Front Burner - Front Burner Introduces: The Africas VS. America

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

In 1985, at the height of the Black Power era, police dropped a bomb in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Their target? A family of Black radicals known as ‘MOVE,’ who found themselves ensnared in a city — and nation’s — domestic war on Black Liberation. Over seven episodes, host Matthew Amha investigates the events that culminated in the MOVE bombing, and the long afterlife of a forgotten American tragedy. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/X9pEruGw

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey there, we have a special bonus episode for FrontBurners Podcast subscribers from the brand new CBC podcast series, The Africas vs. America. In the spring of 1985, the city of Philadelphia became the first in U.S. history to drop a bomb on a family of American citizens. The attack killed 11 people,

including five children, and the ensuing fire set an entire neighborhood to ruins. The targets that day? A family of Black radicals known collectively as MOVE, who found themselves ensnared in a city and nation's domestic war on Black liberation. In the Africa vs. America, host Matt Alma investigates the events that culminated in the move bombing and the long afterlife of the forgotten American tragedy. Through intimate conversations, the Africa vs. America offers an unseen look into the move's origins and dynamics while looking ahead to the group's uncertain future. Matt, I will also mention, is a friend and has worked with us on Front Burner. He is a rare talent and I am very, very excited about this one.

We have the first episode for you now from the Africas vs. America. Have a listen. Before we start, a heads up. This episode includes explicit language. This is one of these cases where the material has some flesh on it which i know is not uncommon actually in forensics and forensic anthropology in this case this audio you're hearing is from a video first offered to undergraduate anthropology students at Princeton University, then posted on the free education website, Coursera. It's called Real Bones, Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.

Professor Janet Monge and a student are standing at a display table. Behind them, rows and rows of skulls sit in glass cabinets. And laid out before them are human remains, what Monge refers to as the material. The bones are, I mean, we would say like juicy, meaning that you can tell that they are of a recently deceased individual. They have a lot of sort of sheen to them, at least this one does. As she speaks, the camera closes in on Monge, and she's got a partial femur in her hands. Experts in her field have concluded that the bones she is handling belonged to a teenage girl who was killed in 1985.

They also know what killed her. And the bones were actually burned as well, so it's got quite a complicated history. Manj is right. It is a complicated history. And contested. and deeply misunderstood. A reporter called me and asked me to have lunch with her. She wanted to talk to me about something. This is Mike Africa Jr. In April of 2021, he was contacted by a reporter from Philadelphia's indie news site, Billy Penn. The reporter had also worked in the physical anthropology section of Penn Museum.

And over lunch, Mike says she told him that Penn Museum and Princeton University had been using the remains of a girl he considered his sister for science. Katricia Dotson-Africa was 14 years old when she died. Her family called her Tree. And they'd been told that her remains had long been accounted for. But now, a reporter was telling Mike

that this wasn't true. The news flattened him. She was going to break the story in the news that day, and I told her, wait, let me tell people first. So Mike got word up to the family elders. As you can imagine, disbelief, shock, hurt, confusion, anger.

Do you think had this story not been reported, you guys would have never been told or would have found out about this? Probably not. I wouldn't think they would have. They didn't tell me. They didn't tell me. For 36 years, they kept it a damn secret. me. They didn't tell me. For 36 years, they kept it a damn secret.

The details of these remains are shocking, as are the events that led to the death of the girl they are believed to belong to. Tree died alongside 10 others, all members of a family of radicals known collectively as MOVE. This is the story of those deaths, and that group, and how its members became ensnared in the U.S. government's domestic war against Black liberation. If they come in here with their hands, we'll use our hands. But if they come in here shooting and killing our women and children and our men, we will shoot back in defense of our lives. I'll never forget the judge says, you've been charged with murder. I said, what? Murder? He's hitting them. He's hitting them. He's hitting them on the head. He's kicking them on the head.

