Sharing & Caring | Choosing to Live in Community

Smoke Trails #11
MOVE Organization

The last 24 hours were certainly some of the most meaningful of the last 2 months. I spent them with members of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia and its environs, interviewing them, spending social time with them and their families, and then participating in a propaganda action that resulted in 2 arrests. I've hung out with some movement luminaries before, but never at the moment of confrontation.

A bit of background information for those not in the know: 30 years ago, a group of mainly Black anti-civilization activists started up an urban ecovillage in the heart of downtown Philadelphia. Both their politics and their pigment drew the ire of the police, who invaded their home with the firepower of a small army, killing many members and burning the whole neighbourhood to the ground in the process. The surviving MOVE members are still serving life sentences behind bars.

Much has been written about MOVE, but the one who wrote most is in jail because of it. One of America's most important political prisoners, journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, is on death row ostensibly for murdering a police officer, although it is generally accepted as fact that he was clumsily framed for killing the cop, targeted because of this investigation into police corruption and the political persecution of MOVE.

Protests for the release of Mumia and the other MOVE members occur around the world, but the radical left frames the conflict only in racial terms, which is only half of the story. The tale that remains untold is the fact that they were animal-rights activists, raw food vegans, and deep ecology environmentalists 30 years before it became cool, and 20 years before nearly any one had even heard of half of this stuff.

Since then, the revolutionary left has been so traumatized that in all of this time, no other above-ground group has challenged the speciesist assumption of the state apparatus and technocratic society head-on. The clandestine cells of the Earth Liberation Front have torched multi-million dollar ski resorts, and the underground freedom fighters of the Animal Liberation Front have set fire to torture chamber vivisection labs. But MOVE lived in the middle of the city, rescuing cats and dogs, composting their own waste, and openly calling out the capitalist system for destroying the planet.

And they did all of this as a family, living together communally, sharing their possessions and earthly wealth with one another. To cement their relationships and reinforce their revolutionary zeal, they all took on the surname Africa. Incidentally, there have always been MOVE members and supporters that do not trace their ancestors to Africa by direct descent. But all humans were originally from Africa -- MOVE is not a Black nationalist movement; and it's not an anthropocentric internationalist movement, either; it's an earth-first life movement.

The time we spent together was brief but intense, I was given intimate access to some of the inner workings of the group. The only red flag that came up for me at all was the constant mention of the founder of the group, John Africa. His name was mentioned as a placeholder for higher power, much in the same way that hardcore Christians pepper their conversations with gratitude to Jesus.

I can understand the idea of channeling iconic energy to a Black John Doe, though because of my Gaia-Goddess-worshiping ways, I would prefer to heap praise on a Jane Africa. Admittedly, when they speak of deity, they talk about Mama Earth; their references to John Africa are more similar to a Muslim's secondary statement of faith, "Muhammed is the Messenger". But I can't even conceive of giving any one entity, either human or suprahuman, so much credit. Is this evidence of hated hierarchy?

I had made arrangements to interview the Minister of Information, but after we got some good footage, she invited all the other MOVE members present, including 2 young children, to tell their stories on tape; these are not the actions of power-hungry people. Over the course of the day, I saw how the whole extended family mobilized to support each other at a moment's notice, physically and emotionally. They are a seriously dedicated force for change, and unlike many urban activists, they are openly affectionate and aren't too uptight to have a good laugh.

Because they are such a close-knit community and their views are so divergent from the monocultural mainstream, they tend to resemble one another in their speech patterns and turns of phrase. But they clearly are not carbon copies of one another, in the way that some cult members that I've met reiterate party platform word for word. Maybe I'm only saying that because I agree with all of their ideas (or at least the ones I'm familiar with). But all I see is a functional, fully-featured tribe of green, red, and black activists that refuse to compromise in defense of mother earth and in their opposition to the planetary prison system.