Rev Left Radio - The MOVE Bombing and Mumia Abu-Jamal

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

 Jared from Millennials Are Killing Capitalism joins Breht to discuss the MOVE organization, the bombing of MOVE in Philly in 1985, Mumia Abu Jamal, the history of racism and police violence in Philadelphia, and much, much more.  Ramona Africa's GoFundMe for her cancer treatments and medical needs - https://www.gofundme.com/helpsaveramonaafrica    Mobilization4Mumia - these are the comrades I work to support in Philly - https://mobilization4mumia.com/donate-1   MOVE 9 Legal Fund (Abolitionist Law Center) - https://abolitionistlawcenter.org/2018/11/05/action-alert-support-the-move-9-legal-fund/ Find "Millennials Are Killing Capitalism" here: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/ Follow them on Twitter @MAKCapitalism Outro Music: Radical Dilemma by Rebel Diaz Find and support their music here: https://rebeldiaz.bandcamp.com/album/radical-dilemma ----------- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical.  Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante): Twitter: @Red_Menace_Pod Audio: http://redmenace.libsyn.com  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdxX5eqQyk&t=144s Black Banner Magic (Season 2 coming soon) Twitter: @blackbannerpod http://blackbannermagic.libsyn.com   Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert):  Twitter: @HammerCamera http://hammercamera.libsyn.com   Other Members of the Rev Left Radio Federation include: Coffee With Comrades: https://www.patreon.com/coffeewithcomrades Left Page: https://www.patreon.com/leftpage Little red School House: http://littleredschoolhouse.libsyn.com ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. You can support the show financially by: Becoming a Patreon supporter (and receive access to bonus content including the Rev Left book club) here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio - OR - making a one-time donation to the Rev Left Radio team here: paypal.me/revleft Get Rev Left Radio Merch (and genuinely support the show by doing so) here: https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio --------------- This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/  

Hello everybody and welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade O'Shea, and today we have on our friend and comrade Jared from Millennials Are Killing Capitalism to talk about the move bombing, Mumia Abu Jamal, and the broader context of white supremacy and racism in Philadelphia and in this country as a whole. If you like this episode and you want to support Revolutionary Left Radio, we have a Patreon. patreon.com forward slash rev left radio we're looking to expand our patreon in interesting ways and also try to include live call-ins on our patreon so if you're interested in trying to help the expansion of this project you could always support us there and if you don't want to do a subscription model and just want to pay a one-time donation to help out the show i know dave and i would really

appreciate it and every you know dollar we get helps us expand the show and dedicate more time to making it as good as possible so the links to both our patreon as well as our PayPal will be in the show notes of this episode. But with no further ado, let's get into this three-hour episode on a crucial part of American history with Jared from Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. So I'm Jared Ware. I'm a co-host of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. We're a podcast that focuses on revolutionary anti-capitalist movement. We try to feature a lot of young activists and organizers who are organizing in their own communities or who are working in the academy doing, you know, kind of groundbreaking work. We definitely try to feature

a lot of marginalized voices, a lot of black and brown folks, a lot of LBGTQ folks, and try to kind of broaden out the perspective of the left. And we kind of started that because at the time when we were starting our podcast, we felt like it was, podcasts on the left were dominated by things like Chopo Trap House and other podcasts that were really kind of in the social Democrat lens and also very white. And so we definitely wanted to, you know, highlight other movements that were going on and give voice to those. And so I host that podcast along with Josh Breon. Prior to that, I co-founded a podcast called Beyond Prisons, which is still going on as well. It's hosted by Brian Sondinstein and Kim Wilson, and it's a prison abolitionist podcast.

So that's kind of who I am in a nutshell. And just to be very clear about what this is today, this is a collaboration between millennials are killing capitalism and Rev Left Radio. We're tackling the topic of move and the move bombing in 1985 today. Jared obviously lives and organizes in Philadelphia, which adds a certain local flair to this conversation. But then also after this podcast in a couple months, I'm going to go on Millennials Are Killing Capitalism and do another collab. This time, you know, hopefully Josh will be present for that one and just sort of cross-pollinate our listenerships because I think

that Millennials are Killing Capitalism and Rev Left Radio, we kind of converge on the same topics, on the same sort of analysis, but we come at it from two very different perspectives, and I think that makes our shows simultaneously unique as well as sort of convergent in a really interesting way. So I think this collaboration is long overdue and I'm very excited for it. So thank you for coming on and thanks for doing this with me. Yeah. Thanks for having us and thanks for doing it as well. And I completely agree with what you just said. Before we jump into these questions, I know that we talked before we started recording in and you kind of wanted to make some caveat up front just to be very clear about your position and how we're going to go through this. So before we jump into the

questions, do you want to say anything about that up front so listeners can know exactly where you stand? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Brett, you approach Josh and I about doing this episode. You know, initially I was very excited. I think that talking about the history of the move organization and particularly the 1985 bombing is a really important thing for us to, one, know about, because it's an important part of history that doesn't get talked about enough, but also to be in conversation about on the left. And, you know, I had some reservations just because I do live in Philadelphia and work here, organize here, and I am in and around spaces with move members. And so, you know, my hesitancy was just a little bit that they're here and they do also speak on these topics. And I think that

people should seek out those narratives, those you can find conversations on YouTube. You know, you can follow some of the move members that are out there on social media. And so I just recommend that people also go right to the source and hear from them as well. But, But, you know, in thinking about it also, I think it's important that the burden not always just be on the members of Moved to talk about this. They've been through, you know, some horrific atrocities, right? And I don't think it should be upon them to always have to explain those things to folks. So, you know, I took it upon myself to do as much research as I could in preparation for this show to make sure I did the topic justice. And hopefully folks will feel like that's the case.

Yeah, absolutely. And just to add to that, as Jared said, there's plenty of interviews with actual real move members. Move is still, you know, an organization to this day. I encourage people to go check that out. We will absolutely try our best to reach out to some move members over time and see if they want to come on and give, you know, the first person narrative of their experiences, if they're, if they're willing to. In any case, we're going to put clips throughout this episode where, you know, move members are reflecting on and talking about what happened. And so you will hear throughout this interview voices from people actually in move. But again, I share Jared's sort of urge to listeners to go listen as much as you can to the first person accounts of what happened, whether on another

podcast or on documentaries on YouTube, you can find quite a bit. And it's just fascinating. And, you know, this doesn't get enough attention on the left as I think it should get. It started to sort of have a revitalization period in our popular culture after, you know, I think it was the 30-year anniversary came out and a documentary a few years ago came out called Let It burn and so there's some you know a little resurgence of interest in this topic but i felt that millennials are killing capitalism would be the perfect podcast to reach out and do a collab on this front for the reasons jared uh just said this is market prescott host of sojourner truth and our guest in studio a romona africa um who happened to just survive likely barely the bombing of the

move house in philadelphia historic bombing it's the first time that we know of that city officials ordered the bombing of a house, including women and children in a residential area, and also Kareem, who is a revolutionary move supporter, and we're just trying to get a sense of what the timeline of the initial attacks back in 1978, you're saying, and then the attacks that happened, May 13th of this year, marked 30 years since that bombing took place. So, can I ask this, though? I'm sure just our audience would want to find out, why did they have it in so much for

move? I mean, you were working, a Black Liberation organization, into healthy eating, health foods, alternative, quote unquote, alternative lifestyle in the fact that this, you know, you had a certain way of living in a certain. with taking care of yourselves, taking care of your bodies. What was the big beef? Very simply, Margaret.

Everything that John Africa promoted, encouraged and moved and John Africa is the found is a very simple. To respect, revere the protective of life,

all life. Human life, animal life. plant life, the earth that feeds us, the air we must have to breathe, the water we must have to drink. And if you follow that reasoning, it puts you in direct conflict with this system and everything about it. Nobody that pushes the system believes in life. They will compromise life, they will barter life in a minute for money. That's their God. And the best way probably to start this discussion is just to address the basics for people who might not know. Who are MOVE? Who is John Africa? And maybe you can even talk about the guidelines, sort of the

founding document of the organization. Yeah. So, you know, Move is an organization that was founded in the early 70s. Initially, it was called, I think, the Christian movement for life and then it eventually just became move it's not an acronym so people often make that mistake and try to figure out what it stands for you see a lot of bad journalism where they try to suggest it stands for something but basically what it stands for is just movement right it's just that it's just literally the word so john africa is a really interesting figure historically. He is the founder. He developed the guidelines. He left school at 16 years old with a third grade education from the Philadelphia School District. And he was not,

he was functionally illiterate, basically. So he dictated the guidelines to another move member, and they published them. And, you know, the guidelines are not easy to find online. It's one of the things I've looked for over the years and they're not, you know, they're not readily accessible. So I think you think of the guidelines primarily as an internal document for the MOVE organization. But essentially, you know, you can find both on the MOVE website, which is on a MOVE.com and elsewhere, you know, a good sort of description of kind of moves politics and philosophy or religious beliefs, right? because these things all kind of blend together with move. But fundamentally, they're taught that life is a priority, right?

And so this is a quote, John Africa taught us the life is the priority. Nothing is more important or as important as life. The force that keeps us alive all comes from one source from God, mom, nature, or mama. This is kind of like the foundational belief, and it really undergirds a lot of their belief system. you know and then there's there's a lot of really interesting aspects of this and i think

move is not a they're not an or they're a revolutionary organization and they say that openly at the same time they don't fit into like a sort of western um political tendency as we might think of it they're certainly not like marxist leninists or anarchists even though people try to use some terms within that like i've heard them referred to as like anarcho-primitivists and things like that. But, you know, they really don't neatly fit into any of those terms. They're more of a religious organization. And they consider themselves basically to be a family, right? They refer to themselves as family. They all take the last name Africa. So they think that each individual life is dependent upon every other life.

All life has a purpose. All living things that move are equally important, whether they are human beings, dogs, birds, fish, trees, ants, weeds, rivers, wind, or rain. That's another quote from their website. To say healthy and strong, life must have clean air, clean water, and pure food. If deprived of these things, life will cycle to the next level, or as the system says, die. They refer to the system a lot. The system is basically, you know, for those of us on the left, we would probably call it capitalism or call it imperialism. You know, there are a little bit of a, kind of an anti-civilization mode though

like a lot of their critiques run through capitalism and imperialism and I think they would you know sort of they see those things right those are inherently built into our system right so as they're critiquing the system they are critiquing those structures but I think they also sort of see that

as humans have developed right and as we've gone through things like the industrial revolution right we've basically progressively destroyed the planet and become a threat to life on the planet itself. And I think that most people on the left now recognize that to an extent, right? And I think that that's a really important and prophetic thing because they were saying that in the early 70s when that was not a common like political theme or line, not to say there

weren't environmental movements because there were, but they were still, you know, much sort of younger. But those critiques were ahead of their time. They also believe in something they call natural law. So they say, we believe in natural law, the government of self, man-made laws are not really laws, because they don't apply equally to everyone, and they contain exceptions and loopholes. Man-made laws are constantly being amended or repealed. Natural law stays the same and always has. Man's laws require police, sheriffs, armies, and courts to enforce them, and lawyers to explain them. True law is self-explanatory and self-enforces.

You know, they go on and talk about that more, but I think that that's a, you know, this is the thing about move, right, is that when you read the things that they say, they tend to just make a lot of sense on their face, right? And it tends to be in language that's very accessible to folks. And, you know, this will come up later on, but they were so good at laying these things out that they were able to, you know, really successfully defend themselves multiple times in court, not always, but. kind of famously so in a couple of instances. And they're very good at and still are, to this day, very good at pointing out the contradictions in the system and really being able to expose those and kind of point out the inherent issues, right, with the way that our society is structured. Yeah.

So they believe in firm, self-evident rights and wrongs and have a strong critique of the system. You know, and then this is a key aspect, right? Because this also gets to why they had, confrontations with the state that got as serious as they did is that they're not reformists, right? They see themselves as a revolutionary organization. They both say, we don't believe in this reform world system, the government, the military, industry, and big business. They have historically abused, raped, and bartered life for the sake of money. These rulers and policymakers don't care

who they kill, enslave, cripple, poison, or disease for their quest for money. They have made material wealth a priority over life. Marbles of science and technological so-called advancements all stem from the systems of greed for money and disrespect for life. They go on again, but this is like, you know, it gives you a good sense of their critique. They take it very seriously, and this becomes, you know, one of the issues with move in the 1970s that created supposedly friction with some of their neighbors was, you know, the fact that they have such a respect for life that they don't they won't kill things like rats or mice right you know so they were seen in that era particularly um as like unclean you know things like that and and that became a source of

some friction with neighbors you know i think what's interesting is the degree to which that gets kind of um blown up out of proportion yeah exactly obviously the response to that you know shows that it's completely disproportionate to what the issue is, right? You know, what's interesting too, and I think one of the things that Moved really points out when you look at their history is that we claim to be in a society that's about certain freedoms, right, about freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. And those three freedoms in particular basically represent how they live their lives and the activities that they were always engaged in. And yet, they're also the freedoms for which they were always persecuted for exercising. So, you know,

in that way they also really expose contradictions in the system. Yeah, exactly. You said it yourself. They were ahead of their time in a lot of ways. And one of the ways that I think that they were ahead of their time is like they really started off sort of protesting like zoos and circuses. They really take this idea that that life is sacred and all life needs to be respected. And, you know, that's how they started their thing. And like nowadays, you know, with SeaWorld and all these things sort of behind us, it's sort of taken for granted. But even like zoos, circuses have more or less shut down in the use of animals. But zoos are still very much flourishing. And this is, you know, 40 years ago, they were advocating on behalf of animals in that context. And one thing that you mentioned with

neighbors is that because they love life so much, they would take in any and all stray animals who didn't have a home and that sort of ratcheted up tensions with their neighbors who, I think it's fair to say, and I probably, we'll get into this more later, but it's fair to say that the neighbors were pretty sympathetic with them, but move, they're sort of unapologetic and uncompromising approach to everything, did sort of create some tension as time went on. But I think even when we're going to get into later with the confrontations with police, I still think that they, with all of the worries and concerns and, you know, neighbors being upset about this and that. I think the neighbors were still ultimately sort of sympathetic to them, especially when that conflict with police,

came and they would even, you know, come and help move rebuild, you know, after a particularly violent confrontation with police and the destruction of their home, et cetera. So that sort of tension plays out throughout this discussion, I think. But you mentioned they don't fit very nicely in any political category. And, you know, coming from this left tradition, people might have a knee-jerk, and I know I did a knee-jerk reaction to sort of say, well, this is kind of like anarcho-primitivism. It's, you know, rejecting civilization as a whole. And they're critique of capitalism is sort of nested inside this broader critique of civilization. But, you know, they're also religious and spiritual in their approach to earth. And I know you and I talked a little

bit before we started recording about the word cult and how sometimes the word cult in lieu of an easy political box to put move in, the word cult gets thrown out a lot. So do you want to talk about your feelings about that word and how it's used and how or how not move fits that? Yeah. You know, I don't think it's ever the most helpful word, right? And I think, you know, I'm thinking about the episode you had actually where you had a member of RCP, you know, or the RCU on. And he was talking a little bit about how that gets used in relation to revcom, right? Yep. The thing with the, with that term is like it just becomes a, it's similar to the word terrorist in some regards, right, which gets used against move as well.

