Uncover - S20: Why & how Matthew Amha chose to tell the story of MOVE — On stage at Hot Docs

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

In this live discussion from the Hot Docs festival, Africas VS. America host Matthew Amha joins Falen Johnson on stage to speak about the stories journalists choose to tell — and how they tell them. He reflects on the personal cost of infusing his own experiences into his journalism, and how he navigated the MOVE organization’s historically fraught relationship with the media.

My name is John Cullen and I want to tell you a story. It's a story about a scandal, broken relationships, gossip, rumors, money, corporate rivalry, and curling. It's the story of Broomgate. How a single broom, yes, a broom, turned friends into foes and almost killed the 500-year-old sport of curling. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Phelan Johnson,

co-host of The Secret Life of Canada and the CBC Podcast Buffy. On Thursday, May 4th, CBC Podcasts hosted a night of storytelling at the 2023 Hot Docs Festival. Hosts from some of CBC Podcasts' most acclaimed series took to the stage and turned the mic on themselves to share the stories they've spent years figuring out how to tell. I had the pleasure of joining host Matthew Amha on stage in a wide-ranging conversation. We touched on the role of journalists and the stories we choose to tell and how we choose to tell them.

Take a listen. In 1985, the city of Philadelphia did something unthinkable. It dropped a bomb on its own citizens, on a residential house in a middle-class neighborhood. on its own citizens, on a residential house in a middle-class neighborhood. And for more than a decade, the city had been in a standoff with a black liberation organization called MOVE. The target of the bomb? MOVE's home and headquarters. The bomb started a fire, and authorities let the fire burn, killing 11 people, including five children.

Mother's Day is coming up soon. We will never get a chance to embrace our children and hug them and kiss them. We will never have that feeling of love, you know, to put them to our breast. Because they're not here. Because this government took them away from us. That's Consuela Africa. Her two daughters were killed that day in May of 1985. The story of her family, her community, and the war on move

is one of the stories that Matt never thought he'd tell. But he did. Please welcome Matt to the stage. Thank you. tell, but he did. Please welcome Matt to the stage. This is where I now become a reporter. So Matt, listening to Consuela's Grief in that clip is heart-wrenching. It's incredibly difficult. Why did you think that you'd never tell this story? Yeah, so I think for me, you have kind of alluded to there the kind of personal cost that comes with having to infuse your own personal experience. So there's a kind of initial hesitancy of not

wanting to, you know, this is going to be my introduction to a lot of people. Most people in this room would have never heard of me before. And so to have the kind of introduction point be include such intimate elements of my own life and my own experience was something that I was kind of hesitant to include. And, you know, I also have to say that this story is a uniquely American story. It is a uniquely Philadelphian story. through the black experience here in Canada and the black experience in America, I kind of felt challenged initially by the prospect of jumping into a city that was not my own and jumping into a neighborhood and story that was not my own. And so I think all of these had kind of made it a little bit difficult initially,

but through kind of conversation with some of our main subjects, I think I kind of came to terms with it over time. And as you mentioned, this is an American story and you are a young Canadian journalist. Were you able to tell this story in a way that other people maybe couldn't before? Yeah, so part of the issue with the MOVE story is the way that it had been reported for so long. You know, I think the MOVE organization, who, for those of you that aren't familiar, I mean, essentially, this is one of the most radical activist organizations in modern American history, like as radical as you can imagine.