I know my family. They would have died that day if they had to, to protect me. they would have died that day if they had to, to protect me. I'm Matthew Amha, and this is The Africas vs. America. Chapter One. Mother's Day. I was about 16 years old when I first saw the name Move. The group was a footnote in some reading I was doing into a Black Panther named Mumia Abu-Jamal. I was a young first-generation kid in Toronto trying to make sense of my place in the world, trying to understand my relationship to the police, to the education system, to my country, and to myself. I grew up in what you might call a pan-African home,

and was already reading pretty widely about Black history, about the likes of Thomas Sankara and Maurice Bishop and Ella Baker, and independent stories like the Battle of Adwa and the Haitian Revolution. But MOVE, something about them was different. This had to be the most radical group I'd ever come across. And in the past few years, I've found myself returning to this formative memory of the group pretty often. I was the same age that Trayvon Martin was

when he was killed by a vigilante in 2012. And about a year younger than Ahmaud Arbery, who was murdered by a group of self-deputized white men a near decade later. In those intervening years, I watched the biggest protest movement in American history come and then go in response to police violence. In 2020, even at home here in Toronto, the streets were packed with my peers and our elders demanding material change. Black people have been treated unfairly for so long, and we're talking about 400 years plus, and enough is enough. This was a movement demanding a systemic overhaul, from policing to prisons to housing.

I watched people compile so-called anti-racist reading lists, champion the works of radical black thinkers and writers, and call for a re-examination of the historical record. But even then, against that spectacular backdrop, all of that energy, there was still no mention of MOVE. It was as though their story had been erased from our public consciousness. Part of what has made the MOVE story so indelible for me is the fact this small,

hyper-local organization, never more than 50 members at any given time, incited such an overwhelming and disproportionate level of reaction from the state in the form of surveillance, information wars, and brute violence. To this day, it remains unlike anything I have ever seen before. And then I read about the claims of Tree Africa's remains being used as teaching props. So I've come to Philadelphia to try to make sense of one of the most unforgettable stories I've ever come across. It's been a minute. Yeah, man. How you doing? I'm all right, man. How you feeling?

All right. I see you're busy. Yeah, man. You know, we'll talk, though. Hi. How you doing? Hey. Hey. How you doing? I'm going to still contact you. We're going, though. Hi. I'll catch up. Hi. How you doing? Hey. Hey, how you doing? I'm going to still contact you. We're going to talk. Love you. Love you back.

Mike Africa Jr. and I are on Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia. Mike has this boyish quality about him with these scattered freckles and his easy 40-watt Hollywood smile. And he's like the mayor. Everyone here seems to know him. Yes, yes! How you feel, bro? I'm gonna call you too. We still gotta talk. We still trying to get stuff together.

Unremarkable brick row houses line either side of this block. They're modest, just two stories, each with a small front stoop and a patch of grass that inches up against the sidewalk. There's a part of me that even wonders how they fit all of those police officers on this narrow little street. Yeah, right? We stop, and Mike gestures toward a row house across the way.

That's it? This is it. In the early 1980s, 6221 Osage Avenue was MOVE's official headquarters. Back then, the house belonged to Mike's great-aunt. In its earliest days, MOVE was largely a family affair, blood relatives of its founder, John Africa. That would evolve over time, but no matter how they came to the organization, anyone who joined MOVE adopted the surname Africa, and they considered each other to be family, whether related by blood or by choice.

And though they didn't all live together, the MOVE children were raised together. So Osage, it was a place of real love and familiarity for Mike. You think the person that lives in there knows about what happened? He's probably looking at us right now. I mean, you might hear him say, Michael. I come here all the time, like around May 13th. So he knows, he sees, he's got that ringer. He's aware of the history. Yeah.

When Mike played here as a kid, the street had a little more character. Bigger trees, deeper porches, windows with wooden detailing, lots of bright white paint. And in 1985, the home at 6221 Osage Avenue was distinct from the others. For one, the windows were boarded up with wood. Also boarded up was the garage, which opened onto an alleyway behind the house. In it boasted a bullhorn, propped up on the outside of the property, and a fortified bunker on the roof, complete with a gun portal.

They couldn't get to the bunker from inside, so on any given day, members of the family could be seen scaling the walls of the property with rope. All of this might sound a bit extreme, but the Africans had their reasons. For more than a decade, MOVE had been the target of violence and subversion by the Philadelphia Police Department and the FBI. and the FBI. And these tensions between city, nation, and family would finally come to a head here on May 13th, 1985. Well, the first thing I always tell people about May 13th is that it began on Sunday, Mother's Day, May 12th of 1985.