You know, it becomes an easy term to use to devalue someone's perspective or to just to devalue people, right? and to suggest that what they're saying has no merit, right, because you think that they're in a cult. And I think part of it, right, is like, I'm not a particularly religious person, but I always think that any new religious group gets labeled as a cult, right? Like every religion that starts, that's sort of the way that it gets branded. And religions do have to start at some point. They all did. I particularly think for people that have some form of faith, that tends to be kind of of a bad faith exercise to label somebody else as a cult. And then for people who are agnostic or atheists, you know, I guess my point in looking at it is it's much more interesting, I think,

to look at what do people actually believe and what do they do and how are they seeking to change the world than it is to label them in some way or another. We can see that even within the left, right, because there's a lot of different groups that call themselves Marxist-Leninist or call themselves Maoists or call themselves anarchists, but what they believe in what they say should be done is often very different from one another. And so it's not, in my mind, it's just not a particularly useful term. But I do think that, you know, if you talk to move members and you read, move texts and things like that, it's clear that John Africa is seen as a, you know, sort of religious figure, right, and a prophetic figure. And they're very open about that. And he provided

sort of the basis for the, you know, the lessons that they follow and how they move forward to this day. Now, obviously, as we'll get into, like, he died in 1985. And the organization is still around in 2018. So, or 2019 now. And so obviously, it's something that has stood the test of time. You know, it hasn't completely collapsed or, you know, left without the leader. And a lot of times with quote-unquote cults, they don't survive that sort of major cataclysmic event if they have one. So I think in some ways that's also kind of a knock on using that term. Yeah.

And I would just add on that the whole concept of a cult, putting aside the idea of like new religions coming up and they're labeled cults because they fall outside of the accepted sphere of what is considered a respectful religion and what isn't. That's all very true and part of this. But I also think the word cult has some specific meanings if we're really trying to pin the label on somebody. And I think a part of a cult, an inherent part of a cult in the pejorative sense in the way it's used, is that there is some level of brainwashing via deceit or manipulation. There's often this sort of abusive tendency to cut off members from their family in the outside world

to make them more dependent on the cult. And ultimately, it's very individualist cults. Like if you think about, you know, the big Colts in the 70s and the 80s, they revolved around one figure, but that figure, if that figure died or whatever that figure said was treated, it's almost like God himself was saying. And a lot of times these individuals would use that power to abuse sexually or physically their members and stuff. And I think on all those accounts, you don't really see that in Move.

Move is collective in that even though they have a figure that started the movement and sort of articulated the movement really well, it's not. not depraved in the way that most other cults are. He was not using his power to abuse anybody or to cut anybody off from family or friends or anything like that. And so on all levels, I think the use of the word cult really fails and is honestly sort of offensive when you start examining move and listening to move even people today and people back then. Very, very articulate, critical thinking, independent-minded human beings. And to call them a cult is sort of degrading in a way that I think is unacceptable. Would you agree with that? I think those are

excellent points. And I think what I would just add to is that there are members that have left move and a lot of them do have some different critiques of it. But at the same time, when you read those critiques or you see those things, it doesn't have the same character as people who have left the cult. And it doesn't, they don't describe the sort of things you're talking about. Right. So they don't, they don't feel as though they were brainwashed, right? They chose to believe something and organize with a group of people around those beliefs. And, you know, maybe they disagreed on some tactics. Maybe they had individual issues with different members. They actually have a very strong stance against any form of abuse, too. So that's all I would say with

relation to that. Yeah, I think a lot of the core tenets sort of undermine its ability to become abusive and cultists in a systemic way because their beliefs are just about respect all forms of life. I mean, you can't really, you know, make that into a horrific, abusive situation where, like, respect even the plants and the ants on the ground. I mean, you know, it doesn't work that way. But, you know, move as we mentioned is still an active organization in Philadelphia. And you've organized alongside them because you're active in Philadelphia. So what have your personal experiences, if any, with them been like? And how, if at all, has that organization, you know, evolved over time? Yeah. So I've only moved back to Philadelphia

within the last couple years. And I'm still kind of a fledgling organizer on the scene. So, you know, I just want to caveat this by saying, I'm not an expert. I don't have close relationships with move members. But having said that, they're, they're very active on the scene, right? So I've been to protests around, you know, on the right of return and for Palestinians that they've been at. I do some organizing around, you know, the current kind of campaign to Free Mumia. They're active in that campaign as well. I've been to events about the move nine and supportive of that. Obviously, those are their events, right? So a whole bunch of move members are at those events. And, you know, my impressions of them are that they're incredibly kind,

that they're really good comrades, and that they're still struggling, right? They're still participating in these revolutionary struggles, whether they're anti-imperialist struggles or whether their struggles for the freedom of their political prisoners, which we'll get into a little bit later, but they're active members of the scene. They have a great amount of wisdom and they're generous with their time, right? They'll talk to you about things. I say that partly to say, like, a lot of the characterizations of them that you see from the late 70s or early 80s that they're overly confrontational or things like that. I haven't seen that. I will say, like, they're great protesters, right? And they're not afraid to speak their minds.

They do use profanity, which is something that kind of famously comes up in the videos and things like that that you see, but they don't shy away from that either, you know, in sort of describing things in the terms that they deserve to be described, basically. Yeah, I think Ramona said in one of her interviews, she says, this entire system is vulgar to the core. So when we talk about the system, of course, we're vulgar too. Yeah. No, absolutely. You know, and so they're not afraid to confront city council people. they're not afraid to confront the district attorney or the mayor and these things are consistent throughout their history they're still that way to this day but you know like i said just in terms

of interactions with them on a on a day-to-day level they're just comrades out here that are trying to participate in the the revolutionary movements that we're trying to still cultivate right yeah so that's how i see them yeah you know studying this stuff i remember that uh combat liberalism by Mao. And one of the things that Mao defines and critiques as liberalism is a sort of passivity in the face of the status quo or in the face of challenges to it. And it's like even if you're a revolutionary, you know, sometimes you can just because of social awkwardness, not speak your full mind or sort of water down your message. And, you know, that sort of passivity or that neutrality is a form of liberalism that Mao encourages us to combat. And if there's a perfect example of not

falling prey to that sort of passivity, it is moved. Because, Like I said before, they're so uncompromising and so unapologetic in how they go about things. And it does ruffle feathers, even people that are sympathetic to them. But I think it also really sets them apart and shows them how seriously they take this fight for liberation. It's not something they do on the weekends. It's not something they just talk about but never act. It is a part of who they are. And it's every step they take and every word they say is sort of built into that structure.

And I think it's sort of admirable. You don't see that very often. and to see somebody do it. You know, I think the Black Panthers had that too. They didn't mince words. They didn't tone it down for anybody. They said exactly what was on their mind. And that brings people to your side.

For example, the Democrats today, you know, one of the big critiques is that they're so spineless, that they're already given up half the game before the Republicans even sit down to negotiate, etc. And this is the exact opposite of that. It's like, this is what we believe and you're going to know exactly what we believe every step of the way.

And I don't know. I find that admirable. Yes, he said, we will drag them out by the scruster their neck. He answered, Did you ask him what if they don't, what if they resist the scruff of the neck? Did you make him go down in detail to say, well, yeah, if they resist, I'm going to kill him. Did you make him put out his intentions? No.

You don't never question Rizzo, and Rizzo is questionable. That man ain't told the truth since he got in office. That man ain't been agreeable since he got the name of mayor. We're saying it's about time did y'all start putting the truth. Don't question the person that's telling the truth. Question the person that's telling the lie. We're saying we ain't talking about hurting nobody. We ain't talking about killing off nobody's religion.

Rizzo is talking about religion persecution. He's talking about putting us in a gas up. He's talking about killing our baby, genocide like they did the Indians, like they did the Jews. We're saying it's about time that the news media start questioning Rizzo's reference. One other thing I would say about them in Philadelphia is I think that a lot of us really look up to them, right? They've been through some amazing struggles, some horrible struggles, right? And they're still here and they're still active. There's nothing I can add to them, right?

I just learn from things that they bring to the table. Definitely. Okay, so before we move forward and get into these confrontations and the history here, can you talk about the broader history of police violence against black people in Philadelphia specifically as those realities, I think, form a valuable historical context for everything else that we're about to talk about after this question? Yeah, this is tremendously important. And it's really important even to this day, I think, where you have a quote-unquote progressive, district attorney in Larry Krasner because you really can't confront all of the

institutional issues within Philadelphia without understanding the deep legacy of racism within the city and understanding that it's ongoing. You have decades, right, of really intense racist activity by the state here and that that has a tremendous impact on the community and on people within it. It's fair to say Philadelphia has a systemic issue, a systemic problem with racist policing and police brutality. Police brutality has always been highly racialized. I'm going to share some different findings from some reports.

So in 1981, which is like kind of a perfect time period here, right? Because the first interaction we're going to talk about, the first confrontation happened in 78 and the second one happened in 85. So this is right in the middle of that era. The U.S. Commission on Human Rights published a report on basically racist police practices within the U.S. And it really focused on Philadelphia significantly. So it noted that the hiring practices were racially biased in both the hiring and promotion of white police. It noted that there was a lack of a clear and restrictive deadly force policy in Philadelphia

and that that may have been responsible for many incidents of apparent misuse of deadly force by police there. It's telling that we're still dealing with those situations around the U.S. so many years later, but this was very big deal in Philadelphia at the time so much so that usually the U.S. doesn't have commissions on human rights that talk about things like this, right? For example, a review of 32 incidents of police officers shootings of civilians in Philadelphia showed that all victims were male, 75% were black. Only one of the 32 was a white man. Eighteen of them were 21 or younger. Four of them were under the age of 15. My God. 19 of the 32 were fleeing and unarmed and one was shot well handcuffed. One was just a bystander laying on the ground that was shot by police. Of several, the police department claimed were armed. There were eyewitness testimonies that disputed this.

So there could have been even more people that were unarmed that were shot in this. And the most egregious unit within the Philadelphia PD were Philadelphia stakeout officers. And this becomes important later on because they are key figures in both the 78 and 85 confrontations. They were most frequently among the deadly force cases. What they would do this unit is they would pose in plain clothes and try to set up situations where people would attempt to rob them. So they would like get in a wheelchair and hang out in the subway station for hours and wait for somebody to try to rob them and if they did then a second officer would jump out yell police and then if the if the victim ran they would shoot at the victim you know i mean i think anybody can understand

how extortive that is and who wouldn't run in that type of situation right so it was that was a common practice so frank rizzo is an important figure he's still an important figure in philadelphia in that he is a very much a dividing figure. There is still a massive statue to him, which there's been a big movement to try to get torn down. The current mayor has said he's going to tear it down, but then he says he won't do it until after he gets reelected. The approval ratings of the statue are like right around 50%.

So you have all of these predominantly white people that want to see the statue, a lot of Irish, Italian, other kind of white ethnic, immigrant groups, the descendants of those basically, right, that make up a lot of his base of support. And then you have the black people and the brown people within the city who overwhelmingly want it down because they see it as a legacy of racist terror that's celebrated. So he joined the Philadelphia Police Department in 1943. His actions throughout his career reveal a legacy of extreme violence, racism, and homophobia. Rizzo was police commissioner from 1968 to 173.

and then he was mayor from 71 to 80. So he was mayor through the first major confrontation with move. But, you know, in that whole period, which move was starting up, he was either police commissioner or mayor during that time. The U.S. Commission on Human Rights Report also cited dramatic racial disparities in hiring and promotion of white police officers over black police officers. A class action lawsuit against Philadelphia revealed that during Rizzo's time as police commissioner, black officers dropped from 27 and a half percent of new recruits down to seven and a half

percent. So a dramatic drop. He basically stopped, either stopped recruiting black officers or black people knew that they didn't want to be a part of that black, that police force, right? You can read that one of two ways. In 1950s, Rizzo led raids on beatnik hangouts and clubs for LBGTQ people and interracial couples. Sometimes his tactics got him in trouble, like a time when he and fellow officers chased down and beat five naval officers in 1964 as deputy police commissioner he took control of the riot squad amid a riot that took place in north philadelphia so that is the columbia um Columbia street riots i think is what they're called um they're pretty famous there was a an incident where basically a black woman was was basically manhandled right pulled out of a car

And the rumor mill got started that it was a pregnant black woman that they had killed. That did turn out to be an exaggeration, but of course it was based in all of the racist activity that was going on by the police force at the time. And so a riot ensued. And he was part of putting down that riot. And although nobody died in the riot, 341 people were injured and 774 people were arrested. So it was a massive, a massive right and very violent behalf of the Philadelphia police. In the 1960s, he organized counterinsurgency within the Philadelphia Police Department against civil rights activists. So famously against SNCC and the Black Panthers, he organized a lot of raids.

He organized a raid against a SNCC office in 1966, where they claimed they discovered two and a half sticks of dynamite, which has always been denied by SNCC activists. And if people know SNCC, I mean, they did have some revolutionary rhetoric, particularly later on when Stokely Carmichael and A. Trapp Brown kind of took over. But they weren't known as the type of organization that would have dynamite. For the most part, they were a nonviolent. I mean, nonviolent isn't the name student nonviolent coordinating committee. So as commissioner in 1967, Rizzo led a crew of officers to school administration building,

where a crowd of high school students was protesting in favor of a black history curriculum. Rizzo's present precise wording is disputed, but local newspapers reported that Rizzo told cops whom he suggested were being attacked to get their black asses in reference to the students. The results were brutal with dozens of students beaten in what observers described as a police riot. Cops chased two black girls right outside the window of the administration building where we were looking out the school's school districts then. public relations manager remembered years later and proceeded to beat the crap out of them with a nightstick. Right. So there you have like a school district public relations manager.

And anybody who knows anything about school districts or public relations knows that that's not the type of story that would usually come out of them unless they, they absolutely were appalled by the treatment because they're usually there to spin an event in the favor of the city. So these incidents solidified Rizzo's reputation along with the 1970 raid against the black Black Panther officers that ended with the men being strip search before newspaper photographs an incident that the Panthers later sued and won over. He stated that the Black Panthers should be strung up. This is actual warfare.

