Nearly 40 years after Philadelphia dropped a bomb on its citizens, Mike Africa Jr. wants to preserve MOVE’s legacy

It’s easy to assume Mike Africa Jr.’s MOVE days are completely behind him when walking through his manicured backyard, past his five-foot aboveground pool, and into the state-of-the-art podcast studio behind his Clifton Heights home.

His studio lights are so dope they impress an Inquirer photographer. Seemingly, he’s come a long way from his childhood in Philadelphia’s infamous, antitechnology, back-to-nature, Black power organization.

But once you sit on one of Africa’s blue velvet chairs and get talking, his connection to MOVE comes sharply into focus.

A custom Seed of Wisdom license plate — back in the day, MOVE parents referred to their children as “seeds of wisdom” — is mounted behind his desk. Next to it is a poster from the 2020 documentary 40 Years a Prisoner, the HBO movie about Africa’s decadeslong mission to get his parents released from prison. Mike Africa Sr. and Debbie Africa were among the nine MOVE members convicted of third-degree murder for the 1978 shooting of Philadelphia Police Officer James J. Ramp.

Africa holds a copy of his new memoir, On a MOVE: Philadelphia’s Notorious Bombing and A Native Son’s Lifelong Battle for Justice. In the 285-page memoir, Africa, 45, mourns the death of friends and family who died on that horrific day in 1985 when Mayor Wilson Goode gave the Philadelphia Police Department the OK to drop C-4 explosives on 6221 Osage Ave., killing 11 people, destroying 61 homes, and displacing 250 mostly Black Philadelphians.

“MOVE is a part of Philadelphia history,” said Africa, his dreadlocks tied tightly under a black and white bandanna. Africa owns the rights to the MOVE organization and serves as its legacy director. “It’s a part of American history. It’s a part of Black history. Have you ever heard of a government dropping a bomb on a house and shooting 10,000 rounds of ammunition?”

In the 39 years since the MOVE bombing, there have been countless analyses of MOVE’s tyrannical, yet gentle, leader, John Africa, and scathing criticisms of the Philadelphia Police Department’s complete disregard for Black lives when it let the fire burn. Much has been written about the millions of dollars awarded to its victims and the mysterious 2002 murder of MOVE supporter John Gilbride. In 2021, several children of MOVE said they had been abused. A University of Pennsylvania’s anthropologist’s gross mishandling of the bomb victim’s remains made headlines.

With his coauthor, D. Watkins, Africa addresses all of these issues while speaking to the commune’s proclivity toward violence and how its squalor impacted the quality of life of the surrounding working-class Black neighborhood. He pays homage to MOVE’s noble mission of protecting all people, animals, and the environment, centering MOVE’s tangled family dynamics. Africa sees MOVE through a loving lens. At its most vulnerable, the memoir is about how orphaned children of incarcerated and murdered MOVE members were abandoned by the organization’s surviving adults and ostracized by Philadelphians — Black and white.

“This story has a lot of facets, a lot of purposes,” said Africa. “I want it to serve as a historical document. It’s also for up-and-coming revolutionaries so they don’t have rose-colored glasses on when it comes to MOVE.”

To fully understand MOVE, Africa said, you have to know his great-uncle John Africa — Vincent Lopez Leaphart, known to Mike Africa as Uncle Benny. John Africa’s mother died of pneumonia in the 1950s and he blamed his mother’s death on racism, believing she was treated poorly because she was Black. He was a soldier in the Korean War, where he was sickened by the death and bloodshed. When John Africa returned to Philadelphia in the late 1960s, he formed a group of revolutionaries and urged them to take the last name Africa.

The organization, which eventually came to be called MOVE, despised the trappings of modern life, especially technology. Members didn’t send their children to school; they hated hospitals — children were born at home — and ate raw food. By the early 1970s, there were several dozen members of MOVE, including John Africa’s sister, LaVerne Sims, and her daughter, Debbie, Mike Africa’s mother.

