in winning the public over to them anymore,” Gibbons said. “They were interested in that for a while, and it hasn’t done much good. They are greeted with more indifference then sympathy.”

With one worrisome exception last summer, there have been no loudspeaker tirades or disturbances on the streets that are home for MOVE.

None of the four MOVE-related houses - both halves of a Victorian twin on Kingsessing and single rowhouses on Catharine Street in West Philadelphia and 56th Street in Southwest Philadelphia - appears to be barricaded. And neighbors on all three streets report that MOVE has fit in rather unobtrusively.“

I am concerned about the future of the block and the future of MOVE,” said Fran Opher, the vigilant block captain on Kingsessing Avenue. But “they certainly have proved to be good neighbors.”

Opher and her neighbors have had scares since MOVE bought the Victorian twins in 1991 for $265,000 in cash. The money came out of the $2.5 million the city paid MOVE parents to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of the six children who died in 1985.

One such scare came two years ago when MOVE hung wooden shutters on its upstairs windows on the Kingsessing Victorian and closed up the windows overnight. But worries eased when the shutters were opened. They have stayed open since.

A more disturbing event took place last July 9, when two sisters, Louise James and LaVerne Sims, stood outside the MOVE property and staged a loud protest, demanding that Sims’ 15-year-old pregnant granddaughter move out, neighbors say. The pair - who have a mixed history of being both supporters and antagonists of MOVE - were met with a refusal by the girl, whose mother is one of the nine jailed MOVE members. (James and Sims are the sisters of slain MOVE founder John Africa.)

What sent a shiver of fear through neighbors was the response of MOVE member Alphonso Africa, 46, who emerged with a bullhorn to yell back.

The bullhorn brought back fears of Osage Avenue, where the police assault was preceded by loud harangues by MOVE from loudspeakers.

Alarmed by the protest, Opher called the local police district for help. Her plea was dismissed with the advice, “Call 911.” So much for the city’s promise, after MOVE had set up its main residence on Kingsessing, to pay special attention in assisting the block.

After the protest ended, Sue Africa, 45, one of the few white members of MOVE, went door to door on the block. “She wanted us to know that it wasn’t MOVE’s fault,” said Opher.

MOVE is now a group of about 20 people, most of them female. It is not recruiting, and its members’ histories generally date to the group that formed around John Africa in the early 1970s. Africa’s body was found headless in the rubble of the bombed Osage compound, one of 11 adults and children killed in the disaster.

What small growth there has been is from the absorption of young people who are relatives and the arrival of a handful of members as they are released from prison.

The group’s leader remains Ramona Africa, the only adult MOVE member to escape after the Osage Avenue bombing. Operating out of the group’s home at 45th and Kingsessing, she is the center of MOVE’s legal and publicity efforts.

Since being released from prison in 1992, she has become a darling of the academic left. As MOVE’s “minister of information,” she has traveled to campuses from New Jersey to California, telling MOVE’s story of victimization.

On April 12, for instance, she spoke in Boston to students of Harvard University and Radcliffe College. She requested and received $1,500 for the talk from a Radcliffe-financed student group.

“It went really well,” said Faith Adiele, the college administrator who oversees the speaking program. “We were happy there were a lot of people from the community, which is rare for a Harvard event.”

At home, Ramona has been pursuing her epic legal fight with the city over the MOVE siege. Although former Mayor W. Wilson Goode and all other officials involved in the debacle have been granted immunity, her suit against the City of Philadelphia is still alive and may one day result in a trial sure to garner much publicity. So far, taxpayers have paid $400,000 to private lawyers hired to represent the 10 former officials and police sued by Ramona Africa and others.

Always, Ramona returns to MOVE’s demand that authorities release its ‘’innocent family members" - the five men and four women convicted of killing Officer Ramp, 52.

It was the city and neighborhood reaction to protests over those convictions that led to the Osage Avenue disaster.

In a switch for the organization, eight of the nine MOVE members have recently hired an attorney, Paul J. Hetznecker, to pursue their last-ditch appeals, dropping a previous plan to be their own lawyers.

Although he said he was still researching the case, Hetznecker said recently that evidence would show that it had been unfair to link all nine MOVE members to a common conspiracy to kill police. “It was a travesty,” Hetznecker said.

Any outcome to MOVE’s appeals is months, if not years, away.

In the meantime, with its prophet slain, its membership frozen, its rhetoric a 1960s throwback and its energies fixated on long unresolved grievances, MOVE seems stuck in an earlier time.

Gibbons, the playwright, put it best. “They have a quality,” he said, ‘’of being relics."

This story was originally published on May 7, 1995