Those are quotes from him. In 1967, his approval ratings stood at 84% across the city, which means he had supporters across racial lines. But after the police violence at the school, letters to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which had primarily white readership, were two. to one in favor of Rizzo. The letters to the African-American newspaper, the Tribune, were three-to-one against him. So that's really, that's kind of the turning point in terms of public perception of Rizzo is 67, which is, of course, before his attacks on the Black Panthers, once he has that

basically leads that police riot against those student protesters. That's when you can really see the clear divisions between how black people felt about his administration versus how white people felt about it. Yeah. He said, if the prisons are crowded, we need to more prisons. Let's build them. So that was in 1968 that he said that, which I think is really prophetic. When you look at a lot of historians, people like Elizabeth Hinton put the sort of rise of mass incarceration in that period, right? And it makes sense to those of us on the left, right? 67, 68 were really some of the most revolutionary periods of organizing within the left, particularly among black radicals, and that's also the time period in which

mass incarceration really started to be floated and seen as a solution for how do we deal with all of these, quote-unquote, social problems. So a decade later, leading up to Philadelphia PD's first assault on the move of house, he bragged on national television that the department's armory had grown from a mere six shotguns when he took over as commissioner to saying, now we're equipped to fight wars, we can invade Cuba and win. Jesus. You know, I think that statement is also important because it shows that Rizzo intended to use his police force like an army.

He talked about them and treated them then that way. And his primary targets were always the left, black radicals in particular, and also LBGTQ people. Just as one more example of his flagrant homophobia and violent nature, during his reelection bid in 1978, he stated. he stated and you know it's like unbelievable this stuff like this is on the record but he said just wait until after november you'll have a front row seat because i'm going to make attila the hun look like a faggot and pardon me for saying that that was a literal quote the

shameless just with cameras popping away and everything huh yeah yeah so i mean i think in one way it shows also the times what what people were able to say but at the same time you look at it and people have made this equivalency but you know he was really a predecessor for people like Donald Trump, right, like stoking this really hateful rhetoric against marginalized groups and pointing at them and saying these are the people that are the problems of our society, basically. Yeah, that open cruelty, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And then according to a separate human rights watch report, during Rizzo's tenure as mayor,

Philadelphia police officers made no more arrests than New York City, but were 37 times more likely to shoot unarmed citizens for nonviolent crimes. Christ. That's like unbelievable, right? Because it's not like anybody thinks that New York City's police are like the model, right, for good policing. But it shows how quick they were to shoot first and ask questions later. You know, I'll just say a couple other things. They were well known. There was a well known and documented and reported upon code of silence amongst police. It shows up later when we get to discussions about the move commission and the grand juries that happened because most police refused. testify about the raid and about the bombing in 1985 as well. And I think that that's important because some did, but, you know, they were kind of the outliers and they were really vilified for even talking about it. But there was a strict sort of code that, you know, we don't talk about what goes on in the streets, basically. And so, yeah, I mean, the last thing that I just add as a personal note is that, you know, organizing in Philly, you know, I go to demonstration,

about police brutality, about political prisoners move, et cetera. And always you have some middle-aged black person will inevitably walk up to us at some point, right? And we'll give a nod or make a comment about telling their own story of the time that they were, you know, beaten or just incredibly harassed by Philadelphia police during that era. You know, and I don't say that to say that it doesn't still go on because I know that those things still do happen. But it's, it's kind of amazing the degree that, you know, you can just be out with, you know, some fairly radical notion, right, about, like, abolish the police or something like that. And you'll just have, like, somebody who's probably a liberal, right, just walk up to

you, have their own personal story of being terrorized by these guys. It's just so widespread. It's a historical legacy, but it's still ongoing. Hey, yo, one cop does it. Two cop does it. Free cop does it, and fourth cop watching, somebody taping, evening news playing, 20 minutes later, big chief makes statement. Cop gets suspended, smiles at arraignment, because judge just drop the charges, rewind and replay it. So when I scream from the police, that's just to grab you, then I break the statement down over something that you could clap to.

Problem at the chorus, like it's incest with the courts, force beating people to prisons that's private, and of course the cops, play your role in keeping you on. parole to send you right back on a tear to the yard into the hole Keep that piggy on patrol Tell them fears how to control If you ain't never lived here How the fuck you're supposed to know Then again a problem's bigger

Than just crooked ass piss Got the game already playing Keep them killing our kids And we keep going Don't stop running They keep selling We don't want it So close to it

Almost found away They keep coming We keep yelling We don't want it Almost better This thing's bound to brain I mean of course we need police But not police the way we know it

These take it right and fucking With you first thing in the morning Treat you like a criminal Don't pat you down at your school Arrest you over a quota Over racist ass rules The officer is to oversee A power trip a black man

Only thing that's left to fill some power Over a black man brown man knowing no badge man you are at you could give a fuck about these little kids where you patrol at imagine trying to function not trusting those to protect you pay it to protect you so you have to protect you who do you expect to last week they tried to get you hem you up and arrest you citation issued i mean fucker ran the cop too if he hassling shit and fuck the walking dead cause rick is a pig pepper spraying college kids while sitting in peaceful protest you coward motherfucker you should be beaten in the open while we

Keep going, don't stop running They keep selling We don't want it So goes to it Almost found a way It's not surprising On one level that Philadelphia is so racist And that symbolically

And literally, it played Such a crucial role In the founding of this white supremacist Genocidal State. I mean, the founding fathers Philadelphia is where they I think they drafted The Declaration of Independence, etc.

So it's really, it emanates out of this spot and the white supremacy that is inherent in this system. It's not surprising that it explodes in Philadelphia. And I think it was actually Frederick Douglass, if I'm remembering this correctly. Frederick Douglass said that Philadelphia was the most racist city in the United States. And that was in Douglas's time, which is saying quite a bit. So, you know, it really can't understate the level of just systemic and brutal, violent, murderous racism that existed in Philadelphia and you know I'm sure still does I've never been to Philadelphia but you know it's not it's not hard to imagine that it still exist on some level yeah and I mean I

think like I'll just give an example there's still like these mummers parades every year and every year there's like some like stupid blackface portion of the parade you know and it's the mummers like I don't exactly understand their tradition or whatever but it's basically a lot of like you know different white European immigrant groups that get together and get drunk you know, it's not surprising, right, that there's always some sort of racist vestige that exists there as well. Right. On the other side, the one thing that I will add in Philadelphia's favor is that there's

there's also a great history of radical organizing, of abolitionist organizing, certainly. It was one of the early cities that had a large free black population. And so these two polls are very much in tension and it's very much contested, right? I just think that's important to note because there is that there is absolutely a very strong racist reactionary history. And then there's also a very beautiful, powerful history kind of against those same movements, right? And that makes sense as well. Yeah, it's completely dialectical. But yeah, so the two main areas that we're going to hit is the confrontation in 78 and then the bombing in 85.

But getting to that, I think it's important to sort of establish how. you know, move came across the radar of the state and how that conflict developed through the early in mid-70s, culminating partially in 78 and culminating, you know, brutally in 85. But yeah, just like giving the history leading up to 78, I think is important for move specifically. Yeah. So, you know, they started out and they grew throughout the 1970s. They lived in a house without electricity. They were carpenters. They shoveled snow and swept the street in their neighborhood. they ran a car wash in front of their house in Palleton, which you'll, you know, if you read different stuff on them, like that was the kind of, a lot of people would go and get their cars washed

by move members down there. That was like, a lot of them didn't work, right? So there's a, there's a few members that worked, but because they had such a strong critique of the system, that was kind of seen as like a reformist position within move, which is not to say they, you know, this is where I think it's interesting to point out is that they're not like so rigid on things that they're uncompromising on everything right and so for instance they generally eat raw food that you know fruits vegetables primarily some raw meat as well in this era i don't know if they still do but they also they allowed their members to eat system food or distortion they'd call it and and the same with with work like there were some members that held down jobs they had some members that they claim were underground that

worked in different parts of the city. They've even said perhaps that some worked in the police department to get them information. It's a complex organization in that way. But nevertheless, they ran the car wash and they did these other activities in the community, things actually for the betterment of their community like shoveling snow, sweeping the streets, running a car wash. They helped homeless people find housing in this era. They assisted elderly people with home repairs. They intervene to prevent violence in the community and help formerly incarcerated people meet parole requirements through a rehabilitation program. So in terms of praxis, right, it was like really solid stuff that was going on early on. They also really sought out public forums to debate their ideology against other people, particularly folks from the left or, you know, some of them like different religious figures, people like Dick Gregory, Alan Watts, Jane Fonda.

Julian Bond, Ritchie Havens, Walter Mondale, Roy Wilkins, Buckminster Filler, and Cesar Chavez. And they state that none could refute the teachings of John Africa, which, you know, I mean, obviously that's their perspective. But I think also when you read the things that John Africa said primarily, they're pretty hard to refute because they tend to follow a very clear sort of logic. So, as you mentioned before, the liberation, you know, animal liberation work around zoos and pet stores was a big part of their early work at that time. But, you know, and this is why partly we laid out that piece on the Philadelphia PD and Rizzo. You know, one of the key issues for them became protesting police brutality and the racism of the police force in Philadelphia. and they demonstrated frequently against police abuses of power and brutality under the Rizzo administration. Their work in this area was requested by other community groups and organizations, which of course

makes sense. They're willing to speak their minds totally freely without any filter, basically. And so they'll condemn the system in the strongest words and the words that it deserves. They really ramped it up. And their position, which, I totally believe, right? It makes total logical sense is that police began a concerted campaign of harassment and repression towards move during this time frame. And the city records and the arrest records really do support this as well. So police would frequently arrest move members for protest activity,

charging them with disorderly conduct or any other local ordinance they could use. In 1973, MOVE had 10 different demonstrations. There were no arrests. in 74, they had 93 demonstrations and members were arrested 37 times for charges like disorderly conduct, making terroristic threats, which in Philadelphia is a really low bar. I know some kids who've been charged with that, generally just using harsh language, right, against somebody you're telling them you're going to do something to them. Sure.

In 1975, demonstrations dropped significantly down to 38, but the arrests continued to skyrocket. They went up to 142 arrests in 75. So you see over that timeframe that move increased their activity, it increased the rest, but then even when they dropped their activity down a little bit, the arrests continue to go up. And really all of those violations, when you talk about what they're related to, they're really related to what people would consider free speech or free assembly issues. There's a lot of different discussion on the left these days about free speech, particularly, you know, in terms of trying to shut down hate speech or speech from fascists.

But I just think that it's important to acknowledge that these are, these are rights that people allegedly have, right? And it's not, it's not the other people we're trying to stop move from saying these things. It's that the police were literally arresting them for saying them. You know, move was always an organization that taught revolution and a revolution that meant it must overthrow the current system. However, much of what pushed move towards a conflict confrontational posture also seems to have been this repressive nature with police, all of these arrests, all of this involvement in the court system and the things that came related to that. So here's some really important examples that move sites.

Sure. In May 18th, 1974, move states that leasing and Jeanette Africa, both pregnant at the time, were so brutally beaten by Rizzo's police that they both had miscarriages. in April 29th, 1975, Alberta Africa, who was John Africa's wife, was pregnant at the time, was beaten by five police officers until she miscarried. And then I'm going to read one section from Moves website in relation to Life Africa, because this incident culminates from those other two, but it also kind of kicks a lot of things sort of into a different gear in terms of how Move starts to interact. So Janine gave birth naturally. This is from Moves' website. So Janine gave birth naturally at home to Life Africa on March 8th, 1976.

Three weeks later, seven Moved members were returning home from a stint in jail. Officers in at least 10 cars pulled up to the house, claiming the move was creating a disturbance. Chuck Africa told officers to lead them alone and was then grabbed and beaten, setting off other officers to beat the six other movement. Janina Africa was trying to protect her husband Phil Africa when she was grabbed by a cop thrown to the ground with three-week-old Life Africa in her arms and stomped until she was nearly unconscious. The baby's skull was crushed.

Lou held a press conference the following day explaining how the police had murdered life and displayed a nightstick that was broken into over Robert Africa's head and an officer's hat that was left at the house. because life did not have a birth certificate the city denied the claim and so move had to prove that life was murdered by inviting politicians over to view the body charges brought against the police officers who murdered life were immediately dismissed despite neighborhood witnesses the city instead pursued charges against the six men who were beaten that night no officer was ever charged any crime for this infanticide the city thoroughly contests this version of events, which I think is important to say, even though I don't know how much we want to sort of validate that. The matter of fact is that Life Africa died, how he died is disputed. But it certainly

led to, along with those other events that I mentioned, to an escalation where Move began to do armed demonstrations in front of their house. And, you know, I don't know if we want to say anything else here because at this point we would start get into the sort of discussion about the 78 confrontation. Yeah, no, that's fine. Just a couple points before we move on is one of the reasons why Life Africa didn't, wasn't technically recognized or whatever, didn't have a birth certificate is because part of Moves philosophy is that they reject their enemy schools and their enemies hospitals. They don't send their children to either. They do, you know, at home, natural births, et cetera. And so there's not going to be any documentation from the state saying, you know,

this little child is alive because they've never engaged with the state's institutions, i.e. the hospital, to have that. So, you know, given that, I think that gives the state some wiggle room to deny that this happened. But I don't think it's at all surprising or, you know, would it all surprise anybody to know that they actually did do that and that I, you know, I'm obviously very prone to believe move in this instance. The state saw that, you know, without a birth certificate, it's hard to even prove that this, this baby was alive in the system. And so they had wiggle room there and they took advantage of it. And you'll see, you'll see again in this next question how police just completely lie and pin crimes on move that the police themselves actually committed.

I do want to say one thing quickly about the free speech thing that you mentioned. I think, you know, the reason why we don't believe in free speech for fascists is because, you know, we're materialist. We believe that free speech as a right does not exist in a vacuum. And in a white supremacist, genocidal society like we have in the United States, States, what is and isn't considered free speech, what is and isn't given, you know, a platform and what is and isn't contested depends on your political spectrum. And I could totally imagine fascist of one sort, you know, speaking just as vociferously and angrily as move on the far right and not getting a fraction of the punitive attention from the state that move drew, because

move were overwhelmingly black. And that plays a huge role in all of this. And again, you know, if you have any doubts about the police, their ability to just fucking lie and brutalize innocent people, even children, just look into the Co-and-Cell program, look at how they destructured the Black Panther Party, look at what they did to Fred Hampton, laying in bed next to his pregnant fiancé. I mean, these motherfuckers are shameless in every single way. So, you know, it's not surprising at all that they would engage in this level of just disgusting, grotesque violence against innocent human beings and against children who can't

even fight back. I mean, that's what this system is, whether it's in Vietnam, Or it's in, you know, the city of Philadelphia, that same brutal fucking system is that play and has the same disregard for non-white life domestically as it does a brother. The devil is enlisted in a Bible page. He was choking Eric Garner took that brother's life away.