MOVE’s early 1970s profanity-laden protests against animals in cages at the Philadelphia Zoo and police brutality at City Hall rankled Mayor Frank Rizzo, who, Mike Africa writes, “was just as committed to his belief that Black people were inferior as Benny was to his belief that [people] like Rizzo needed to go down.” MOVE’s Powelton Village headquarters were surrounded by stray dogs, rats, and other vermin, much to the disgust of neighbors. The tension led to the 1978 showdown between the police and the MOVE 9 ending in the death of Officer Ramp.

Both of Mike Africa’s parents were jailed. Debbie Africa was eight months pregnant, and weeks later, Mike Africa Jr. was born in the Philadelphia House of Correction.

Mike Africa’s grandmother, LaVerne Sims, dropped the surname Africa to distance herself from MOVE, and took in Africa and his older sister, Whit. Still, Africa played with his cousins at MOVE’s new headquarters on Osage Avenue. The vermin and violence returned and the new neighbors were angry. When the bomb was dropped in 1985, Africa watched the smoke and fire that killed his cousins and Uncle Benny from four miles away. He was just 6 years old.

“I could have easily been there,” said Africa, who is a father of four. His voice dropping before it faded into a chilly silence.

Growing up with his grandmother in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Africa went to school, ate cooked food, and played video games. He cut his locks into a high-top fade and listened to rap — Will Smith remains one of his favorite artists. But when his schoolmates learned about his connection to MOVE, they teased him, goading him into fights.

“They used to say, ‘MOVE stood for Monkeys on Vines Everywhere,’” said Africa, bristling at the memory. “They were dehumanizing us. But we were children. We didn’t know what was going on. We weren’t committed to MOVE yet. We were just doing what the adults told us to do.”

Africa visited his parents in prison regularly. He wanted to learn about his family and history. The teasing and fighting eventually became too much for him, and at 13, and he dropped out of school and moved back into a MOVE house. By then the organization had received millions of dollars in settlements from the city and bought homes where other MOVE children were now living. Africa grew a new set of locks and returned to MOVE’s vigorous exercise regiment that included hundreds of push-ups a day and running up to 10 miles.

“I could begin to see the value of what MOVE offered its members and the community,” Africa said. “The missteps it had made in service of its mission, and also the deliberately grave injustices committed against it.”

As the Philly front man for MOVE, Africa advocated for the release of MOVE 9 members, connecting with the children of other Black revolutionaries like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King and Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz.

“We have experiences that no one else has,” Africa said. “Our parents were involved in things that were dangerous. Our neighbors saw us as weird. They picked on us. We had very uncomfortable childhoods. But at the same time, many of us are proud of what our parents did, what they were involved in.”

Africa’s work as a paid speaker and author has put him in close proximity with celebrities like John Legend and Questlove, with whom he collaborated on 40 Years a Prisoner. Africa was featured in Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God’s Summer of ’85, a podcast that explores the connection between the MOVE bombing and the Live Aid concert, when international rock royalty convened in Philly to raise money for victims of the Ethiopian famine.

He’s talked about building new relationships with his parents in PBS documentaries, and for a while, Africa hosted a podcast on the Oprah Network, where he chopped it up with the likes of Common. When it was suggested Africa not use the word bomb in reference to MOVE, he bowed out. It wasn’t authentic.

His efforts to recast MOVE have put him at odds with other MOVE children who say he’s exploiting memories for his own gain. He understands their pain, but will not abandon his mission. “The things the other MOVE kids were saying are true,” Africa said. “We went through the same things. We were hungry in the corner together trying to figure out how to get out of the situation together.”

In fact, it’s why Africa is adamant about telling his story now.

“I don’t want to romanticize the history of MOVE,” Africa said. “There are many things that MOVE shouldn’t have done and there are things that shouldn’t have been done to MOVE. But if you ask me how I feel about it, I love MOVE.”