On A Move: Philadelphia’s Notorious Bombing and a Native Son’s Lifelong Battle for Justice. Mike Africa Jr. with D. Watkins. New York: Mariner Books. 287 pp. $32.50.
Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader. Edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black. San Francisco: City Lights. Open Media Series. 457 pp. $24.95.
Reviewed By Todd Steven Burroughs
The symbolically permanent ash around Osage Avenue has made it what it has been for nearly 40 years—the most American of addresses. A private space containing a small, insular world, it was destroyed in the late 20th century by one of the 13 colonies cloaked in the symbolism of the Old and New testaments, water followed by fire. Nothing less could propel the MOVE Organization into the international public consciousness.
The encyclopedic facts recited about MOVE—radical Black-led group of back-to-nature adherents who were jailed and bombed by the Philadelphia authorities—are always tinged with implicit criticism: too loud, too profane, too extreme, too cultish. In this insider account, Mike Africa Jr.—born into the Family Africa but spends much of his life weaving in and out of the organization, depending on family circumstances—symbolically steps onto the famous wooden MOVE platform and explains most, if not all, of the hows and whys. It’s the tale of a prophet, born of humble means, who comes out of nowhere into the public spotlight, gathers a group of zealous followers, makes a definitive mark on society, and then dies a dramatic death that prevents him from establishing a promised land of his own creation, leaving his people to wander, worship and fight with and betray each other. But it’s also a great story of found family.
Like many a counter-culture social and political collective in the 1960s and ‘70s, MOVE believed in confrontation without any exceptions. (“Allowing your enemies to slap you was not the path to earning respect,” Mike Africa Jr. summarizes. “You couldn’t be slapped into a space of equality. You had to fight for it.”) So the group fought against those who sponsored zoos and circuses and had strong critiques of established leadership because the “system” seemed to promote slavery for animals and second-class citizenship for Black people.
Paradoxically, so much of On A Move is about the search for a place to be still, a permanent home where MOVE could practice its beliefs in private. One of the book’s many revelations is that there were several attempts to find that safe space. First, there was a try in rural Virginia. Then there was Rochester, N.Y. Mike Africa Jr. and his book’s co-creator, prominent author and magazine writer D. Watkins, re-created well a scene of MOVE founder Vincent Leapheart—“Benny” to The Family Africa, but then a.k.a. John Africa, more of a symbolic name and public posture—and another MOVE member riding their bikes uphill to that historic near-Canada waystation, a temporary oasis of disguise and reinvention until they get chased out by historic chasers. So much has been written for decades about MOVE being noisy, but Africa, just by his inside-telling, shows how the group’s quest was just for solitary, quiet communion. And then came the flood, followed by the thunder and the lightning, and then followed by a permanent psychic aftermath.
Africa Jr.’s fight to free his parents—Debbie and Mike Africa Sr., members of the MOVE 9, a group of members arrested during a 1978 flare-up with the Philadelphia police that climaxed with the death of a police officer—takes up a good portion of the book, and should. But if you take the clashes-against-white-authority parts out of this dramatic and frank narrative, so much of it would read familiar with the memoirs produced by members or ex-members of other small American sects such as the Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses: the development of a strong internal identity to counter what the “world” teaches; much discussion of dietary laws; harsh, and sometimes violent, squabbles within the family; leaving the group and becoming outcasts; rules about public family loyalty and self-defense, and ultimately choosing spouses within the clan in order to make plans for the next generation.
MOVE saw/sees themselves as American revolutionaries who used/use their personal example as a message for the world. With 21st-century circuses removing their animal acts, some of its beliefs are becoming more mainstream by the decade. So Mike Africa Jr. was bathed in this naturalistic thinking from his infancy and gets to constantly assess it in front of the reader. In many fundamental ways, he reminds this reader of a 21st-century, younger version of Tupac Shakur, another son of a revolutionary Black woman. Shakur missed being born in jail by one month. Mike Africa Jr., birthed quietly in 1978 by Debbie and MOVE in a prison cell, fills that particularly symbolic void, among other spaces, all the while learning and eventually rebuilding, MOVE-ing in new directions, forcing the reader into what is, was, might have been, and what is still to come from The Family Africa. Like Shakur, he makes no promises to fulfill anyone’s radical vision but his own. Unlike Shakur, he has had ample time to think, to analyze, and to build. (Perhaps it helps when you have a historically vicious target, one directly blocking your path.) But regardless of Mike Africa Jr.’s plans, it’s clear that although Benny perished in the Osage flames, John Africa The Idea is still pedaling uphill.
Because of the circumstances of his birth, a portion of Africa’s memoir could be in a future edition of Mountain, edited by Pennsylvania-based scholars Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black. Back in Africa’s childhood, Abu-Jamal was a street/community radio journalist who dared to share on-air empathy and later open identification with Benny’s clan. He does a brief late-‘70s/early ‘80s cameo in Mike Africa Jr.’s reconstruction before he is netted, chained and promised a chair of the state electric. With the love of Benny and his teachings in his heart, Abu-Jamal decides to fight and write. The Family Africa and the anthologizing scholar also share a common denominator in the form and tradition of in-the-joint scribing. “On the back of envelopes that MOVE members wrote to and from prison,” recalled Africa, “they wrote, ‘Remember, the fight the MOVE organization is waging on the streets, in the courts, and in the jails is for your sons and daughters too.’”
The Reader compiles expected historical hit singles such as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” but also includes normally-not-heard album cuts such as Elijah Muhammad’s Blackman message and Eugene Debs’ views on prison labor. Feeling as if witnessing a backdoor history of American incarceration unfold in its pages, it’s hard for the reader not to view prison as just a rite of passage for the nation’s most vigorous, most unafraid tree-shakers. The book’s editors believe ideas will always seep through the barbed fences.
With the non-linear theme of resistance dominant, the establishment walls help to create an atmosphere in which it’s hard to distinguish between past and present. Frederick Douglass could be talking about MOVE when he recalls his brief capture with some other enslaved Africans who had hatched a freedom plot: “We were a band of brothers, and never dearer to each other than now.” (“Through Douglass,” postulate the editors, “we learn that prison was part of slavery, just as slavery was part of prison.”) Or Native American leader Crazy Horse, a Lakota fighter: “We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government then. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages.”
This text—the 14th for Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been under lock and key since 1981 for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer, the victim of a controversial trial, judge, and use of evidence—is very up-to-date in obvious, sad ways. Black said in a recent interview with the New Jersey podcast All Politics R Local that six of the final seven contributors—including 79-year-old Native American activist Leonard Peltier, whose parole was denied earlier this year and who is correctly considered by the Left to be an American political prisoner, like the now-freed-or-dead MOVE 9—are still alive.
This collection of memories and manifestos serves multiple purposes beyond an attempt to make slammed cell doors reverb; in both works, words are not just important because of their content but also because they can travel outward so relatively easily. It’s the reasoning behind those imprisoned MOVE members deciding to write on those envelopes, so, recalled Mike Africa Jr., “anybody handling the letter—guards, mail carriers, or anyone else—would know what MOVE was and know its purpose.” Although nowhere near swords or keys, both books shine past and present spotlights on the real price of a purpose-driven life if it publicly collides with and refuses to tolerate the worst of humanity.
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Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D., is a writer and public researcher based in Newark, N.J. He is the editor of the anthology The Trials of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Biography in 25 Voices, published by Diasporic Africa Press.