He put bullet holes inside the Trayvon. He shot Oscar Grant right in his back with his cuffs on. He shot Michael Brown and left him dying in the street. He beat Rodney King, Conaguer, back up on his feet. He took Sandra Blan and fake. The suicide in the jail He murdered all concerning over DVD sales He took Freddy Gray

Then he took Freddy Gray He jumped out of cart and shot Camille While he played He murdered Earl Hayes Chopinando in his car Same devil's in a desert Still an oil in the war Same devil got you blinded

So you front in your racks That shit is whack You're the all-lives matter of rap Huh Yo shut the freeways down I give a fuck if you were stuck sitting in traffic right now My motherfucking brother, man

You don't give a fuck You stuck in traffic You gonna hear us Or you gonna motherfucking fear us But the system coming down If everybody don't get their fair share Motherfuckers Talk that shit, bam

Talk that shit on the behalf of the people Ha ha Yeah No color All these my motherfucking brothers Worker class motherfucker Villas Ville

VLNS Your fucking bastards Pray for the devil So moving on to 78, can you explain what happened in 1978, which incidentally was one decade after the assassination of Fred Hampton, who the move nine were, you know, coming out of 78 and how that trial and general experience further shaped the organization overall? Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad we're taking this perspective because I don't think you can really have a good conversation about 85 without 78 and then understanding what led up to 78, you know. So the 78 confrontation I really see as related also right to the death of life Africa and all of this police brutality that MOVE was facing. You know, in 77 MOVE started to demonstrate outside of their house basically armed with guns, you know, or apparently armed with rifles, basically. The first time they did this was because there was a heavy police presence that entered the neighborhood and MOVE believed they had come to enforce an eviction against them.

And it's possible that's the case. That's not sort of the state narrative, but in whatever the version of events, right, move were responding to a set of a large police presence that were entering right into their neighborhood. In response to that, they simply went outside. They basically, you know, you can see videos of it online. They basically drilled, you know, with weapons. It wasn't, in my opinion, it's not super aggressive, right? it's more a demonstration, right, that we're armed and we're here to defend ourselves, basically.

It's an important event because it's the first time that MOVE appears armed like that, right? Prior to that, that wasn't how people saw MOVE members. They saw more of the vocal demonstration, the different actions, the protests, all of the other work that we talked about earlier. But this was basically the first time that they appeared as an armed force that was preparing to defend themselves. So this led to an armed standoff between a few move members and over 200 Philadelphia police officers that went on for a few hours. The incident ended without violence, but it set up a year-long siege of the house where police were regularly stationed outside of the house. Police decided that they weren't going to allow that, right? But they were also, you know, I think a little bit afraid to just try to like go up into the house at that point.

So anyways, on March 1st of 1978, Rizzo got a court order from Judge DeBona to put a total blockade of the move house, shutting off utilities and denying city water to the property. I mean, this is like such an extreme thing. You don't read about this type of stuff very often or hear about it very often, right? Of like the city actually taking the action to like cut off water to a house where they know that women and a lot of children live. And I think that that's something I just want to say for a second for people to

understand too because a lot of the characterization of move gets treated as though it's a group of adults that are involved in political organizing right yeah that's that's not the case right they're their their family organization they have a there are a lot of children that were removed there are a lot of women that were removed um adult males are actually a minority presence within the organization um and i think that that's that's a really important thing for people to understand especially as we get into like how police characterize them later on and some of the stuff that goes on during the sieges and assaults on the houses is that um these things were happening against houses that were predominantly women and children that were living there yeah anyway so he cut off the

utilities cut off the water um he set up fencing around the house to prevent people from bringing food in so basically he was just trying to like starve them out right get them to um essentially evict themselves from the house so that you wouldn't have to deal with, you know, confronting them directly. And it's kind of, it's kind of amazing because the parallels to like a Cuba or Venezuela, right? I mean, what's the tactic? You put the embargo, you sanction them, you cut them off from supplies and trade routes with the rest of the world as much as you can. You increase the depravity and poverty inside the borders to create a crisis where you can then go in and then, you know, act violently against the organization that you don't like. And that's, that's U.S.

imperial 101 sort of tactics and we see it happening interestingly one of the first times that I can think of happening inside the U.S. itself actually the government shutting off water and blockading an entire block to go to war with black folks in that area it's just it's just I mean it's repulsive and it's just fascinating that there's those those imperial dynamics happening abroad as well absolutely you know so after this move had an attorney at the time right the basically a settlement agreement with the city they agreed to hand over their weapons and allowed police to search their house you know it's really interesting because when the city goes to search the house and takes the weapons all the weapons that they find are inoperable right so

we don't fire right which you know is why i sort of said they appeared to be weapons earlier on and that that's another sort of contested area within this right but the truth is that they did the the weapons that were recovered by police were inoperable again to sort of show that like move wanted to to make a presence that they were defending themselves but they weren't interested in in acting violently towards police right to provoke something there and basically part of the settlement also was it permitted police to arrest every member of move that had an existing warrant which was several of them the city agreed to arrest each member on their own reconnaissance the warrants would have included people right who were in that contested event earlier

where life was was killed because they said they put out charges on all six move members who were beaten in that event d a rendel who's an interesting political figure who shows up multiple times through this but ends up being mayor later on and then eventually governor of philadelphia and he's still a prominent political figure in philadelphia he was the the d a day at the time He agreed to expedite proceedings against the move people in jail currently and recommend that those move members be released on their own reconnaissance as well. So basically, you know, they're going to give over their weapons, allow police to search the home. They were going to agree to be arrested. The state was going to agree to basically let them out on bail, right, without charging them bail.

So that was the sort of arrangement. And the last clause of it was that they were supposed to vacate the house. by August 1st. This is where it gets complicated, right? Because August 1st, they're not able to find a new residence before August 1st. And I think it's easy to understand why that might be difficult for them, right? This is a, you know, there's a lot of reporting that's going on about move at the time. They're very well known. And the press is not favorable, generally, right? So it's not really an organization that a lot of people necessarily want to sell property to or to rent to.

So it's easy to understand why they might have had difficulty meeting a strict deadline of when they were supposed to vacate the house. But, you know, the agreement and started in good faith and basically on August 1st, that's when things took a dramatic turn. As soon as they couldn't find another place,

Judge DeBona signed 21 arrest warrants against all the move members that were in the house. So that's what starts it, right? This is what, but basically causes the confrontation is, is these arrest warrants, there was this agreement that move met all the terms of the agreement except moving out of the house, and basically the police department in this time prepared a confrontation. Basically, what they're going to do is just level the house with everybody in it, make it completely unlivable and

eventually demolish it into rubble, and then force them basically out. and obviously arrest the members that had the 21 members that had warrants. So that was their goal, the police's goal. And they showed up with bulldozers that, you know, I think it's interesting. One of the things in watching this stuff archivably is that you note, like, obviously you didn't have SWAT teams in this era that had, like, the full armor, the, you know, the helmets, the tanks,

like all of the stuff that they have now. But you certainly see sort of the origins of that, right? Because you see, you know, in this case they took bulldozers and put like, you know, homemade armor on them basically and and other heavy equipment, you know, back hose, things like that. And they basically approach to tear down both some kind of like bunkers and different things that Move had set up on their property, but also to basically tear off the front of the house. Then they had SQRTs, which are like these big water cannons. And they were just going to launch tear gas in and fire thousands of gallons of water into the house

and basically flush everybody out. That was the police's strategy, you know. You know, you can watch this online. I mean, that's the one thing that I'm glad, you know, within the sort of coverage of both of these confrontations, that there's a there's a decent amount i mean i wish they had every angle and you could see everything but there is a decent amount of footage of the actual confrontation so people should watch that and be able to you know look at it themselves and really quick jared you'll probably

get to this in a bit here um but just the idea of you know finally having footage of this event you know that that technology is coming to the fore etc and i think here also you see the first real like Rodney King-esque beating of Delbert Africa caught on camera. And I'm sure you'll get into that, but I just wanted to kind of lay the groundwork for that. Like that was, I think, one of the first really videotaped police beatings in American history that got a lot of coverage. Yeah, that's absolutely true, right? And I think that one of the things that's really weaved throughout all of this narrative, right, is the lack of accountability for the police as they participate in these different activities right and that everything that they do um they do with impunity and and that

becomes the case with with delbert africa as well um with the beating of delbert africa so and this is weird to me but i don't know if it i don't know how much of it is intentional and how much of it is just sort of bad tactical stuff police are stationed like weirdly all around they're not positioned well if if it becomes a firefight at some point basically and so at some point in the confrontation right after all the tear gas, all the water, some police, they actually get into the house after the front of it's removed and they basically clear the upstairs and the main floor and there's nobody in them. They come out and at some point a shot fires off. And it's very contested as to who fired the first shot. Move states that they never fired any

shots if you watch the footage you know it's a it's there's so much fire going on that it is hard sometimes to really like make good sense of what's going on but whatever the case multiple police and firefighters end up getting shot one ends up getting killed um there are multiple journalists and other eyewitnesses who say including you know a guy who's now a temple professor like stuff like that you know, that say that the shot that killed officer ramp, who's the police officer died, came from behind police line, that, you know, that there were other police back up there or shark shooters or whatever, and that that was where the shot came from. I'll get into sort of moves defenses, but regardless, all these shots rang out,

eventually there's kind of a lull, and move women, try to start to get some of the children out, and basically wave the right white flag, right? because they don't want to get killed so the move members come out of the house they all surrender unarmed they all surrender peacefully and at that point

as you notice when Delbert Africa gets beaten just brutally brutally go watch the video it will make your stomach turn yeah yeah I mean they're hitting them with their helmets they're kicking them in the groin in the face like it's it's brutal fucking cowards and like you say

it is it is reminiscent of like Rodney King feeding. So all of that happened, that part, like you say, it's live. People can watch it. You know, police complained after the fact. Yeah, they went straight to like an FOP meeting and they were pissed at leadership for how it was all set up. They claimed also that they had, they had Uzi's and Mac 10s, basically, which they said were way too inaccurate over the range of the conflict.

So, you know, even within that, like police narrative sort of line up that. They weren't set up properly, and they probably were suggesting that you had inaccurate arms in a conflict like that, you know, is suggesting that friendly fire was probably an issue. Yeah. So there were weapons found by police after the raid, move cites several issues in relation to those weapons, and I'll go through those, like, line by line. But Rizzo would state that it was for people like this that they needed to bring back the death penalty. he said put them in the electric chair all pulled the switch one one police officer was down and the system was out for blood yeah and he said that on camera in front of a bunch of police is that correct i think that's correct i think it was like i think i saw that footage yeah yeah i think it's

actually in one of the press conferences after the event that's right so what happens is there are 11 members that end up getting charged in some capacity um a couple of them there's a separate trial and they weren't there's a weird thing with a couple of them like they weren't moved members so they treated a little differently in it but anyway um for nine of them right which becomes the move nine this is the important trial they go to trial they essentially defend themselves i think there's a court appointed attorney but they don't they basically don't utilize them but they bring witnesses um and they make their arguments and and these are their arguments as it relates to it i think they're important to hear um so no more

move members were armed when they were arrested is point one the gun the police claim killed ramp bore no fingerprints from any move members and these are just to back this up these are not just claims but these are actually these are the police don't actually dispute these points yeah right um or the state doesn't paraffin tests for gunpowder residue on move members came back negative ramp was shot in the back of the head and the bullet traveled down through his body given the move was in the basement of the palatine house basically move states that it's physically impossible right for that sort of trajectory to exist there were moved witnesses including three journalists a neighbor a student and a city negotiator who stated that the first shots were fired from across the street behind

where police were positioned not from the move house move asked why the guns were so clean if they were supposedly coming from a muddy basement that was full of you know water and and mess from tear gas from thousands of gallons of water, you know, all of that. And the guns were not kept in a proper evidence locker. So that's an important piece too. Like, all of this stuff went into like police custody

basically. And it, there's weird things that happen in the 85 bombing too, but basically like what's pointed is like there's terrible practices within the Philadelphia Police Department at the time in terms of like chain of evidence, forensics, medical examiner,

all of these practices were were horrendous at the time and led to, like, just bad practices. I interviewed Mike Africa Jr. recently for another piece, and so his parents were Mike Africa, senior, and Debbie Africa, who were both part of the move nine, both arrested, you know, in connection to this confrontation. And one of the points that he makes and move points out, which I think is so important,

is that after they were all arrested, the city bulldozed the entire house, shipped it up and put it in a, like a dump truck, right, and drove it out of there, right? So all of this evidence, right? If you had a scene where there was just a violent confrontation between police and a radical organization and a police officer was killed, police and firemen were shot, and rather than preserving all of the evidence of this building, you completely destroy. all of it. You know, what sense does that make? And moreover, it was within, I heard that it was

within a couple hours of the incident. And, you know, going back to, you know, a decade previous 1968, we just had an episode about Fred Hampton and what happened with the Chicago PD. They had a gunfight with the Black Panthers in which Hampton was killed. They claimed that it was mutual combat and that the Black Panthers fired the first bullet and just as many bullets as the police fired. Because they did not tear down the crime scene, the Black Panthers had two weeks of walking the community through the crime scene where Hampton was murdered and showing them exactly how, you know, all these bullets and the trajectories do not line up at all with the police story.

And then ballistic forensics eventually came along and said, the Black Panthers, if they shot anything, it was one bullet. And 99 of the 100 bullets were coming from the direction of the police. So, you know, I think we see here 10 years later sort of learning, if you will, from that error on the side of the Chicago police and just saying, like, let's just get read of all of the evidence. And so they'll have no way to, you know, show the community what really happened here and have no real evidence at all to support their case. It's our word versus theirs once the actual crime scene is devastated.

And I think that was a, I can't be for sure. This is speculation. But I think that was definitely a cynical and conscious move on the part of the Philly PD. Yeah. I mean, certainly that's how move feels about it. Sure, sure. And I think, you know, there's an interesting part, too. This is where, like, Mumia kind of comes into the story in some ways for the first time is he's a journalist that,

move always respected for the way that he covered move he obviously was a former black panther member as was delbert africa delbert africa actually was a chicago panther which is an interesting connection between fred hampton and and move but um but anyways mumia had called up judge malmed on the radio after they they sentence all nine move members in that trial it's a bench trial so there was no jury and they sentenced them to 30 to 100 years. So basically life sentences for all nine members. Now, to point out how absurd that is, right, there is one police officer that was killed by a single bullet. To take nine people and sentence them all for life sentences for one bullet is obscene. But to add to that obscenity, so Mumia called in on the radio when

judge malmed was on the radio and asked him how he knew which move member or which move member he thought it killed him and he said on the air he hadn't the faintest idea who had shot officer james ramp right so the state you know willfully admits that it couldn't prove that any of the move um any of the move people shot james ramp um it didn't have evidence to back that up the only evidence that they have to back it up is that they say that one of the move members bought the weapon that they say ballistics ties to the murder but you know there's so many ways to sort of factor or railroad or create a case around something like that um that it's just not it's not reliable it's entirely circumstantial and and ballistics evidence in general is not that reliable

either um so anyway that's the that's the point but even if that was the case right one move member held that left it right if that was the case and and so i mean that's kind of the the open hypocrisy of the whole thing parole time for move nine incredibly it's been almost 30 years 30 years since nine move men and women were unjustly consigned to prisons across Pennsylvania. Although known as the Move 9, there really are eight survivors of the August 8, 1978 assault on moves West Philadelphia home and headquarters by local cops. They are Phil Africa, Janine Africa, Mike Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Eddie Africa, Chuck Africa, and Delbert Africa. The late Merle Africa

died at the women's prison in Muncie, Pennsylvania, under quite mysterious circumstances. All nine move men and women were convicted in one of the longest and most contentious trials in city history on dubious charges of third-degree murder of a city cop, various weapons charges and conspiracy. Even if the charges were true, which they most certainly are not, the sentence 30 to 100 years can only be termed grossly excessive. At the time of trial, third-degree, carried a sentence of seven and a half to 15 years. So essentially, the move men and women got double, then quadruple the maximum what the statute provided. Indeed, the women got the same sentences as the men, even though none of them faced weapons charges. There's little real doubt that

they're in prison today because they're moved members. Today, 30 years later, they should be entitled to their freedom, and they would be but for the concerted campaign of cops and the local media to keep them imprisoned for a century. Move members continue to fight for their imprisoned brothers and sisters, and they ask that you join that struggle by supporting their parole demands. As many of you know, I covered the press conference on August 8, 1978. Every reporter present knows that within hours of that press conference, the police department issued a written press release,

giving a completely revised statement of how the cop met his death. That makes sense when you consider that the cop was most likely the victim of friendly fire, for the move house had become a shooting gallery. Moreover, when's the last time you've seen a crime scene destroyed before nightfall within hours of the shooting? It happened here. I also covered the trial, a parade of legalized injustice, if ever there was one. Indeed, days after the trial, Judge Edwin S. Malmitt took to the airwaves to defend his unjust rulings.

