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There are two new articles about MOVE, written by Philadelphia journalist
Dr. Lenore Jean Daniels, which are now featured at
<a href="http://move9parole.blogspot.com">move9parole.blogspot.com</a>.
At top here are the links to the original articles, and the full text for
each is pasted below (permission is granted to reprint as long as the
original sources are cited)<br><br>
From BlackCommentator.com:<br><br>
<a href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/325/325_ror_malcolm_move_cover.html">
http://www.blackcommentator.com/325/325_ror_malcolm_move_cover.html</a>
<br><br>
From News One:<br><br>
<a href="http://newsone.blackplanet.com/nation/opinion-white-supremacy-law-and-order/">
http://newsone.blackplanet.com/nation/opinion-white-supremacy-law-and-order/</a>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>Malcolm, the MOVE Family, and the Movement You Can Believe In<br><br>
Represent Our Resistance<br><br>
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD<br><br>
<br>
B</b>lack<b>C</b><a href="http://ommentator.com">ommentator.com</a><b>
Editorial Board<br><br>
</b>The history which bears and determines us has the form of war rather
than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of
meaning.<br><br>
-Michel Foucault<br><br>
<br><br>
We’re not up against people because they’re white. But we’re against
those who practice racism. We’re against those who drop bombs on people
because their color happens to be of a different shade than yours. And
because we’re against it, the press says we’re violent. We’re not for
violence. We’re for peace. But the people that we’re up against are for
violence. You can’t be peaceful when you’re dealing with them.<br><br>
-Malcolm X<br><br>
<br><br>
May 19, 2009. It is the anniversary of Malcolm X’s birthday. Malcolm’s
life should empower us everyday.<br><br>
When he was a street hustler, Little Red could never have envisioned what
he would become or what he means for many of us today. Malcolm described
himself as “hip” then. In
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345350685?ie=UTF8&tag=blackcommenta-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0345350685">
<i>The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley</a></i>, he
said:<br><br>
“Shorty would take me to groovy, frantic scenes in different chicks’ and
cats’ pads, where with the lights and juke down mellow, everybody blew
gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who were fine as May wine,
and cats, who were hip to all the happenings.<br><br>
Little Red informed Malcolm X. The latter never forgot the lessons he
learned from the former.<br><br>
Years later, when Malcolm stood looking out at predominantly Black
working-class audiences, he knew the social, political, economical pit
established for most of them to reside beneath the shadow of tyranny. He
could face the shadow, too, without cowering or trembling in fear and
speak: “<i>Look up,” he told the audience. “You sustain this shadow of
tyranny. All of you, all at once, blow it away!”<br><br>
</i>It wasn’t easy. Nothing is. At every opportunity he had to remind a
defeated spirit that it had power to blow the shadow away. “Anything I do
today,” he said, “I regard as urgent.”<br><br>
Malcolm saw a crisis then, and it required his urgent attention. If he
had had more time, if he had been allowed to organize and educate the
masses to recognize their condition as an international crisis affecting
all Black people, if he had had more time to then galvanize Black
leadership around the masses to present the case of Black people to the
United Nations, would we have not experienced the catastrophe of a
multi-prong, international assault on Black people - one that even many
Black leaders now pretend to ignore?<br><br>
That the shadow would grow stronger on our fear, Malcolm knew. He saw the
potential for us to accept an ever growing pit in which we would become
accustom to living, in fear because over time, we would not be able to
distinguish between our humanity and their definition of existence as
criminals, terrorists.<br><br>
The shadow now is a very real entity. Anywhere we go now, the shadow
precedes us; it follows our steps; it surrounds us on all sides.<br><br>
As Black people, Africans and Africans in the Diaspora, are linked to the
other masses of pit-dwellers, the Brown, Red, and Yellow masses, and
collectively, our desperation is usable in the service of a corporate
empire.<br><br>
We are “disposable” outright. We are the “disposable,” ordered to dig
deeper holes and reside as the “captured,” far in the shadow, providing
cheap labor and profits for the corporate empire, if we resist. The
greatest conspiracy theory of them all: freedom and justice is for all -
under the shadow!<br><br>
We get confused; the shadow can be so overwhelming. We begin to identify
ourselves with it, become absorbed in it, and think we’re it! We are not