Ramona Africa is one of 13 people inside the MOVE home on Osage Avenue that Mother's Day. MOVE's founder, John Africa, is there too. Six children, ages 9 to 14, are asleep in the second floor hallway, and the radio's on, turned to the local all-news station, KYW. KYW News Radio has news you can use. And they start talking about the cops are masking around, you know, our home, around Osage Avenue. Move had grown accustomed to being monitored by the police. But this was different.

There's a small urban army gathering outside their home, and they hear it from the radio first. But for the past couple of hours, neighbors up and down the block have been getting phone calls and visitors. Here's some tape collected shortly afterward, part of a WHYY TV documentary. be gunfire in your neighborhood. When I got up, it was about 500 police on the scene. So when we went to church, we asked our minister to pray for the neighbors, to pray for Moo, to pray for the police and the firemen, which he did.

The whole church prayed for him. Inside the house, the Moo family keeps company with the radio, hour after hour after hour. We were listening to KYW, and during that time throughout the day, the cops went door to door, was telling people it's Mother's Day, take your wife, your mother, your family out to dinner or whatever, just get out of the area. Any cars that was on Osage Avenue, they removed. Police are building a perimeter around the move home, and neighbors are beginning to understand what's taking shape.

They're here to resolve a 13-year standoff with MOVE. Here's more from that WHYY documentary. Then I began to notice this top brass, I guess, coming in. Trucks coming in, bringing weapons, and the stakeout officers began to come in, and each one of them had a weapon. Then they brought in this heavy artillery, something that looked like a cannon. This buildup continues through Sunday into the early hours of Monday morning. By 3.30 on the morning of May 13th, the 6200 block of Osage Avenue has been emptied. Police takeout units and bomb disposal teams are on standby. By 4 a.m., the city cuts gas and power to the entire neighborhood.

From behind the cover of night, MOVE confronts police with their bullhorn. There are now hundreds of Philadelphia police officers in the street, and many of them are armed with high-powered automatic weapons. M16s, Uzis, and.30 caliber machine guns. By 5.35 in the morning, Police Commissioner Gregor Sambor is on the scene, armed with a bullhorn of his own and an ultimatum. Gregory Sambor gets on his bullhorn and says,

Attention, move. this is America. You have to abide by the laws and rules of America. And he goes on and on and gave us 15 minutes to come out. Police say they're here to arrest four members of MOVE on charges ranging from criminal conspiracy to possession of explosives. on charges ranging from criminal conspiracy to possession of explosives. I'm thinking when I hear this attention move, this is America. And I'm like, yeah, you know, do you know what America stands for?

The wholesale slaughter of the indigenous people of this country, you know? So we didn't come out at the 15-minute deadline, and we didn't come out because we knew without a doubt that they were not there to arrest us. They were there to kill us. us. People ask us, well why didn't you send the children out? Were Indians expected to turn their children, their babies over to the cowrikaners? No. But people want to look at MOVE and ask us why we wouldn't turn our children over to our enemy? It was halfway nighttime. The first thing you said was you heard someone on a bullhorn. Do you know who that was on the bullhorn? It was Mona and Commissioner Sandler was on too.

That's when I woke up. Up in the second floor hallway, 13-year-old Birdie Africa is startled from his sleep by the sound of the piercing bullhorns. This tape you're hearing is Birdie's testimony to an investigative commission a few months after May 13th. By now, Birdie and the rest of the children are wide awake. The adults are leading them to the cellar. For a while, it's just the kids down there. But it's not long before they'll be joined by the women. I got a call around 3 o'clock in the morning, and it was a very cryptic call.

Lynn, get over here, it's going down. Click. But I knew what they were talking about because, you know, things had been escalating. So I knew it was move. On May 13th, 1985, Lynn Washington Jr. is a print reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News. His reporting connects issues like race and police brutality, the kind of things which go hand in hand in Philadelphia. He's been on the move beat for more than a decade at this point. So I get on my motorcycle and drive over, which turned out to be good because I was thinking the motorcycle would give me more mobility to be able to move around and everything and was able to get me through the checkpoints and whatnot. So I got there around five o'clock, started mingling with some reporters trying to get the lay of the land.