On a talk show on WWDBFM, I phoned him and asked him, point blank, if you knew who killed the cop. He replied, live on air, I haven't the faintest idea. Yet this guy sent nine people to prison for 30 to 100 years. From death row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal. And most of the Move 9 are still in prison today. will I'm sure provide a link but the abolition law center which is a great radical law center based out of Pittsburgh helps with the defense of the move nine and helping them with their parole hearings and things like that only Mike Africa senior and Debbie Africa have been released and that was just in this past year so they spent 40 years of their sentence in prison Merle Africa and Phil Africa both died well incarcerated under very suspicious circumstances you know, obviously suspicious, right, because they're not that old. I think Merle was in her 40s.

Yeah, yeah. And the remaining five members of the Move 9 are still fighting to get parole. All of them obviously have served over 40 years in prison for the death of a police officer that even if it was committed by move, it could only have been committed by one person and the state cannot even say who that person is. So the 78 confrontation is very important for both the city of Philadelphia and move from moves perspective this year-long siege of their house following police brutality against them and did in a literal blockade of food and water into their home and finally in a demolition

of their house and in the unjust conviction of nine of their committed members for the death of one police officer who they swear they did not kill yeah on the city's end you have a really badly botched police operation right one police officer was killed several police and firefighters were shot. Nobody on the city's end was happy about it or wanted to go through it again. And so you had a city and a police department that now had even more hatred towards move, but I think also a little bit of fear and understanding that move people would defend themselves. Additionally, there was a trial for filthy cops for beating Delbert Africa.

Rendell did bring charges, even though he said initially that they showed great restraint after the beating of Delbert Africa and he said they would have been in their rights to kill him but he did eventually bring charges but the charges were dismissed out of hand by the judge imagine that he didn't even listen to it you know he just he just dismissed the charges

by the end of 81 Mumia right who was this this radical journalist who covered move fairly and certainly took up their cause and supported the move nine he himself was in in prison or in a case basically for allegedly killing a police officer and and that is famously considered you know a frame-up both on an international and national

perspective considered one of the most prominent political prisoners in the united states so they're they're very connected right and they and they see move is a strong supporter of mumia's struggle for freedom and mumia is a strong supporter of the move nine and and upmoved members. But, you know, that kind of is where, you know, it's where that confrontation comes to an end. And basically, move had to regroup after 78 and turn their attention towards defending and then, you know, finding a new place, trying to defend the move nine, you know, and then working towards their freedom.

And between 78 and 85, there's a number of different matters that have some historical importance. most importantly John Africa gets arrested on federal charges in that time period you know this is kind of amazing people understand how hard it is to win a case against the feds but he managed

along with Alonzo Africa they were able to successfully defend themselves in court and found not guilty of all charges you can read you can you know you can like look in and read his his closing statement which allegedly like he just sort of was like you know

just in court and kind of woke up out of a daydream or something like that and just gave this really powerful speech. But essentially, it speaks to the same thing that we talked about earlier. Move members, another part of their practice was that they constantly studied the laws of the state. They wanted to understand everything about how the legal system functioned, and they were very interested in. And they did mock trials internally all the time to determine strategies to defend themselves against the system. I mean, there's so much there, but that was just the prelude to what we know now as the move bombing. So let's go in that direction. So this decade and a half of confrontation and conflict from the early 70s onward finally culminated in what can only be described as a

brutal act of quasi-genocidal bloodshed on the part of the Philadelphia Police Department, backed as always by the broader government and the FBI in 1985. This event is known in our popular their consciousness as the move bombing. So let's get into those details. What happened on May 13, 1985? So a couple of things I think that are important. There's a couple of mayoral transitions. And Wilson Good, I believe, starts his term in 1984, so a year before the 85 confrontation.

He was the first black mayor elected in Philadelphia. It plays out in some interesting ways. Rizzo would later say that he could never have gotten away with doing what Wilson Good did, basically, that he could have never gotten away with bombing move. Is that just because Good Good was a black man? Is that his argument? Yeah, that's his argument, right? I guess. And it's interesting because later on, Rizzo actually ran against Wilson Good later on, you know. But I think it's also important to point out that even though you have transitions in leadership, like, there's so many

figures in the story that come up again and again. And that's still true to this day, like a lot of the figures that, as I was reading some of these books and looking at this material, you know, you just see like, that person is still on council. That person was mayor

later on. Another person was mayor later on. You know, DAs and judges swapping places. And you really have a political class within Philadelphia that basically continues through to this day. And a lot of these figures were a part of it. So anyways, the 85 confrontation built up during the good

administration. There were complaints from the neighbors of move, but I think that that also kind of misses the point at this point, because from moves end, after 78, right, their main focus in their strategies on freeing the move nine, and how do they do that, right? And so part of their strategy was to basically create a confrontational stance against the state to such a degree that the state would have to agree to some of their demands. And it makes some sense also why they would feel this way, right? Because you remember they had a settlement agreement with the city previously, right? So the city had agreed to release some prisoners before. So this was not totally an unbelievable task. And they also knew, of course, that what they had on their

side, right, is that people recognize the injustice of the move nine, right? They were bona fide political prisoners. And part of what happened, right, is they moved to this house out on Osage Avenue in this neighborhood, known as Cobbs Creek. Just to point out a couple of things, like Paladin Village, where the first move house was, was a more white neighborhood. It was more of kind of like a, it's not too far from UPenn, kind of a liberal or slightly radical space during that time frame, whereas when they move out to Osage, they're definitely in a predominantly black working class neighborhood of Philadelphia. So a lot of the complaints stem from the fact that Move was constantly trying to agitate against the city of Philadelphia, right? And they

boarded up their house, they set up loudspeakers, they would go on long rants basically about the mayor and about the district attorney and about the governor and about the president. So they were very vocal during this time period. And I mean, I think, like, you can imagine, right, if you had some some liberal neighbors, right, that weren't that interested in your radical cause, or even somewhat sympathetic, like at some point that, that graded on them to some degree. But I think the point is that move actually was also, that was part of their strategy, right? Because part of what they looked at is if we can get enough people frustrated, then maybe we can get them to help advocate that the city needs to meet some of these demands. They had a process in place and a thought

process in terms of how they would proceed here. So it's hard to gauge some of the complaints against move in that time frame, you know, to determine to what degree were they just seeking to provoke or seeking to bring about enough agitation, right, around this issue that they could maybe see the city start to be interested in meeting some of their demands. And I think it's important to note that the city made no efforts to try to negotiate at all during this time frame. Basically, the city took the stance that the release of the Move 9 was kind of out of their hands and too great of an ask, and so they weren't going to meet it, right? And so in that sense, they're not interested in compromising with Move at this point. So, you know, that's part of it.

part of the issues that came up that the city used was there were, which this is also true with the Palton villages, like, you know, there were license and inspections violations at the move, which basically what that means in Philadelphia is like, you know, you can't, and this is true other places, you can't just like build onto houses without permits, you know, and build fences without permits and things like that. A move didn't pay any attention to that, right? Because they didn't they didn't abide by or care about those laws for one thing eventually in the most sort of obvious incident of this they built these bunkers on top of their house to to defend it and again like you have to understand this comes from a group of people that have just literally

have their house bulldozed and taken away and had nine of their members arrested so they were they were very interested and concerned with being able to defend themselves at this point they're trying to fortify their house and basically create a vantage point at the top of their house to see further and do whatever defense they had to do. Is that correct? Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, it doesn't come up until later, but during the assault, and we'll get to that in a minute, like you also find that there's, which the police didn't know about, there were a lot of fortifications inside of the house as well. So anyways, move, sort of pushed, and they also were interested in in getting their demands conveyed to officials.

This comes up in the documentary, so I'm going to address it to. But Luis James is an interesting figure in this in Laverne. So they're actually sisters of John Africa. And there becomes an incident where Frank, who is Luis's son, is physically abusive against Luis. And what Luis claimed to police is that during, as Frank, Frank was beating her basically. He asked John Africa, do you want me to cycle her, right? Which is the move term for death. And he said not at this time. That's what she claims, right? So I think that's important to put out there. She leaves after that. And there's a lot of, there's some interesting kind of, it's sort of speculation, right? But some people believe that Frank did this to his mother, right, to get his mother out of the house because he was worried about the that was coming. So I think that's an important thing for people to understand, too, because it does get brought up. And Louise James, there's also great footage of her at the move commission

after the fact she's one of the people that testifies, right? And she's a former move member herself. And it was her house, actually, that they were living in in Osage Avenue. But she says, like, you're asking me if my son beat me? You know, she's like, are you going to interview Mayor Good when he comes up here because, you know, I heard reports that he put his wife's arm in a sling, you know, and so she kind of, I think, really gets to the heart of, like, that's really irrelevant to what we're talking about right now, right? Because when it comes down to it, you're talking about an excuse why a bomb was dropped on a house full of people. Luis, then, as she's out of the house, advocates actually for the city to meet the demands of move, right? So again, like, strategically,

it's an interesting thing. You know, I don't know how much, you know, how much of it is true, how much of it is speculation, how much of it was strategy, right? But those are some of the events that you'll see if you watch the movies and things like that. Beyond that, what happened is neighbors at some point have a press conference, and they basically call upon the governor to get moved out by any legal means necessary. At that point is when Wilson Good decides that he's going to move forward with the siege on the move house.

Now, we can speculate as to why a lot of the speculation that I read is basically that he thought at that time that the governor might and he didn't want to look that weak in his city that the governor brought the state police in to evict move and he couldn't do it. The governor was a white Republican and he was a black Democratic mayor, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's also very much in like the sort of, I mean, you have to keep in mind the historical context, right? He's coming four years later than the Rizzo administration. It's a very law and order, you know, like he doesn't want to look soft, right? And that's sort of the context, right? Ed Rendell, again, comes into play. He draws up the legal basis for the warrants. I'll just say that laying siege to a house, the warrants were very weak. They included alleged parole. violations for a contempt of court and a legal possession of firearms and making terroristic threats, which we've already, I mean, making terroristic threats is what moved it on a daily basis if we're being honest, right? Like, they say things like, I'll shoot Ronald Reagan, like, it's just part of what they, you can see, you can, there's examples of it, but they're very vocal in, in some of their

speech. But my point is that there's, there's no murder charges here. Even, even the sort of physical abuse, like, that didn't come to the place of a, of a criminal complaint. So the basis is essentially that there were members in the house that were violating their parole, which of course they would be just by being there, right? And that's really the basis through which they push through warrants to bomb a house. So they never planned for this to be anything other than assault. You know, I think that's also really important. There was no attempt at negotiation made, really, right? Like the plans that were drawn up were drawn up very oddly, right?

So they're drawn up by people who are on the bomb disposal unit, and they're drawn up by, like, a guy who runs the firing range at the police academy and some, you know, basically rank and file police officer. So the plans were not drawn up within the leadership of the Philadelphia Police Department. They were shown to a couple of different people, like at the state police level, at the FBI level, and supposedly given for comments. Right? So I think that's important because obviously other entities within our system had a chance to say, oh, this is a really stupid idea. Like, you shouldn't do this and didn't do that, right? I think that's an important thing to point out. And it's also weird. And the move commission will find it faulty, I think, accurately, that you wouldn't develop a plan like that within police leadership if you were doing it. So, you know, Good and Sambor, who Sambor is the police commissioner at the time, they had defined move as terrorists, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of people occupying this building were women and children. And when you define people as terrorists, it opens up a kind of logic that they do not, they're not people that you negotiate with, right? Yep. The city determined that a full-on assault of the move house was the best course of action, and they wanted to make sure not to repeat what they thought were the mistakes of 78.

which means they didn't want police officers or firemen to get shot this time. Although I'll say like when you get into like how they, again, how they set up like on all sides of the house and the types of weapons they were using, they weren't very smart in terms of avoiding friendly fire again, right, which was really probably one of the key issues within 78. So that's not addressed really in the plan. So back to the, so the fortifications. So they had built two large wooden bunkers with metal plan. on the roof. And I think that it's an important thing. So they did do some investigation to see if there was another way to remove those. And the best way to remove them would have been to get a

crane. And basically, it seems like there's not a lot of record as to why they didn't go down that road. They investigated a little bit. But it seems to have to do really with like the timing, which is like a horrible reason. I mean, there was a little bit of, difficulty because of the narrowness of the block, but there were cranes that were capable of doing it, you know? And so I think that's a really important point is that there were definitely alternatives to the course of action that they took and basically whether it was just out of like viciousness and malevolence or whether it was sort of laziness or wanting to do things on a certain time cycle for an arbitrary reason. They also knew that the Philadelphia PD knew that there was

gasoline on the roof. That's really important too. So there were images that had been shared in that had gone like international of a move member carrying a canister of gasoline onto the roof, pulling himself up by a rope, basically. That was widely distributed within police intelligence reports leading up to it. So that was a known. And it's important to note that like police thought that Moove was more heavily armed than they were. So the next thing that I'll say is about the kids, because I think this is a really important point. Move regularly took walks in the park and like went and exercise with their kids in the park. And so there was an order for basically Department of Human Services and police to basically take the kids.

into some sort of protective custody before the confrontation. And it's not clear why that didn't happen. It's not disputed within the city that that order took place. But basically, it seems as though the person who the order went to didn't have any urgency around it. Then in addition, even on the morning of the kids had left the house and walked in past the police barricade to go back to the house. So there were ample opportunities for the kids to not be in the house.