the shadow! It is a way of existence that is <i>unacceptable</i> for many
or many of us would still be on the cotton or tobacco
plantations.<br><br>
It was certainly unacceptable for John Africa and the group of freedom
fighters. In
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0872864693?ie=UTF8&tag=blackcommenta-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0872864693">
<i>Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the USA</a>,
</i>Mumia Abu Jamal recalls John Africa’s closing statement in his 1981
court trial:<br><br>
“The MOVE organization lives by the principle of life, the origin, the
source. My Mama, or the person you heard referred to as mother nature -
that’s my mama (sic). That is your mama, too. Because I’m fighting for
air that you’ve got to breathe (sic). Yeah, you do. And if it gets too
polluted, you’re not going to breathe that air. And I’m fighting for
water that you’ve got [to] clean, and if it gets any worse, you’re not
going to be drinking that water. I’m fighting for food that you’ve got to
eat. And you know, you’ve got to eat it and if it gets any worse, you’re
not going to be eating that food.<br><br>
We are not fighting people. We are not out there fighting cops for the
sake of fighting cops. Those cops are fighting us and they are fighting
us because they want to uphold this industry.<br><br>
For being naturalists, for their refusal to live under the shadow, the
Philadelphia MOVE organization became outright “disposable”
people.<br><br>
“They want to exterminate us,” Ramona Africa told me in a phone
interview. Exterminate resistance.<br><br>
Ramona Africa is a member of MOVE and the survivor who saved Birdie
Africa (then 12 years old) by escaping the burning building at 1662 Osage
Avenue in Philadelphia after the police illegally dropped a C-4 bomb on
their home.<br><br>
On the 24th anniversary of that police assault in May 13, 1985, Ms.
Africa is still on the battlefield. John Africa, along with 4 other
adults and 5 children were killed in that firestorm. Along with the FBI
and Police Commissioner, Gregor Sambor, the first Black mayor of
Philadelphia, Wilson Goode, condoned the illegal bombing of the MOVE
home. Goode held a press conference while the Africa family was under
siege. Goode told <i>his </i>audience he was ready “to seize control of
the house…by any means necessary.”<br><br>
MOVE members and supporters had been working to free 9 of their family
members falsely charges and “jointly sentenced in the 1978 killing of
Officer James Ramp after a year-long police stakeout of MOVE’s Powelton
Village home,” writes Hans Bennett in “Attention, MOVE: This is America!
- At the 24th Anniversary of the May 13 Massacre, MOVE organizes for 2009
Parole Hearings.” He quotes Ms. Africa:<br><br>
“The government came out to Powelton Village in 1978 not to arrest, but
to kill. Having failed to do that, my family was unjustly convicted of a
murder that the government knows they didn’t commit, and imprisoned them
with 30-100 year sentences. Later, when we as a family dared to speak up
against this, they came out to our home again and dropped a bomb on us,
burned babies alive.<br><br>
Ramona Africa, severely burned, was charged with “conspiracy to riot” and
served 7 years of a 7 year sentence. She could have received a shorter
sentence, she told me. They had a question for me: “Would I agree to no
contact with MOVE?”<br><br>
Today, Ms. Africa is working to free the MOVE 9. They could be out too if
they agreed to denounce MOVE!<br><br>
But you can’t kill a revolution!<br><br>
“We have traveled world-wide and people want to know when will we open a
chapter?”<br><br>
MOVE plans to open chapters throughout the U.S., and chapters in Spain,
France, and Cuba.<br><br>
“We have spoken to students at Vassar, Harvard, and the University of
Pennsylvania and other campuses.”<br><br>
People denounce the tactics of oppression used against MOVE and other
resistance organizations and they want to learn and become involved -
because they are involved, Ramona Africa told me. Silence, fear, and
inaction are responses greatly appreciated by the corporate
world.<br><br>
But Ms. Africa notes how some people have been “duped, “as John Africa
used to say, into believing they “must abide by legality. Your rights are
embedded in legality. How can you think that abiding by rules of your
oppressors” would set you free? John Africa taught the members of MOVE to
recognize who benefits from this legality and who suffers.<br><br>
“When poor people and Black people are sent to jail, the first thing they
are asked is what did you do?”<br><br>
What did <i>you </i>do? That’s acceptance talking. That’s regulating
injustice from within the pit. That’s ignorance and fear
talking!<br><br>
“First time I went to court, when I came in, the judge was
polite.”<br><br>
“‘Good morning, Ms. Africa. You have not been found guilty of anything.