Outside, this small city block is spilling over with activity. There are news trucks, cop cars, fire engines, wagons, vans. The fire department has taken up position on Pine Street, just behind the move home. At 5.50 that morning, Commissioner Sambor's 15-minute surrender deadline passes. First light has only just broken. Firefighters unleash high-pressure water cannons onto the bunker on the roof, coordinated with police units who are unloading canisters of tear gas into the home. It was pouring down on us in the basement. We got the blankets and they was wet and we had them in the bucket and they was wet until we put them over our heads and started laying down.

The row houses on Osage are connected by adjoining walls. And the police use this to their advantage, blasting three-inch-wide holes into 6221 from either side with explosive devices. They also blow the front porch to pieces. Bertie's hiding in the basement, but he can hear the sounds above. What do they sound like? Bombs. Sound like bombs? How many did you hear?

A lot of them. Tommaso, the youngest, takes shelter under a blanket with one of the women. Bertie tucks himself in with his mother, Rhonda, and little Phil, age 12. The girls, Netta, Delisha, and Triafrica, they don't have their mothers here to comfort them. Their parents are in prison and will only learn the horror of this day from fellow prisoners and prison guards. And then the shootout started.

There were so many bullets in that morning shootout that they were ricocheting off the sidewalk like hell. You see today how it's like a clear blue sky. I started hearing this stuff, this patterning off the street, and it was like, that's hell. And I look up and I'm like, how's that hell? Fortunately, I was next to my motorcycle, put my motorcycle helmet on and climbed under a car to try to keep from getting hit by these bullets.

There were so many bullets. In news footage from the day, we can see cops unloading boxes from the back of a cruiser. Ammunition raided from a local gun range. Over the next 90 minutes, the Philadelphia Police Department will fire at least 10,000 rounds into the home. When the shooting finally stops on Osage Avenue, it's shortly after noon. Reporter Lynn Washington is looking around, trying to figure out what might happen next. That's when he spots John Africa's right-hand man in the crowd out on the street, Big Jerry

Africa. And he's with two other people. One, a civil rights activist from West Philadelphia, and the other was a recently retired judge who was the Democratic Party's official candidate for district attorney. Jerry tells Lynn that MOVE is ready to surrender, but he wants to speak with Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Good to work out the details.

They could never get Wilson Good on the phone. They called Wilson's office. He's not here. It got so desperate that they called the chief justice of Pennsylvania Supreme Court and asked the chief justice to call Wilson Good. He did, and Wilson wouldn't get on the phone with him. So an effort to try to resolve this was blown because Wilson wouldn't get on the phone. Wilson Good disputes this claim, but he does give the okay for others on the scene to negotiate on his behalf.

But MOVE isn't having it. They want to talk to the guy with the power. For an excruciating five hours, things remain at a tense standstill. And in the midst of that standstill, Mayor Good delivers a press conference from City Hall. We intend to evict from the house. We intend to evacuate from the house.

We intend to seize control of the house. We intend to evacuate from the house. We intend to seize control of the house. We will do it by any means necessary. We don't have any... The day goes on, goes on. It's stalemate. It's hot. Around mid-afternoon, I was assigned to

cover the city's headquarters. So, on my way there, I saw a reporter that I knew. And he said, you know, the city's going to drop a bomb on them. And I'm like, what? Drop a bomb? Now, anything the Philadelphia police did was not outrageous to me, knowing what they did.

But I just could not fathom that they would drop a bomb on a house that they knew had kids in it. You know, despite the fact that they had fired 10,000 bullets in that house in the morning. So I go to the city's command post and I'm talking to a police officer and the city's managing director

sticks his head out, sees me, and tells the cop, get him out of here. Lynn turns and makes his way to a parking lot across the street from where the city has made up a makeshift headquarters. He's been on his feet for more than 10 hours now. So he finds a curb and takes a seat.