And it was totally and utterly the city's fault that they were. That's one of the areas, right, that obviously is unconscionable about this, is that you would even begin an assault knowing that there were, you know, five children in the house. Good made a decision not to be on the scene that day. It was allegedly supported by the police who were fearful of his safety. Good's position on this was basically that this is a police operation so I don't need to be involved. And this is a theme with Good, right? But he basically abdicates his responsibility throughout this to do anything to stop it, right? So Sam Boar started famously by chanting attention move, this is America, and basically, you know, haranguing move members that they have to follow the laws of the United States and not their own.

the first thing that happened, and I didn't hear this, I can't speak for anybody else, you know, but we didn't hear this announcement, but Gregory Sambor, the police commissioner, we believe him when he says he made this announcement saying, attention move, this is America. You have to abide by the laws and something of America, American society. Now, I didn't hear that. This is America, so we're going to bomb you. When I heard that, first thing that went through my mind is attention, move. This is American.

Do you know what second and third graders are taught about the founding, of America? I mean, what do you think would have happened if Gregory Sambor was living in, you know, 1776 and went up to Nathan Hale's house or Patrick Henry's house saying, attention, Patrick, attention, Nathan, this is a British colony and you have to abide by the laws of the ground. What do you think would have happened to him? They probably would have blew his head off. And today, the people that blew his head off would be honored and celebrated every 4th of July as heroes, freedom fighters.

So this was supposed to be the warning for move members to come out. Or else. Did they say what the or else was? They said 15 minutes. That's what he said the announcement was. 15 minutes. We have 15 minutes to come out. but we weren't going to come out for several reasons one we knew they weren't there to arrest us they had every opportunity to arrest us and koreen can speak on that because we went shopping every week twice a week at the same place went to the park every day and swimming every day had the kids all the time The kids were up and down the street.

If they were trying to protect the kids, as they said, that they were looking out for the kids, they had many chances to intercept the kids. And so after it begins, in one 90-minute interval, police fire over 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house on Osage Avenue. One individual police officer acknowledged firing 1,000 rounds personally from within 50 feet of the house. Jesus. the guns used in the assault included the following a browning 50 caliber machine gun m16s a thompson submachine gun 30 aught six and 22 sharpshooter rifles two m60 machine guns oozy shotguns and a silence 22 rifles so that those were the

police's armed and there's strategic you know there's tactical drawings that you can see of this and like literally they're like set up in stations like on all sides of the house but another important thing to understand about their strategy for the incursion is that they had people in both of the neighboring houses to the move house that were there

to supposedly light off small charges to create holes in the walls that they could pipe tear gas into the house. That was allegedly the strategy. You know, if you can kind of visualize this, right, like you have all of this weapon refiring on all sides of the house

into it and then you have people your own people in the neighboring houses, like, it's just a recipe for friendly fire incidents and disaster. And that does come up during it. Again, and this is interesting going back to earlier. So the police that were sort of involved in like the incursions to the neighboring houses, they were members of the stakeout team, which is the team that had the most, you know, had killed the most unarmed people basically in America, right, during this era. So they got in there and they started, I think, with one regular charge and it doesn't do much of anything. And so then they start using C4. And this is important because a lot of times the bombs that gets talked about is the bomb that was dropped. But the reality is that they were using C4 on the house all day. The only reason they had C4 because it wasn't legal at the time for police departments to have C4 was because a friend of their in the FBI had given 38 pounds of C4 to the bomb squad, supposedly for like bomb-sniffing

dogs, but that's a crap load of C-4 to get for that purpose. What happens is they're in there, these guys that are in the houses are getting shot at, and you can hear these narratives in some of the videos, right, of the police officers talking about things after the fact, and, you know, they're talking about getting shot at by automatic gunfire and things like that. What we learn later on, Move didn't have any automatic weapons. What Move had was 122, two pistols, and a shotgun, essentially. That's not to say Move wasn't firing at all in this, but like the big guns and the automatic gunfire that gets reported throughout it and talked about throughout it, police often and repeatedly in testimony will still

say that they were being shot at by automatic weapons by MOVE members. But the only way that it's possible is that they were being shot at by other police. So that happened. They start using C4. They basically blow off the front of the house, but they find in doing so that the house is heavily fortified inside. So that's one of the things that move also learned from the 78 confrontation is that they basically built walls inside of walls and bunkers within the house as well as the ones on the roof and took a lot of extra measures to be able to protect themselves. And so what happens and all of this, right? After there's 10,000 rounds, there's these SQRT water cannons firing thousands of gallons of water again. There's tear gas. All of this is going on. Nobody from move

surrenders. And sometime around midday, it's like sort of at a standstill. And the police have failed, right? That's essentially what happened. Their plan didn't work. They ended up shooting at each other. Some of them end up hiding in a closet in one of the houses because they're, you know, they're afraid of the automatic gunfire, which is obviously coming from other police. Some of the C4 that they use ends up collapsing the joists of one of the neighboring houses, so it's no longer structurally sound. They can't continue to try to, you know, do an incursion from that house. You know, basically their plan doesn't work. That's essentially it. And then they make a decision about what are they going to do next and in doing that you know this is

where the decision to to drop the bomb comes up so the rationale that's given by police of why to drop the bomb their stated rationale right is not that they're using the bomb um as an anti-personnel device or to kill the people in the house right that's that's not what they claim they their claim is that they wanted to remove the bunkers from the roof which the the water cannons were not capable of removing them. It's important to note that the fire commissioner never told the police that the water cannons could remove the bunkers. He didn't believe that they could. And he told them that if that was a part of their plan, that it was faulty. So they kind of knew or they should have known that that wasn't going to work. From Sam Boar's perspective as police commissioner, he said, you know,

they still had tact, move still had tactical superiority. After all of these thousands of rounds of ammunition, all of this other stuff, move still had tactical superiority. So we wanted to, drop a device, as they always call it, on the roof, right, that would dislodge the bunkers. That was the idea. And that's their claim of the idea, right? There are some interesting parts that come up in this that I think are important to point out. And one of them is that in the development of the bomb, so two guys develop the bomb. Klein is the last name of the other, and there's Frank Powell, the guy who actually drops it out of the helicopter. They both claim that Commissioner Sanbor told them to use lots of frag and shrapnel in the construction

of the bomb. It's important for people to know that don't know what that means, but basically, you know, it's putting shrapnel in the bomb, which would make it an anti-personnel device, which discounts, you know, is directly contradictory to their narrative, right, that it was just to dislodge the bunkers because there's no there's no reason to create the shrapnel's not going to help dislodge the bunkers right it would only um kill our main people that were on the roof so allegedly they say sambors said use lots of frag and shrapnel he disputes this of course which he would have to right because yeah he can't admit to that that would have been a you know

and what what incentive would the firefighters even have to lie about that you know there's no incentive at all. And that's the other point, right? It's basically career suicide for them to make this claim against the police commissioner, right? It's their superior officer and the most senior police officer. So I believe that that's the case. Now, what's interesting is that they say that they did not do that, which again, I think is not particularly reliable, right? Because, again, same reason that Sanbor wouldn't want to admit that he does it is the same reason that they wouldn't want to admit that they follow that order. Right. But we won't, we will never know the answer to that. So anyways, um, they, they,

they, they, they did run it by the mayor. Um, the mayor did approve it. That becomes contested later on, but everything within the narrative within the city suggests that that's, that happened. And Frank Powell got on the helicopter, dropped the bond. It landed right next to the gas can. And it, exploded and hot fragments from the gas can ignited material on the roof, you know, as well as like the gas can obviously increased the sort of size and scale and heat of the explosion. The bomb itself was made out of C4 and Tovex, you know, which Tovex is something that they use in like mining, you know, it was basically a replacement of TNT. So this happens, right?

They dropped this big bomb. The bomb does nothing to the bunkers. then they make a decision to let the fire burn. We just reported that police commissioner Gregory Sambore said that he ordered this so-called concussion bomb to secure the building. Could you explain exactly what that means and what Sambor intended to do? What does that word secure mean exactly? Well, I think that you would probably have to ask him that question to get a full explanation. My understanding about what he wanted to do was to remove the bunker from the top of the house.

There was a tremendous amount of concern that the bunker was constructed in a way that would prevent the officers from entering the building because it was always a possibility of someone hiding out in there and shooting. So there was an attempt all day long, first with water, then with other objects to try and remove the bunker. And apparently, the decision was made to try and explode it off in some way. Now, the reason given for dropping this bomb on top of the house was to neutralize the bunker because they wanted to move. They had allowed move to build a bunker, a pillbox, a reinforced shooting tower, I mean, shooting compartment on the top of their roof. So the plan, and this is what I tell you that, you know, Greg Sambor was an absolute idiot, the police commissioner.

His plan was to have police officers run across the roofs of the row home, punch a hole in the roof, and then dump tear gas down in the roof. Now, I just told you a minute ago, during the morning raid, they blew the whole front of the house off. So they could have went to the other side of the street with tear gas grenade guns and shot all the tear gas they wanted right into the apartment. of the house. See, so the explanations and the common sense conclusion makes no sense. So what makes more sense is that they wanted to drop a bomb on that house and hurt those folks, including the kids in the house, that they knew were in the house, but the police

commissioner says I consider them combatants and not hostages of their parents. Once again, would a white police commissioner have considered white children as combatants? I would argue strenuously that that would never happen. But it happened here because they were black kids. So they dropped a bomb to neutralize the bunker and hopefully blow a hole in the roof. Now they also knew from their aerial surveillance that there was a five gallon gas can on the roof. bomb drops, it blows up, it lights up the gas cans. Now we have a fire going on the roof. The police commissioner makes a tactical decision to let the fire burn.

To refer to 1985, I was talking to a woman who actually, I won't identify, but who is a lifelong Philadelphia. And I once a friend of mine at that time, that period. And I said that the houses on Osage Street are a fire. I just found out and she said, goo. So there's a lot of racial hatred in this country, the city in this country that we have never addressed. We don't, we don't, we, it's the sin of America. We had a bomb dropped on us.

We had thousands of rounds of bullets, 10,000 rounds of bullets fired on us. We were deluged with water. We were tear gas. The bomb ignited a fire that the fire department stood there and refused to put out after putting water on our house for hours all that morning. And all of that, and we're violent? Sam Boar's argument and the fire commissioner backs this up is that he asked the fire commissioner, if they let the fire burn, could he put it out after the bunker? had been, you know, taken down, basically. And the commissioner said something along the lines of, like, I think so, but I'm not sure, basically.

So they make a decision to use the fire as tactical weapon. That's basically what the move commission ends up saying. We're getting into an area that's, like, heavily disputed, of course, by, like, move members and stuff like that, right? Because there's also the argument, right, that they just dropped a bomb on them and they wanted to burn them out and kill them. They certainly, at the very least, had to understand that that was a possible consequence of what they were doing.

And so during this time, and this is another story that is contested, but it is backed up by both Ramona Africa and Bertie Africa. And so Bertie Africa and Ramona Africa end up being the only survivors from MOVE after this. It's important to note also like Ramona is still a move member. She has cancer. There's a GoFundMe to support her. but Bertie died a few years ago

and Bertie actually left move like right after this because he was only 13 he was a kid and his mother died in the fire and so he went to live with his father and he was never a move member again and so in points in which Bertie and Ramona's stories kind of line up there's a good amount of credibility there I think

because Bertie not being a new move member any longer didn't have any reason and why he needed to hold up some party line or some allegiance to like move's narrative, right? I also think that Ramona's stories about it are very reliable, so I'm not saying that to discount hers. But I just think that that's an important piece to note that they both say what happened is that basically Conrad Africa

and some of the women and children that they made repeated attempts to get out of the basement through this hatch in the back and that multiple times they were met with police gunfire this is totally disputed by all police actually that's not entirely true it's it's totally disputed by all the police that were in the back alley there are other witnesses and police that claim that they heard gunfire during that time was there any footage of this part of the house there is no footage at that part of the house yeah and so that's an important thing is that This is like the sort of one area in the back alley where there really isn't any footage.

There's no independent way, right, of confirming. So you sort of have to decide who you believe. And I think it's also important to note that some of the police officers who were in the back alley were involved in the 78 confrontation. In fact, two of them were involved in the beating of Delbert Africa. One of them was tried in that case that was dismissed. and the other one was also, you know, allegedly involved but not, not tried. They had that kind of vitriol towards move members. And I think that that's important to note.

You have two different move members who claim that in attempts to leave and surrender, right, into the back, they were met with gunfire. It's like, what's more likely that mothers with children were trying to get their children out of a burning house and that the cops who had this deep resentment were working to keep them in the house, with gunfire or that, you know, it never happened and they're totally making it up and the cops, you know, did nothing wrong at all. I mean, it's pretty fucking clear what a mother would try to do in that situation and it's pretty clear giving these ties to 78 that these pigs did not give a fuck about the life involved and would do anything they could to, you know, sort of brutalize the people like they brutalized Delbert, you know, in broad daylight.

He had a thermometer to take me out and then they started shooting again and then he brought back in, didn't go off the thing back up. Did you see the child actually go back into the house? I believe the child went back into the house. All right. Do you have any idea why that person may have gone back into the fire? My own idea? What I think?

Yes. I just think they went back into the fire. that fire. Sort of regroup. Well, just as a human being myself, I'm just trying to imagine myself in that situation. And behind me, there's a raging inferno. And in front of me, there are people who are saying, come on out. I'm trying to imagine what would cause me to turn back and run into the fire. I don't think we said anything other than come down to us. Come on down with your hands up.

Normal police charging for calling the suspects to come down. I'm just saying that I'm trying to put myself in that person's skin. So I don't think you ever could. We'll move members. Well, you see, I knew a lot of those people, as individuals and as human beings, a lot of people know move from what they may have seen. But I'd had a lot of dealings with them, and I knew them to be more than move people. I knew many of them by name as human beings.

It's probably a rhetorical question. I don't think you, from the way you've responded, I don't think you can answer that. So anyways, eventually Bertie and Ramona do get out. There is one police officer that is treated very favorably in sort of the history. And he's Bergheir, who's the police officer who actually pulls Bertie out of like basically a pool of water that I imagine must have come from the deluge from the SQRTs all day after he hit his head. He actually ends up leaving the police force because he, He gets branded as an N-word lover by the PD, and he basically, he has PTSD, and he basically quits within a couple years.

And, you know, he is, like, when you watch the videos, like, you know, all cops are bad, of course, but he's the one, right, that comes across as the sort of sympathetic figure within the Philadelphia police and the only one. And that's why he's not a cop anymore. What's that? And that's exactly why he's not a cop anymore. Right, exactly. Yeah.

And then Ramona herself does get out, does surrender. And, of course, in one of many injustices, right, in this whole thing, she ends up being the only person that gets tried and convicted in relation to anything. And it's for conspiracy and rioting, essentially. And she spent, I think, either six or seven years in prison related to that. So, yeah, and then beyond that, right, there were. There were several members of move that obviously do end up dying, right, in this. And I'll, you know, kind of go through that real quickly.