And so they have had a historically fraught relationship with the press and with the media, particularly the local media in Philadelphia. To put it bluntly, they don't do interviews. They might do one-offs, but they don't allow people to come in and tell their story. And so I think with my being Canadian, I think in some way here in Canada, the CBC has a very particular kind of resonance. Whether good or bad, folks are familiar. But going to Philadelphia and speaking with MOVE and members in the community, they'd never heard of the CBC before. So I think for once, I was not having to carry the kind of attendant baggage at the place that I worked for. And so I could kind of have a blank slate. So that was an interesting access point with my being Canadian. You know, if I were a reporter with the New York Times or with CNN or one of the major American outfits,

I would have to answer for the sins of my newsroom in a way that I just really didn't. And I think, you know, just kind of inherently the kind of outsider positioning, bringing a perspective outside of those that have been so deeply involved with this story. You know, we're speaking with folks that have lost members of their family. We're speaking with folks whose members of the family have been incarcerated for up to four decades, people that are so deeply and intimately tied. And so I can kind of, I'm able to observe from a different perspective, not as a voyeur, but just kind of exercising kind of general curiosity and treating people as honestly and fairly as I could. You got to understand too,

fairly as I could. You got to understand too, Matt, like you're hearing me say things that are very personal to my family. And so like sometimes I just, like I've already said more than my family will want me to say. You know what I mean? And I'm doing it in a way

where it's like free flowing and natural, but it's really not easy for me to tell you these things. These are our memories and this is our heritage and our legacy. So I think with, you know, that clip is an example of the kinds of conversations that led to us being able to tell the story in the first place. And these are the kinds of things that we, I think as reporters are kind of historically taught or conventionally taught to try to

hide. This is the kind of messy behind the scenes stuff that ends up making the actual product, right? And so these are the conversations that I had to have with Mike and with people in the story, you know, to try to earn their trust, to try to explain to them that I did not want to continue to carry on this kind of legacy of dehumanization. Like when I tell you that members of this organization were quite literally on the front page of the local press

described as rats, described as monkeys, described as sewer animals, you know, in the most dehumanizing terms. And I had to be honest with Mike about the fact like we didn't want to do that. We were still going to be fair. We're still going to corroborate everything. We're still going to verify everything.

I was not there in the capacity of a friend, but I could treat him as a human being. And so these are the kinds of things where he's offering to us stories that he has never given to anyone before. That's a sacred process. And so we had to honor that. And so these are the kinds of things that are reflected in the series where, you know, traditionally, this is what gets left on the cutting room floor, right? But I think it was important for us to have people be able to listen to it yeah and I think in our conversations leading up to this that we had a lot of conversations around that the things that relationship building and also just the format of podcast it's it's an incredibly different kind of

format and it kind of begs you to break the rules because those are the most interesting parts so you were granted access to this community and this story speaking of responsibilities what responsibilities does that come with yeah you know i think there's a duty of care and it isn't something that we speak about openly or publicly sometimes frankly it's something that we're taught to reject in the conventional sense that we are in so many ways, taught to, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. You jump in, you get the story, you take it, you re-articulate it, you repackage it, and you deliver it to the masses in a way that they can understand. If that means that you have to, in some way, betray the folks that you

spoke to, then that's what it means. The story is most important, you know? But this is something that we've rejected entirely, you know? This is not how we wanted to go about things and so the responsibility we had was to honor the stories that we were being told. And you know, like we've said, to treat people with the kind of basic dignity that for so long they had not been accorded. Folks that had suffered the ultimate loss. Again, Mike has two parents that served 42 years in prison each. He has members of his family. I mean, the bombing on his family home, 11 people died, five children died, children that he lived and grew up with. And so we were really honest about that process and wanting to undo and dismantle so much of what had kind of been done.

And this was the first time that the U.S. dropped a bomb on its own city. And this was the first time that the U.S. dropped a bomb on its own city. And by that measure, one would think that it would be widely known in the history books, but it's not. Why do you think this event is largely forgotten? Yeah, so I think this is kind of the fundamental question. There is essentially a military-style bombing of a home in a residential area in a major American city, and no one remembers it. Even people that lived near the home, they don't remember it. And so what this brought us to, and we talk about this openly as well in the series, is that the thing that we call history is politically inherently, that it's not divinely ordained, that it is not naturally occurring,

and that sometimes it doesn't even have all that much to do with the truth, is that it is not naturally occurring, and that sometimes it doesn't even have all that much to do with the truth, is that it's about power. And so we have this kind of historical reassessment and this kind of challenging of the historical record that we go on and on about. The other fact is that like this isn't, you know, we would talk about the fact that so much of this is manufactured, that essentially every juncture of American history has been marked in some way by an effort to censor, to attack, or to block the teaching of black history. Whether it be you have the Civil War and the Lost Cause myth. You have organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy whose main goals were to literally rewrite the textbooks of the nation and to recast the story of the nation.