So I'm sitting on a curb in a parking lot, and what's in front of me but a state police helicopter. And then three guys walk out. One of them has a submachine gun. They all have 9mm pistols on. One of them's carrying a green satchel. So I said to myself, oh, stuff. That got to be the bomb.

So the pilot comes over, you know, sir, could you move? I'm moving. I walk away. The helicopter takes off. It flies around. It circles. And then you hear an explosion and the neighborhood shook so violently. I mean, it seemed like the ground moved. It was almost like an earthquake. You know, my knees buckle. And I said, they dropped the bomb. No, they didn't. No, they didn't. They couldn't have done that.

So, we're in the basement after the water, after the tear gas, after the thousands of rounds of bullets shot at us, and there was a law. You know, it was a law kind of quiet where nothing was really happening. And then all of a sudden the house kind of shook. All the men were upstairs. All the men were upstairs? And then what happened?

It was still up there, and then it came down. Everybody came down. All the men came down? That's when the big bomb went off. Did you hear the big bomb? It shook the whole house up. It did? And what happened then?

It told us to stay together. Just to all stay together? Did you all try to get out of the house during the day? When the fire started, we did. It's now 5.30 in the afternoon, and all 13 people inside the house at 6221 Osage Avenue are believed to be alive. They've been bombarded with water, they've been shot at,

tear gassed, blasted, and then bombed. We didn't realize what it was at the time, it never entered my mind at least, that they had dropped a bomb on us. on us. Gregory Sambo, the police commissioner, gave us that 15-minute warning. They never said anything else to us. They never announced or said that they were preparing to drop a bomb. They flew over our house with no warning, and dropped the satchel containing the C4 incendiary explosives, incendiary meaning fire-causing explosives, on the roof of our home. After feeling the blast, Lynn Washington makes his way back to Osage. So you look up and you see a little trail of black smoke coming off of a house in the 6200 block of Osage Avenue. And it looked like a backyard barbecue,

charcoal barbecue. When they first start, there's a little stream of black smoke, and then that black smoke turned to black gray smoke, and you know, having been a General Simon reporter for so many years, I know the evolution of fires. This fire is getting bad. The smoke was getting thicker, and it didn't have the same potency or feel of the tear gas. Then we heard the tree in the back of our house crackling. It was on fire.

crackling, it was on fire. We realized at that point that it wasn't tear gas that we were dealing with. Then you started seeing the thick yellow smoke, and I knew it was burning through the roof. So we're all there like, whoa, what is going on here? The house is on fire. And then the next question is, well, why aren't the firefighters fighting the fire? The fire department just stood idly by. I can't recall any situation where firefighters who have four W-2s that they have aimed at our house, flooded our house with tons and tons of water when there was no fire suddenly could not put any water on our house when in fact there is a fire. on our house when in fact there is a fire.

The firefighters were standing around, and the people were like, fight the fire. What do you mean? Fight the fire. Then it became a little more profane. Fight the damn fire, then fight the, you know, F-word fire. Fire's now billowing, and you can just see the fire jumping across the street, jumping down the roof line. billowing and you could see the fire jumping across the street, jumping down the roof line. They made a conscious decision not to put the fire out because their aim was to kill us, plain and simple. When have you ever heard of firefighters knowing that there are men, women, children,

animals in a house that's on fire? A row house didn't care about any of that. They made a decision to let that fire burn. then free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. There's this video footage that was made available to the public in the months following the bombing. Frontline used it in this 1987 episode. It's from police officers who were filming across the street. In the grainy footage, you can make out 6-2-2-1 Osage with their windows blasted open and

fire raging through the home. They won't call a police commissioner while the fire's on. It's kind of hard to hear. But that? That's laughter. And one of the police officers says about MOVE members trapped inside the burning building, quote, they won't call the police commissioner a motherfucker anymore. What none of us knew is that the police commissioner had given the fire commissioner the order to not fight the fire so now the fire has engulfed the entirety of the 6200 block of osage avenue we're all just

standing there watching it's like god damn it we can't even believe this and now night is falling this orange glow made it look like it was daytime, just like now. But it was, you know, orange because the whole block was just, I mean, it was an inferno. So, you know, we're watching this and the crowd is now restive. You know, they're cursing at the police, they're cursing at the firefighters. The firefighters are starting to, you know, fight the fire. And then I heard that some residents were still stuck in their houses. So I said, you know, initially, like, okay, well, let me go back here.