So John Africa dies in it. One thing that's important is obviously after this, right, the bomb drops, it burns down their house. They don't put the fire out. Contested as to when the mayor asked them to put the fire out or whether he did. Either way, like they didn't start it until way too late. it ends up engulfing 65 houses destroying, you know, basically an entire, you know, block and a half, basically rural homes in Philadelphia,

displacing tons of people that were just homeless, right, because of this. They had been told to leave with nothing but the clothes on their backs, basically. Cops said 24 hours, we're going to make a move on move. So clear all these houses, take the bare minimum, and you'll be allowed back into your homes within 24 hours. And, you know, they came back to everything. They loved being completely destroyed. Yeah.

So, you know, and then in this, like, and this comes up later, but, like, the medical examiner's office doesn't even, like, show up as the rubble is being cleared and stuff. So, you know, like, there was all kinds of crazy stuff happening, like, you know, back hose picking up rubble and then finding body parts and stuff like that. So it's like there's no, again, like, back to 78 again, like, there's no chain of evidence. nothing is properly stored cataloged. It's very hard to determine some of the things that happened forensically that day, which also goes to the sort of question, because there are some questions, too, about, like, you know, there was the people who were trying to get out.

There also are reports that a couple other members did actually get out. I mean, that's both Ramona and Bertie say that, you know, that there were other people with them as they were exiting the house, and yet all the bodies are found in the basement. It's hard to explain that exactly, but it's an important thing to understand as well. The city's narrative basically is like that move members like willfully went back in, basically to burn themselves a lot. It's sort of the way that they try to spin it, you know, which just doesn't follow, right?

But other people that died, Raymond Foster Africa was 50, John Africa was 54. Like I think this is interesting too just because it's like, you got two guys in their 50s. Conrad Africa was 36. Frank James Africa, who was John Africa's nephew and Luis's son, was 26, and then that's it for the men, right? So you have two men that are like in their 20s and 30s, 250-plus-year-old men, and then you have a woman who was, so Rhonda was 30, Therese was 26 Katricia was 15 Zeneta was 13

Phil was 12 Delita was 12 and Tomasa was 9 and then Bertie obviously who survived was 13 it's mostly women and children like we said before and you know I mean it's just it's

unconscionable right and as I mentioned before like the weapons that are found are a 22, a shotgun, and a couple pistols, right? So, like, Move was not armed for a fully automatic high-gun fire, high-power weapon confrontation with police. No police or firefighters were killed. And then, obviously, you know, in addition to all of the terror on move, you have these 60 houses, you know, 60-plus houses that were burned down.

And, you know, I'll get into the move commission findings in a second, just to share some of them, because I do think they're important, even in a situation where the city's indicting itself, they actually come down pretty hard on some of the things with their findings, although obviously there's no accountability for actual people. But, you know, the houses is an interesting story because after they're all burned down, Wilson Good approves the no-bid contract. to rebuild them all. The work is really terrible. And they end up having to get, I think, another contractor to come in to finish it up. It ends up costing millions of dollars way over what it should have, way overestimate and budget. And then the work is so terrible that, you know, they end up all becoming condemned within not a very long period of time. And even back in, like, I didn't make it over there, but like, even back in 2010, like there was discussion of like how do we rebuild these and stuff like that like it's it's still

an ongoing you know issue related to this like it's not as though the city did right by all these people rebuilt all their houses like they were um and everything was good um there's been so many civil lawsuits related to this day that you know i mean it's literally dozens yeah um and the city has had to pay out a lot of money right to a lot of different people including move members um for it so um you know the the the move commission commission is an interesting thing so mayor good appointed his own commission i think that's incredibly important these people were selected by the mayor for the commission and so it was not an independent body but you know he claimed that it was there right to hold them accountable um so they

these are some of their findings. They had a bunch of findings. I just pulled out some of them that I think are the most kind of scathing from their perspective. They found the decision to drop the bomb and the decision to let it burn to be unconscionable and inexcusable. They noted the commissioner's decision to bypass his entire command structure or any significant outside expertise and have members of the bomb disposal unit, a sergeant from the pistol range, and a uniformed patrolman to develop the plan of assault. Right? So they pointed out that that made no sense. They noted that there was no written tactical plan. So they just went in there with this, you know, sort of vague set of instructions. And you, you know, when you read some of the accounts, one of the books I read in preparing for this was Let It Burn by Michael Boyette and Randy Boyette. I don't recommend it to people because he's a grand juror. and so he's very biased

towards sort of the city and the police in a lot of it even though he sort of claims to be nominally a member of the left it's interesting because it does get into

a lot of the like the city stuff right and into a lot of the like interdepartmental and he obviously had access right to a lot of different documents and evidence

from within the city you know so anyways the notion of the no tactical plan they noted that the mayor managing director and police commissioners failure to call off the plan when they knew there were children who had not been evacuated from the house

was grossly negligent and seriously risked the lives of those children they found the firing of 10,000 rounds of ammunition over a 90-minute period into a house where they knew there were children to be unconscionable 10,000 Yeah it's yeah

Just maddening. Jesus. They noted that the proximity and types and amounts of rounds was not only unconsumable given that there were children in the house, but also put all the officers on the scene at risk of shooting each other and other citizens nearby. They found that the explosives used were dangerous and life-threatening and set off by people in the bomb disposal unit who were not trained to use bombs tactically. And, you know, that's a small thing that's important.

You had guys just like playing with C4 essentially, right, that had no, their job is when they find a bomb to take it apart, right, to dismantle it, to safely dispose of it. So they don't have any training or any tactical expertise on setting bombs off or on using them as tactical weapons, which is what they were doing. they found that the FBI had supplied philippi with 38 pounds of c4 which was completely unaccounted for that's one of the interesting findings is they like basically say the city needs to develop a system and the FBI should develop a system to account for all their explosives because they were like there's nothing on either end they found that mayor good had abdicated his responsibility as mayor when he let a clearly failed operation continue after the morning assault had failed they noted that there was no final warning to surrender before the bomb was dropped from the helicopter,

which they said underscore the recklessness of the decision, adding that the mayor was aware that there was a gallon of gasoline on the roof and that there were reports of explosives within the move house, move house. So, you know, like, again, like here you have a self-appointed commission, like really pointing out, like, all of these things that the city obviously should have taken into account to just, underscore that we don't know that they didn't take these things into account right but but still like they found all of these these issues they stated that the high energy mixture of c4 and tovex used in the bomb would have produced temperatures up to 7200 degrees which is hot enough to evaporate water

and ignite fire even if flammable liquid had not been present on the roof you know and this is an important thing i didn't mention this earlier but like stated throughout this was that nobody believed that the C4 would start a fire, you know, or that the bomb could start a fire, which, you know, like, I mean, it either speaks to the fact that these people just didn't know what they were doing, you know, or it's something more nefarious than that, right? It's either incompetence or a crime against humanity. Either way, it's not a good look. Yeah, exactly. So they also found the decision to use fire as a tactical weapon to be completely unconscionable. And they found that police gunfire prevented. some occupants from fleeing the move house there was only one member of the move commission that dissented from that finding um and i think he was a former cop or military but that's an interesting one the grand juries that come later um do not end up really agreeing with that do all you probably do a whole episode on grand jury processes right but yeah um but basically um that was a move finding

So they found that the police gunfire had prevented some occupants from fleeing the move house. And then they noted that the deaths of the children were unjustified homicides to be investigated by the grand jury. They noted that the medical examiner's office acted unprofessionally and didn't process the scene in accordance with generally accepted principles, which rendered most of the evidence after the fact useless. So those are some of the findings, which again, I'll just say it one more time, but these people were handpicked by the mayor. Yeah, not even an objective third party. It's literally handpicked by the mayor and still they're coming up with all of this evidence that suggests that there was complete and utter disarray incompetence and cynical crimes on behalf of the city. Yep.

And so there were two grand juries that took place after the fact. One was run by the city. Another one was a federal one. Nobody ever ended up charged. There was some debate about charging the police for using the C4. knowing that they had, because they also perjured themselves initially, like they didn't admit that they got it from the FBI and stuff like that. They basically made the decision, allegedly, that they didn't want to have the only people

who were prosecuted as a result of it to be frontline folks, which, I mean, I think can make some sense, but then at the same time, like, you can't prosecute nobody, right, for something like this, and it would have been a scapegoat to them, right, because of the entire there were all of these people above them right that were supporting these decisions and whether they were you know there's a there's some good points within one of the you know within that book that i mentioned earlier that like the fact that it was c4 isn't hugely important like isn't hugely significant it's they they got it illegally and they also got some of the guns through some pretty like they basically worked with like some sketchy guy out in the counties to like

get whatever weaponry that they could. And I say it's not hugely significant because they could have used other material to construct the bomb that would have done similar things, right? So, you know, the actual prosecuting them for lying about that, you know, probably I can understand that. But at the same time, it also points to the fact that they did lie or try to cover up certain things, which, you know, also means that presumably they would be comfortable doing that about other issues within the day. So, I mean, that's, that's the 85 move bombing. Yeah. And so just

you know, quick summary, May 13, 1985, you're talking the police firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition. They had anti-tank guns. They had sniper rifles with silencers and ultimately brought in a helicopter to drop this bomb. Over 60 houses were burned to the ground. And, I heard one podcast on this topic say that the police before time or ahead of time considered the kids as quote unquote combatants, which allowed them to treat the children in the house as if they were just basically adults. You know, 7,000, as you said, over 7,000 degrees inside the house. 11 dead, five of them were children. And at the end of the day, all cops, all city officials found free of all charges if they were charged or indicted at all,

which most of them were not. And so, yeah, we have a slaughter of children and innocent human beings and not one person held even slightly accountable in any real way. Yeah, and to your point about enemy combatants, yeah, Sam Borr, one of the commissioners questions them and says, you know, well, you weren't assuming that the children were firing weapons, something along that line, right? And Sambor basically said, like, we didn't have any reason to believe that they weren't, you know, like basically suggesting that, like,

we assumed that they might be firing as well. You can't prove a negative, so in that case, I guess it was. That's this disgusting logic. So, sort of zooming in towards the close here, I do want to mention Mumia, because Mumia plays a role in this event has played a role in the subsequent years after this event is a big figure inside Philadelphia, and the connections between Mumia and Move, you know, are deep in that, both, you know, the Move 9 and Mumia, you know, still imprisoned, etc. or so. I know that Mumia Abu Jamal has since day one, as you said it earlier today, been an

outspoken voice in defensive move and in return. Move has been an outspoken voice in the fight to free Mumia from prison. Moreover, you've personally organized in Philly around the Free Mummia campaign. So can you talk about just quickly who Mumia is and how Mumia and Move are connected? Yeah, sure. So Mumia Abu Jamal was a Black Panther member in Philadelphia. starting at a really early age, like 15, 16 years old, you know, later became a pretty prominent black journalist in Philadelphia, was obviously always a member of the Radical Left. Anyways, I mean, he was award-winning, he was recognized, right, as a black journalist.

He was on public radio for some time, and in 1981, he came upon a scene, so he also drove a taxi. um he came upon a scene in which his brother had been pulled over by cops possibly being beaten or harassed by cops and he came up to that scene if i recall he himself ended up shot in the scene one of the police officers ended up shot there was no really reliable evidence against mumia um everybody that testified against him was either like a police officer or like Like, there were a couple of people that were, that ended up later admitting that they testified in order to, because basically cops forced them to, right? They were either going to charge them with other things or they were already being charged with something.

And so it was their way to get off or they were like dating police at the time, you know. And so all the eyewitnesses were basically set up that the state used. And there was no ballistic evidence, right, that connected. Mumia did have a gun, so that there was no ballistic evidence that connected. He didn't have, like, gunpowder residue or anything like that. So anyways, I mean, it's a case, again, similar to the move cases. The term Mike Africa Jr. told me is spoliation, right? So you can look that up, listeners, if you've never heard it before, I hadn't.

But basically, it's police officers, like, destroying evidence or creating evidence or railroading somebody, right, through bad practices. There's Amnesty International, although it didn't recognize him as a political prisoner, wrote this long brief in the mid-90s when he was facing execution about why he should not be executed and cited all of the issues from having, you know, a racist judge to all of these, all of these different things, right? But the state lined up and the FOP lined up and the district attorney's officers lined up, right and they just they just railroaded him through this process and he became as much of a he's a very

prominent right political figure on the left in terms of political prisoners but also i think the important thing about mumia is that on the right he's a poster child of a cop killer essentially right and so every time that he comes to court or there's an appeal um the state reserves space for the FOP to basically pack the courtroom. I had some comrades from H.U. Resists in D.C. come up last year and go to one of the hearings, and they were just like, to them it was like such a visible manifestation, right, of still the white supremacy of the legal system, right? Just the way that the day in court was still structured all these years later. So currently, I think there's been some important developments within the last couple years, but specifically over the last few months, in that one of the figures actually who shows up in the move era, Ron Castile, who was another DA, who came in in 86, I want to say.

So he ended up being a part of the decision structure not to prosecute police, right, or prosecute other. people within the Philadelphia city structure, but he also was, you know, the DA that pushed forward charges on Ramona Africa, right, after this and tried her. So he oversaw a key section of Mumia's appeals, right? Mumia's initial appeals as a DA. And then later, he became a member of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And in that timeframe, he ended up overseeing his own work, right? Because appeals that his district attorney's office had fought against Mumia legally on the first time around were coming up to him to rule on as a Supreme Court justice and chief justice. Well, recently there was a case at the Supreme Court

level, the U.S. Supreme Court level, that say you can't do that. Not giving people a fair process, right, to have the same people that are involved in the prosecution essentially, right, be involved in overseeing whether that prosecution was legitimate or not. And it obviously makes sense, right, because it's an inherently biased thing. And so Mumia actually ended up winning a key part of that appeal against Larry Krasner's DA's office. And Krasner made the decision to appeal Mumia's victory. So this is like something people are organizing around right now, and this is kind of where I've become involved

as around these two decisions. So, you know, Krasner, who ran on being a progressive district attorney to fight mass incarceration who wants to allegedly set up a unit that looks at wrongful convictions is very much coming down on the side of the state. And it's also important to note that Ron Castile, the very person that is central to this case, was on Krasner's transition team as he came into office in the Philadelphia DA. And so the decision for Krasner to appeal, Mumia's, with that victory, right, what it would have done is it would have opened up a bunch of Mumia's old appeals that he could go back and retry, which would be a potential path for his freedom. and by Krasner, appealing that victory, it's going to slow all that down, right? Because now the state has to decide on Krasner's appeal before Mumia could go forward with any of that.