You have Reconstruction followed by Redemption. You have the Civil Rights Movement followed by redemption. You have the civil rights movement followed by this gigantic whitelash. And you have today in states like Florida that are suffering gigantic book bans, you know, where teachers can go to prison for teaching the words of writers like Toni Morrison and the story of women like Rosa Parks. And so it's to say that the story of the move bombing is not forgotten by some accident. That this is part of a iterative process that over the course of several years ends up happening. And this is what we're left with. Yeah.

Leah and I talk a lot about in the secret life of Canada history being marketing for a country. Yeah. It's a real easy way to position yourself. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So I know that we've got one more clip that we want to play. Before we let you go, I'm wondering if we can cue that. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. In October of 2018, Mike Africa Sr. is released, too. The family is gathered at Mike Africa Jr.'s home. As soon as Mike Sr. walks through the front door, he and Debbie race to one another. They embrace. Why is everybody so quiet? Mike Sr.'s head is tucked into Debbie's shoulder.

When he finally comes up for air, they share a kiss and then just stare at one another. They have seen each other just once since 1978. I've been waiting for this ride. Holy! She said that on the way out. You know how many years I've been? Yeah, so I think I can relate to, in our conversations, we've talked a lot about hope and that there's often, in any kind of storytelling, when it regards anyone who is marginalized, black, indigenous, there's the need to want to put a bow on a story to wrap it all up and end in hope. And you've listened to the podcast and off you go.

Yeah. So what you've just heard is, that is Mike Africa Jr. who was our main protagonist. That's a guy who you heard earlier. That's his parents meeting for the first time after having been incarcerated for 40 years and finally getting released. So in the kind of local press in Philadelphia at that time, that story was kind of marked as a testament to the human condition. Like these remarkable black radicals that spent this time in prison, and they're now out, they're now free as a kind of remarkable tale, something to be proud of almost. And we wanted to throw water on that, frankly, and to tell a more complicated story about the fact that, you know, yes, some people were

eventually released, but many of them died. Many of them that came home were not the same, whether ill, whether suffering from the experiences that they had in prison. Some of them were in solitary confinement for nearly a decade straight. And so it's to say that this notion of hope is also where we land the series. I think it's actually the very last thing that I say in our seventh and final episode. And in every interview I have done, essentially, the last question is always some version of, are you left feeling hopeful? Are you left feeling as though change is on the horizon?

And I think we have this natural tendency, again, history as a kind of marketing endeavor, we have this natural inclination to always want to reach toward this kind of redemption. And stories like Move challenge these ideas. They ask us questions that we're often not ready to answer because they're very complicated. The happy ending isn't necessarily there. You know, it challenges the idea that history will just bend toward justice and we all sing kumbaya. And so to say that, you know, I think hope can be a powerful and transfiguring force. And you'll see it all throughout our series. And you see it all throughout the civil rights movement and the black freedom movement more broadly. But kind of blind

optimism, I think is something to be rejected. And so I kind of have to walk that fine line a little bit over the course of the series. But yeah, I'm pretty proud about where we ended up. Well, it's a fantastic work. And if you haven't listened to it, check it out, The Africas vs. Americas. Matt, thanks for being here. Thank you so much. And watching me put on my reporter hat. Thank you. From the 2023 Hot Dogs Festival, that was my conversation with Matthew Amha, host of the CBC podcast, The Africas vs. America.

All episodes of The Africas vs. America are available right now. Find them on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.