Let me see this story, right? So I go into the back behind the houses. At this point, the police barricades had broken down, so you could pretty much move where you wanted or where it was, you know, safe to move. And I walked into literally a canyon of fire. It was so hot, my skin was boiling. Despite media reports suggesting MOVE members wanted to be martyrs,

that they had planned to die in their home, Ramona Africa has always insisted the family did everything in their power to escape the inferno with the lives of their children and animals intact. And she would eventually help Birdie escape the fire. The police find him outside, unconscious, and he's rushed to hospital with second and third degree burns to much of his body. Ramona escapes the house as well, but not the police. She'll spend the next seven years in prison on riot and conspiracy to riot charges. By midnight, the better part of two residential city blocks lay in ruins.

61 homes had been destroyed. 250 people in this working-class black neighborhood made homeless overnight. Everyone else in the move home, six adults, five children, is now dead. A number of them will be found with bullet fragments in what little is left of their remains. If they wanted to simply arrest us, they could have done that, I mean, any number of times. We had a routine, going to the park, running, swimming in Cobbs Creek.

We had the same shopping routine. They could have snatched us up any time, but that was not their aim. We're not going to allow people to sit back and hallucinate that what happened May 13th was just things going awry, things getting out of control. That's bull. That's not what happened. Their aim was to kill. The city would later acknowledge that the day's events were part of a broader plan. And we'll get into that later in the series. Today we're actually going to look at an actual forensic case from here in the city of Philadelphia. So back to that call Mike received from the

reporter from Billy Penn. She called him because these days he's MOVE's de facto leader. The organization is Mike Africa Jr.'s inheritance. His great uncle, John Africa, founded the organization and his parents were among its founding members. The story of Tree's remains is long and incredibly complicated, but here are the broad strokes. In the aftermath of the bombing, the medical examiner's office called on a local academic named Alan Mann to help identify the remains of the 11 members of the Africa family. Mann brought his research assistant, Janet Monge. But others in the field say the scope of the investigation was beyond the expertise of both Mann and Monge. And when the pair weren't able to identify the remains of five of the victims,

the city called in outside help, a team of internationally renowned forensic consultants. And this is the team that would identify the remains in Monge's video as belonging to Catricia Dotson Africa. Their findings were then confirmed by another four outside experts. But even then, the medical examiner's office asked for further consultations from Alan Mann on two identifications, including the remains said to be trees. And that's how the remains ended up back with him.

And once again, Alan Mann concluded the remains could not be positively identified. So he kept them in his office at Penn Museum. And for decades, that's exactly where they would stay. In a cardboard box, on a shelf, in a nondescript cabinet. So it's got quite a complicated history. box on a shelf in a nondescript cabinet. Then, they turn up in this video, taught by Alan Mann's former research assistant, now the adjunct professor, Janet Monge. We made a number of attempts to speak with Alan Mann and Janet Monge. We did not receive a response to our request for interviews or to our detailed questions about the case.

After the Billy Penn article was published, Monge launched a civil claim alleging defamation. In it, she states that she worked to identify the remains, quote, worked to identify the remains, quote, all while contextualizing the tragedy of the move bombing in social and political arenas. Monge acknowledges the remains belong to someone from the move bombing, but while numerous experts determined the bones almost certainly belonged to Tree, Monge has held fast to her original position that identification was not possible, and the bones, in her opinion, belonged to a young woman, who she considers a Jane Doe. In August 2021, independent investigators working on behalf

of the University of Pennsylvania found that Alan Mann and Janet Monge broke no laws or university codes. But given the number of experts who have determined the remains belong to Tree, investigators say both Mann and Monge showed, quote, extremely poor judgment and gross insensitivity. In their ongoing insistence, the bones remain unidentified. Mike and I are sitting by a creek where he and the kids from Osage used to play together. It's where they would test themselves against the elements, where they would climb trees and swim.