And Mumia's health is not good, right? He's had hepatitis C. He famously won a big case, you know, that got hepatitis C medication for prisoners within Pennsylvania because they were denying it to everybody. And so, you know, you don't know how many years that Mumia has left at this, point with his health and so this was a real opportunity people were very excited about the possibility of these appeals being reopened and for Krasner to stand in the way of this seen as as antithetical to some of the things that he's claimed he stood for and I think

the thing that's interesting too is in Krasner's defense of it is basically that well this happened to thousands of people. So it's, Krasner's defense is actually what he claims is it's not about Mumia. He's afraid of having to relitigate appeals on thousands of people who had to deal with the bias of having the same district attorney's officer's office that prosecuted them also be the person that oversaw their appeals at the state. Supreme Court level. And so to me, it's a completely indefensible position by Krasner. And I say that as somebody who thinks that Krasner does some progressive things within,

as much as that as possible within our system, which is very limited. And you see that even with Krasner because he's currently being sued by the DOJ for being too lenient in a lot of cases. But it's completely an indefensible position for Krasner. in my view. And it's definitely created an interesting space in the left in Philly because there's a, you know, historically, Mumia is such an important figure. So many people want to see him freed. So many people do organize around that or it's connected into their organization in some way. And he's fighting against that. And at the same time, you have a lot of

people that are sort of from the social democratic wing. And some people that are within prison prison reform spaces right who helped get Krasner elected and so it's it's kind of a key struggle in that you know and it reminds folks right that if you're even if you organize around electoral politics that you should always remain committed right to your principles and to the things that you want to see happen and how you want to organize and you can't you can't fall in love with these figures that you get elected or think that that they're your friend, right? Because they will screw you over in a heartbeat, you know,

if it's politically the more expedient thing for them to do. And I think with Krasner, you know, he's faced a lot of scrutiny from the FOP. And I think this to him is his way of trying to recurry some favor with some of the police that he has to work with and some of the establishment figures in terms of former DAs and other folks. so I think it's actually a very cynical political move by by Krasner absolutely yeah he's prioritizing

you know sort of protecting the reputation of the city and not having this political headache over you know the the ideals of freedom and justice and liberty that these people love to love to say they're on the side of discussion um amia abu jamal mamia in prison uh right now and mamia was very much known for covering as a journalist he's a very fine journalist he's a very fine journalists. Today, still doing journalism from inside prison walls. So tell us about the connection with Mumia Abu Jamal and the MOVE organization. Mumia is a long-time move supporter. Mumia became very interested in move back in the early 70s because he was hearing all this negative, you know, all these negative, you know, all these negative. comments about move and he wanted to know why he wanted to find out himself so one of the first

things that happened with Mumia he was working at a radio station and um Jesse Jackson was in town and move people were demonstrating Jesse Jackson and Mumia was asking Jesse Well, why are they demonstrating you? You know, who's going on? Why are they demonstrating? Jesse's response was, oh, I don't know. Who cares about them nappy-haired niggins that don't comb their hair? This was Jesse's response.

And that made MoMA say, hmm, he wanted to know more about Moved. He interviewed Moved people, including my sister, Janine. Africa, whose three-week-old baby had been trampled to death by the cops. He didn't come to move headquarters, putting the mic in Janine's room, I mean, in her face. He sat down, you know, waited until she was ready, talked to her a little bit before even turning on the mic. I mean, he was compassionate, you know. he did not just think he knew what was going on.

He went to move trials. He went to move demonstrations himself. He went up to the prison and interviewed move people. He also interviewed and attempted to interview all kinds of officials. You know, he didn't do a one-sided job. thing. But the fact is a lot of officials wouldn't talk to him

or what they were saying was so crazy. But he would still quote them. But unlike other journalists, he would quote, move. He wouldn't just say, move spouts rhetoric, move curses judge.

Yeah. He quoted move. You know. And the wrong thing to do. And being a former panther, he was a panther for, I think, a little over a year because the party was disintegrating by the time. Yeah. But having that background, having his foundation in writing and journalism in writing for the Panther Party newspaper, you know, he thought a certain way.

He wasn't like the rest of those journalists. So Move just captured his interests more. and more. And the more he saw, the more interested he got, and the more he began to report on move. Mumia lost jobs because of his reporting, mainly on move, but not only on move. His bosses tried to dominate and dictate what, you know, he could cover and all that. Monea was not having it. He lost many jobs because of that. That's how he ended up driving a cab on the night of December 9th of 1981.

He had that as a part-time job because he became a freelance journalist. and covered what he wanted to cover, and then sold his stories when he could. He didn't make a lot of money like that. Right. And he took a job, part-time job, driving a cat. And that's why he was driving a cat in December of 1981. Right. And, of course, a police officer was killed that night,

and Mumia blamed for that death. and there's been no evidence, no proof of that whatsoever. And indeed, Mamiya himself had been attacked. And, you know, a lot of people believe that it was, yeah, he was shot. He was hurt, that the attack on Mamiya happened in great part, may not be the only reason, but because of the coverage that he was giving to the move organization. and that some people had it in for the amoeia still in prison, and now we understand his health is at risk right now.

He has hepatitis, and they're not allowing him to get a kind of medical care. They've known he's had hepatitis. For two years? Three years. Since 2012. This is 2015. For three years, they've known it and have done nothing. They've known he had diabetes.

When he first passed out in March of this year and was taken to the hospital, they knew he was diabetic there. His sugar level was 779. 800 is diabetic coma. All right. So they knew that. They kept him in the hospital, got his sugar down to like four something, 400 and something, which is still extremely. the normal sugar level they say blood sugar level is 100 or lower just under that for something 400 and something okay they send him back to the prison and the first meal he gets is pasta which you know is white pasta it's not whole grain pasta even white pasta and what else did they give him some kind of sweet drinks. Now, you give somebody whose sugar is high and their diabetes, that's the meal you give

them? Karim, do you think, I mean, Mumia won the victory of being taken off of death row? Because we know that there were a lot of interest in killing Mummaia. Do you think now that he's been taken off of death row that this is another attempt to kill him? Yes, I do. Definitely. Momea has lost a tremendous amount of weight. His skin is like alligator skin. His eyesight is going bad. He has almost like bifocal eyeglasses. Ramona recently called up there to see that he gets a pair of glasses because he doesn't even have them.

So we feel in the move organization that it definitely, some people call it medical neglect. But we definitely feel as though that they don't care whether Momea lives or dies. They really don't. because Mumia is an international political prisoner. So, yes, we definitely feel as though that they're doing what they can to let Mumia die. From Mumia, Abu Jamal, to who are left of the move nine, who are still alive, these are, without a doubt, political prisoners who were put inside a cage, you know, decades ago with no good evidence whatsoever.

This would never be done against white folks, especially wealthy white folks. This is never done against the fact. Right. I mean, look at how the move nine were treated in connection with that one police officer, having one bullet in his head, nine people were convicted of a crime. Imagine if, you know, anybody treated in the legal system treated the far right that way. Last year, 2018, 100% of all politically motivated acts of terrorism or mass violence in the United States were committed by right-wing terrorists. And not once do you see any of this, you know, moving to capture an entire or. fire bombing people's headquarters, you know, putting Nazis or their organizations, you know, under severe surveillance and locking them up in prison, you just don't see it. But if you're black and you're on the left, you're almost guaranteed to have that bullshit come down on you. I mean, look at the black identity extremist from two years ago.

What did he do? He made Facebook posts that are anti-cop, and he was taken away from his family for six months with no mechanism by which to appeal or, you know, have any way out of this situation. he was eventually let free, but, you know, Nazis, fascists, the far right there, never, ever treated that way, either historically or presently. And that is because, at the end of the day, we live in a far right-wing white supremacist society. And these cases, these individual instances throughout our history, just proves that we're nowhere near post-racial or getting away from this. This is ingrained in the United States' DNA. You have to topple the entire system. You cannot separate the

DNA from the Bing. You cannot separate white supremacy from the United States government and how it operates. It's impossible. And that's part of the reason why we're revolutionaries. But, you know, going towards the very end here, I just want to, I always want to have a question where we pull out lessons, right? We've talked for over two hours now. What lessons do you think we can and should learn from both the move movement, as well as the trials and tribulations of Mumia Abu Jamal, in your opinion? So one of the things I think about it, right, is that, there's no better evidence of what move says about the system, right, than the way that they've been treated by the system, right? And so I think that when they talk about the length that the system

will go to and why it's unreformable and that it is destroying all forms of life, right, which are things that are, some of those things were not as common to say back then and are more common, right? Especially their critique of like the sort of genocidal nature of society towards all forms of life. The struggles that they went through and the way that they were treated by that system is a great example of that, right? Because the system was not willing to give anything or to compromise anything in terms of trying to allow them to live in their way of life or to advocate for the just things that they were advocating for. And so I think that's that's one lesson, right?

Is I think that it is a, it is one of the most thorough examples of just how vicious this system will respond to you that would literally, you know, burn your children alive, you know, rather than release people who are legitimate political prisoners. So, you know, I think that's one thing. I think for people on the left, like always these are important examples to understand even in a time when police were not as heavily militarized as they are now, the lengths that they would go to repress social movements violently. You know, and that that can never be, we can never take that for granted, right? or, you know, allow ourselves to think that the system will go easy on us when we take a revolutionary posture. You know, I think those are a couple.

I mean, I think in terms of move in Mumia, like, there's also, there's still a great opportunity for people to be in solidarity and to organize around these things, right? There's still pressure, you know, people come up for parole, cases, you know, you have a guy like Krasner, right? And people should be pressuring the hell out of them right now. You know, so there's opportunities here for people to still struggle and be in solidarity with real revolutionary people who are actually political prisoners from bygone eras. And that's true also for, right, former Black Liberation Army members, former Republic of New Africa members, former Black Panthers, you know, and I think that I would love to see there's definitely support of those things on the left. I would love to see people get even more involved in those things and include it as a part of their practice, writing political prisoners and learning from them and also getting included. engaged in trying to, to free them. And we've reached a point, too, where some of them are getting out, right? It's been 40, 50 years in some of these cases that folks have been locked up, and, you know, the state no longer sees a lot of them as a threat. So it is possible. You know,

we've seen an increase in terms of the numbers of political prisoners that have been released on parole, for instance, in the last few years. So, you know, plug into those struggles, you know, specifically Move and Mumia. You know, there's websites and organizations, there's legal support, there's support for Mona Africa. Like, I really definitely encourage people to, you know, to do something in support of these folks because it's not a lot of people died in 1985, but there's a lot of people that are connected to these struggles that are still alive and need material support.

So, yeah, I mean, those are my main takeaways. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm going to link to as many of these, you know, movements and these organizational fights to free Mumia and free move and other political prisoners as much as I can in the show notes. But, of course, we all have the Internet. We can go out and find ways if we truly want to help this situation and truly get involved, there's nothing stopping us.

We absolutely have to, especially if you're in or around, you know, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, et cetera, Mumia and Move. These people are still in cages and they still need your help. So this fight is just as relevant as it was decades ago. Before I let you go, though, Jared,

where can listeners find you and your podcast online? Yes, so we are, millennials are killing capitalism. You can find us on Twitter at M-A-K-capitalism, all one word. You can just like Google,

millennials are killing capitalism and it will come up along with probably some funny articles. Yeah, and then the other thing I did want to just note with regards to Mumia is that every Tuesday between 12 and 2 p.m., there is a campaign, and I'll link this for the show notes too, but to call into Larry Krasner's office to email them, to push them to drop the current appeal that they have so that Mumia can move forward and proceed. to his freedom. There's absolutely no reason why he's holding that up. It's for his own

political motivation and it has nothing to do with Mumia's case in particular. He doesn't actually, you know, disagree. It doesn't seem with Mumia's particular claim there. He just is worried about the sort of Pandora's box that it opens. And the Pandora box that it opens is frankly good, right? Because it would enable a lot of other prisoners to relitigate their cases. And we know that just because Mumia and the MOVE faced this type of repression doesn't mean that they're unique in that. You know, there's a lot of people, when we talk about the historical legacy earlier on of Frank Rizzo and of the Philadelphia PD, this has impacted thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

So they all deserve a right to try to regain their freedom as well. And between, you know, Millennials are Killing Capitalism and Rev Left Radio, we're releasing this episode on both of our feed. You're talking tens of thousands of people listening between these two shows over a long period of time. Imagine if every single one of us just picked up the phone, made a call to Krasner's office or sent in a letter. I mean, that could really sort of be the drop in the ocean that, you know, puts more and more pressure on these motherfuckers and fights for Mumia and move. It's something simple and easy you can do

from the comfort of your living room, and I think both Jared and I are both sort of urging you to try and do that if it's at all possible for you. Yeah, I'll just say one more thing. So Mike Africa Jr., when I interviewed him about the sort of developments, one of the things he said was basically he doesn't know what Krasner has in him,

you know, what he's made up of, but he knows that politicians respond to pressure. He's getting pressured by the Fraternal Order of Police, and he's getting pressured by the establishment and the political class in Philadelphia, which certainly wants Mumia to stay behind bars for the rest of his life. But the counterweight to that has to be the pressure of all of us that don't want to see him free. Exactly. They have all the money and all the power. We have numbers, and we got to use them. Jared, thank you so much. This is a long episode, but the amount of research that went into this on your end is something that, I'm very appreciative of, and I admire your understanding of this situation and your willingness to come on and inform more people about it.

Obviously, you have a comrade here in Nebraska any time, and I look forward to us collaborating over the next couple months on another episode where we get together and we do something because I really appreciate your work, and it's incredibly valuable. So thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Brett, and thank you for inviting us to this collaboration and look forward to working with you more in the future. Absolutely. Solidarity.

folder i'll tell you what freedom is to me no fear i mean really no fear if i could have that half of my life no fear my bedroom is a bit of a problem my people like whatever trying to get the cheddar dilemma is a bit of a problem my people like whatever trying to get the cheddar get the cheddar my people like whatever trying to get the cheddar hello good evening are you feeling content is there food on your table a room to rent is your family well are you keeping up with your health overall are you happy with the hand he was dealt what what enjoy your relative comfort and that spell that you're under time for rule awakening life is about to change and if You ain't read it and you accept a slave

We all move at a different pace But I ain't don't wait for change No bucket, no tin cup No begging for me across No selling for less than What's needed for live in? These times of depression, recession ain't what we're in Repression and passive consumptions

What we feed in the kids Stay quiet and listen, but we've been hearing that same thing Since Columbus landed there had the Indians enslaved We need to break the chains Can't make the same mistakes How we gonna make that change is the dilemma that we're face because my radical dilemma is a bit of a problem my people like whatever trying to get the cheddar get the cheddar my people like whatever trying to get the cheddar my

my people like whatever trying to get the cheddar I'm explosive I'm a timing Nagasaki Hiroshima I'm a disaster fuck fever We're the future. You're a feature. I'm in a trap or the trap a keeper. Don't just rap be a dreamer. I'm in the bleachers by the ivy. Dangerous like damn spotty. I hear the sirens by the sight. You blinded by advertising, so your attires look pricing. The bills keep on climbing, but the cars keep on swiping. You're passionate with the plastic, but you ain't read the fine, but corporations climaxing.

The climate is prying from the pimping of the planet, and they ask me to be passing. I pay for direct action. I'm sick of paying fines, and the money never finds me. I'm old school, I'm rewinded, born champion, a reminder. Two mics check the rider, three flights plus a flyer. With the whole world they invited, then we touch go like minus. I see violence like a virus, tear gas in my eyelids. I don't listen to the righteous, I'm at Rikers. Teaching rhyming.

Lots of children have no fear. That's the only way I can describe it. That's not all of it. But it is something to really feel it. Thank you.