From 1985: Living with MOVE - endless trauma

This story was originally published on May 10, 1985.

Lucille Green is not someone inclined to attend protest meetings. She has a serious heart condition and moves very slowly, and she knows that excitement could easily bring on another heart attack.

Yet on Wednesday night, the 62-year-old Green was at the Cobbs Creek recreation center for a meeting of the United Residents of the 6200 Block of Osage Avenue - the group now engaged in a high-stakes battle to have the notorious MOVE driven from its street. Things have gotten so tense on her block, so upsetting, that even she decided to go that night.

But she wasn’t able to stay for long. Thirty minutes into the meeting, another neighbor ran into the room with a breathless report that a MOVE car had blockaded the street, and the group exploded.

People began to shriek. Several women trembled and cried. Others bolted

from the room, sprinting the three blocks back to Osage.

And in the midst of all this, Lucille Green began gasping for breath. She stretched her neck high, as if reaching for air. Then her eyes closed and she slumped down on a chair.

By yesterday morning, Green was resting comfortably in Lankenau Hospital, recovering, the hospital said, from a serious aggravation of her heart condition. And also by yesterday morning, the word had spread throughout the 6200 block of Osage Avenue: MOVE had struck again.

It didn’t really matter that MOVE had actually not been blockading the street, that a MOVE car had simply stopped in front of its rowhouse at 6221 to unload a shipment of food. It didn’t matter, because after four years of living with the MOVE group on their block, many of the Osage Avenue residents are so traumatized that the slightest suggestion of trouble can, and often will, in fact, become trouble.

“For going on 14 months now, I’ve been walking the floors every night, can’t hardly get a wink of sleep because of MOVE,” said Lucille Green’s husband, Chastine. The couple lives two doors away from the MOVE house. ‘’You really start to feel you’re going crazy yourself."

“We’ve lived through so much - though the bullhorns blaring into the night, the stench, the MOVE people jogging on people’s roofs - that people’s nerves are just shot,” said Howard Nichols, a former Marine and free-lance writer who has become a leader of the neighbors. “We’ve got a lot of old people here, sick people, and what they’ve had to put up with is disgusting.”

What the roughly 50 families on the 6200 block of Osage have endured for the last four years is, indeed, unique - in many ways even more intense than what the neighbors of the original MOVE house at 33d and Powelton Avenue lived with. (The MOVE philosophy, which originated in the early 1960s, emphasizes primitive living and a hostility toward current social structures.)

The first house was detached, and in a neighborhood of relatively large houses on their own yards. But this block is one of rowhouses, where people live more closely together and where the rules of good neighborliness are of utmost importance - especially since this block of teachers, nurses, janitors and police officers has worked hard to enter the middle class.

Yet MOVE has flouted all the rules, doing everything from letting their several dozen cats roam the neighborhood to fighting with neighbors and patrolling their bunkered roof with shotguns.

And perhaps most appalling and aggravating to the people of Osage Avenue is that so far the MOVE members have gotten away with it.

The first MOVE followers living on the 6200 block of Osage were children, many of them the sons and daughters of the MOVE members jailed after the 1978 shoot-out at the first house in Powelton Village.

About four years ago, they moved in with a longtime block resident named Louise James, who happened to be the sister of John Africa, formerly known as John Leaphart, the founder of MOVE.

According to neighbors, Louise James, who around the time the children arrived became a MOVE member herself and took the name Louise Africa, was apparently in sole charge of all the children living in the house. Yet she was also working at the time, neighbors say, and so the children often roamed the streets unattended all day.

“They would rummage through the garbage, looking for things to eat,” said neighbor Darlene Smith. “Some people on the block took pity on them, gave them food and clothes. Once they broke into someone’s garage and took some Christmas lights. They wore them like jewelry, like they’d never seen them before.”

There were problems on the block as early as three years ago, as more MOVE adults - in addition to dozens of stray cats - started living in the house, but residents say they were asked by a variety of officials to keep a low profile.

According to Nichols, they were even promised by a local politician that MOVE would be off the block soon if only the residents said nothing about the situation during the 1983 mayoral race. “The man said the whole MOVE thing could hurt Goode, and our chances to get a black mayor,” he said.

The neighborhood’s annoyance turned to serious anger early last year, when MOVE members - believed to number about 10 children and about five adults - began building onto their house and becoming more strident. (Around this time, neighbors say, Louise James Africa was seen fleeing from her house, followed by several MOVE people swinging two-by-fours.)

First they built a kennel for the stray animals, a ramshackle structure that was built across the back alley so that neighbors could no longer drive their cars through it. Then there were the wooden slats hammered across the front of the house, from top to bottom. And then the bullhorns - as big as those used in stadiums, according to neighbors - that were installed on the roof, along with an ever-expanding wooden bunker.

“When people asked them why they were doing all this, asked them to stop, they would get cussed at and worse,” said Nichols. “And then the harangues started.”

For much of last summer, neighbors say, MOVE members were on the bullhorns for five, six, 10 hours a day, broadcasting at a volume that left them absolutely no place to hide.

“They would talk nonsense, all about John Africa and how we were ignorant for not following him,” said another neighbor, retired janitor and painter Earl Watkins. “It would be one profanity after another, with threats against us and everything.”

At one point, a woman who lives three doors from the MOVE house was singled out by name by MOVE because some police officers and sheriffs were seen going into her house. For several days, the whole neighborhood was regaled with stories of how this woman, who was at home caring for her invalid husband, was a thief, a drug addict, and the molester of young neighborhood children.

When neighbors called City Hall to complain, they were told there was nothing city officials could do. It was only at the end of the summer, when MOVE members say they had gotten their message across, that the bullhorns fell silent.

Residents also learned then that their block had been singled out for unusual police treatment - it was city policy not to send uniformed police officers onto their block. Any call to 911 believed to be MOVE-related had to go first to the Police Department’s civil affairs unit.

Even with all this - with the stench coming from 6221 in the warm weather, the fact that their homes were quickly losing most of their value, with the constant fear that the bullhorns would be turned on again - the block probably would not have made its battle public had it not been for the beating of Bennett Walker.

According to several neighbors who witnessed the incident, Walker was washing his car in front of his house in February when several MOVE members pulled up to their nearby house. The MOVE people began to unload and cut the wood in their van, and the sawdust was getting all over Walker’s car.

Walker, who had grown up on the street and whose father was a police officer, asked the MOVE members to stop their sawing until he finished washing his car. Immediately, neighbors say, he was attacked by several MOVE people, and was beaten to the ground.

“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Nichols. “That was when we realized we had to really band together and push them out of the neighborhood. And by then, we were totally disillusioned with the city and Mayor Goode, who had none nothing for us. So we went public with our problem. Maybe now something will be done.”

Theresa Africa was in front of the MOVE house yesterday cleaning the stoop and smiling.

She communicated the kind of peaceful, responsible image that MOVE has been trying to present on Osage Avenue for some time now. Theresa Africa could not speak for the group, however, and so the current minister of information, Ramona Africa, was called to speak with a reporter.

On the one hand, Ramona Africa explained, MOVE is being unjustly accused of doing things that were never done.

“People in the neighborhood are being misled by a group of bad people, people who are keeping them upset and against us,” she said. “Many of the people here support us.”

But on the other hand, she said that the conflict on the block was inevitable, even desirable.

“We are justified in doing whatever is necessary to get our innocent brothers and sisters out of jail,” she said, referring to the nine MOVE followers who were convicted of killing a police officer during the 1978 shoot-out.

This story was originally published on May 20, 1985