It's where they were happiest. I ask him what it was like to watch an academic, a white woman, lift remains he believed belonged to a girl he knew and loved like a sister, look into a camera and describe them as juicy, to talk about their smell, to treat her remains with such clinical remove. 35 years after she was killed by the city, he still calls home.

I felt like some of the things that white people have done to black people, I felt like some of those things should have been done to her. I felt like she would never do what she did to a white person. I felt like she would never disrespect a white mother that way. And I felt like she should feel some of the pain that she caused Tree to suffer.

That's how I felt. We asked Janet Monge to respond to what Mike has just said. Again, we've heard nothing back from her. But in her civil action, Monge refutes any suggestions of racism. Mike is looking me dead in the eyes as he says this. His glance is unwavering. Though I'm not party to the story, I think I know what he's talking about. That desire for revenge, this wrestling with whatever it is people mean when

they use words like justice. My family's from Ethiopia, the north and east of the country, which suffered heavy looting during Italy's unsuccessful attempts at colonization. From the time I was a child, the specter of that theft has hung over me. To this day, our bodies and cultural works line the coffers of some of the most powerful institutions in the world. It's worth mentioning, the story identifying the remains as trees became public just as the University of Pennsylvania had publicly apologized for another collection, founded by a man who has been called the father

of scientific racism. It's a crania collection of nearly 1,300 human skulls, which Samuel Morton used to justify his belief in the intellectual superiority of white people. At least 14 of those skulls were believed to have been looted from the grave sites of black Philadelphians, and more than 50 from the burial sites of enslaved people in Cuba and across the United States. I remember it said to me very early on in my life that every museum is an active crime scene, that their very existence justified all kinds of violence we would otherwise never excuse. And I've always wondered, at what cost are we willing to stir the dead in order to add to an archive of violence? You know, one of the things they did as a way to raise money during fundraiser dinners is they would bring out the remains of different people, different body parts,

to the donors and say, this is the kind of, this is what we need money for research for and all of this kind of stuff. And she routinely brought out remains and passed them around the buffet tables and shit. It's pretty gruesome. Again, we asked both Janet Monge and the University of Pennsylvania about this. And again, we haven't heard back.

But an external report commissioned by the university found that Monge showed the remains to donors, graduate students, and museum personnel on at least 10 occasions between 2014 and 2019. You know what she would think of me if I did that? If I took her mother and dug her up or acquired her, whatever, put her in the back of my fucking car? I'm going to go to 39th and Reno. Hey, guys, check this out.

I got this fucking bag of bones. And look, look at this fucking bone right this long ass bone right here i don't know what they call that a femur this bone still got meat on it man you know yo y'all give me y'all give me ten dollars i'll show you the skull and you know what when i'm needing some money i'm gonna host a party i'm gonna have a gala and i'm gonna bring those bag of bones out to the gala and I'm going to parade them around and say this is the kind of shit that Mike Africa Jr. does

pay me some money and I'll show you where this motherfucker's liver at in this motherfucker's life yo, yeah what she would think of me if I did that in the name of science black people will never get justice in America in the name of science. Black people will never get justice in America.

I ain't talking about an individual person here and there. I'm talking about people, black people, will never get justice. It wasn't made for us. When it comes to their dead, MOVE observes a very specific set of traditions, one that goes well beyond eulogies and burial rites. If we see a dead animal in the street, we will pick them up and put them in a final resting place

where they won't be disturbed if we can. We see soda bottles that are half filled and release the water so that the water can be free. If we throw a bottle in the trash, we take the top off first so that the air can be free. We don't put our people in caskets because we believe they need to be free. So for someone to put them in a lab,

in a museum, it's the single worst thing that a person can do to a MOVE member that's cycled on to the next level. It's worse than just killing them. Long live John Africa.

Long live John Africa. I'm Consuel Africa. Mother of Patricia Internet of Africa. Yes, yes. My daughters were taken away by this fucking corrupt government. They dropped a bomb.

Something that they use in military. Military. This is the city of Metropolis. 11 people. On April 25th, 2021, Consuela Africa sat before a room of journalists. It's just a few days after Mike took that call from the reporter. We all know why we're here, because of the body snatchers, the grave diggers. With her are MOVE elders Pam Africa, Janine Africa, and Janet Africa. Mike is there too. This is a really hard thing for me to talk about

because I feel like I am reliving 1985 where they told me that my son was dead. Not only did they kill my children, kill my sisters and brothers, but they have desecrated what they say are their remains, defiled them, and had them hidden away on exhibit as a learning tool for their students. If anybody have any doubts about the way this system feel about move,

this should be very clear. They don't care about us, and they definitely didn't care about our children. And we've been telling y'all this. MOVE rank and file are holding this press conference. Five older folks, all but one, sporting long, graying dreadlocks. Took the bones and called it real bone Display, Adventure of Anthropology. They called it an adventure. They treated it like it was some type of ride in a park. Between them, these five have served well over a century behind bars.

And what sustained them through the decades in prison and years of loss, grief, and mourning were the teachings of MOVE's founder, John Africa. Y'all got to understand, we are in pain. We're not weak. Don't misunderstand. We are not weak by no means. We are very strong thanks to the power of John Africa. Because anybody else, anybody else would have succumbed to insanity. But we're strong people. We're revolutionary.

We got feelings. That's what you're seeing here. We got feelings. We are sensitive. It means we are alive. On the table in front of them sits a neon placard with a quote from John Africa. On the table in front of them sits a neon placard with a quote from John Africa. It reads, The power of truth is final. Sometimes, the power of the truth is also too much to bear.

Mother's Day is coming up soon. We will never get a chance to embrace our children and hug them and kiss them. We will never have a chance to embrace our children and hug them and kiss them. We will never have that feeling of love, you know, to put them to our breast. Because they're not here. Because this government took them away from us. Consuela died two months after this press conference. People who knew her told me that the news of Tree's remains was too much for her to carry. She died after a stay in the hospital of the University of

Pennsylvania, part of the same institution where her daughter's remains were believed to have been When it comes to history and memory, my reference point in many ways has always been a chapter from W.E.B. Du Bois' book, Black Reconstruction. It's called The Propaganda of History, and in it, he refers to the historical record as, quote, lies agreed upon. He refers to the historical record as, quote, lies agreed upon. And so the question I keep coming back to is how does any of this happen in the first place? How is it that a major American city, with the help of the feds, hatches a plot to wage open war on a residential home and get away with it? And what does it say about us? That even at this moment in history, we continue to suffer this collective amnesia.

Next time on the Africa's vs. America. On the move! It's the MOVE organization! Lonely John Africa! The improbable origin story of John Africa and the genesis of MOVE. I am the type of person who has always looked for something that would help me to find justice. When I came across the teaching of John Africa, my search ended. John Africa is one. One level, one grade of life.

John Africa is one. One level, one grade of life. Everything you see, the sun, the air, the water that you drink of, all of that is John Africa. John Africa's thing was destroy the whole system. All of it. Burn that shit down to the ground. All of it and all the ideas that created it, too. And if anybody get in your way, get rid of them motherfuckers too.

You've been listening to the Africa's vs. America from CBC Podcasts and Confluential Films. The show is written and produced by me, Matthew Amha, and Jessica Lindsay. Our story editor is Damon Fairless. And our producer is Alina Ghosh. Sound design by Evan Kelly. Emily Connell is Damon Fairless. And our producer is Alina Ghosh. Sound design by Evan Kelly. Emily Connell is our coordinating producer. Emily Mathieu is our fact checker. Our senior producer is Willow Smith.

Consulting producers for Confluential are Tommy Oliver and Keith Giannette. Special thanks to Gary Francis. Audio courtesy of KYW Newsradio, WHYY-TV Philadelphia, Frontline PBS, and the Pennsylvania Public Television Network. Executive producers for CBC Podcasts are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Thanks for listening. Tune in next week for an all-new episode of The Africas vs. America, where you can binge the whole series by subscribing to our channel on Apple Podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description.

All right, that was the first episode of the Africa's Versus America. You can listen to more episodes right now on the CBC Listen app and everywhere you get your podcasts.