This is a preliminary hearing.’”<br><br>
He read the charges.<br><br>
“‘Do you understand?’”<br><br>
“I said, No I don’t understand. “I’m in handcuffs. I understand I am
innocent until proven guilty. Did you come in handcuffs?”<br><br>
The system can’t survive with serious resistance, Ms. Africa said. “They
tried to bride us off with money and positions. Then they came with
violence and an artillery of war” - the bombing of the MOVE home in
1985.<br><br>
“Revolution is total. No one can coordinate your life for you.”<br><br>
The imprisoned members of MOVE are still called MOVE 9 - Janine, Debbie,
Janet, Delbert, Mike, Phil, Eddie, and Chuck Africa. Ms. Africa
explained: “Our sister Merle has passed. But we still remember
her.”<br><br>
Merle complained of a stomach ache, and she was ordered to remain in her
cell. Later that night, she was served a plate at her cell door.<br><br>
Then Merle was found dead.<br><br>
“We are focused on the release of our family first. We keep contacting
the parole board and keeping the pressure on them. They’ve gotten away
with keeping innocent people in prison.”<br><br>
The authorities would love for the MOVE members to “accept
responsibility” and agree to wrongdoing. “Why would you say you are
guilty, if you are innocent?”<br><br>
“What about the Constitution and the Fifth Amendment that says nobody can
be made to incriminate themselves?”<br><br>
“If you have a home plan or a job plan then you are to be released. But
the courts keep people beyond their sentences.”<br><br>
“People do respond. Just because people aren’t active as they should be,
doesn’t mean their sentiments aren’t with you. We have to turn that
feeling into action.”<br><br>
What’s the best way you can honor Malcolm and the memory of those 5
children and 6 adults?<br><br>
Rallies are held in Philadelphia to educate the people and to organize
support for the release of the MOVE 9. If this isn’t happening in your
city, then what are you waiting on? Regard the release of the MOVE 9 as
“urgent” business. Join Ramona Africa and the MOVE family and all who
struggle for the rights of the people. The pit, created by your fear, is
not your home! The power is with you. <i>Look up, and tell the audience:
You sustain this shadow of tyranny. All of you, all at once, blow it
away!<br><br>
</i>Give Sister Ramona a call: (215) 387-4107 and go to
<a href="http://onamove.com">onamove.com</a> or
<a href="http://www.move9parole.blogspot.com/">
www.move9parole.blogspot.com</a>. Then wish Malcolm a happy
birthday!<br><br>
<b><i>BlackCommentator.com</b> Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean
Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary,
resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a
Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its
antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice
and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community
resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an
equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities
behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds
a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory
(race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click
<a href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/contact_forms/jean_daniels/gbcf_form.php">
here</a> to contact Dr. Daniels</i>.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
OPINION: White Supremacy & Law and Order<br><br>
By Lenore Daniels May 13, 2009<br><br>
And you call me a hate teacher. Why, you taught us to hate ourselves. You
taught the world to hate a whole race of people... --Malcolm X<br><br>
Kwame Ture said to white youths who came down to Mississippi and Alabama
to organize with SNCC: Go back home. Educate and organize whites, and let
Blacks educate and organize the people to fight for their own
freedom. Let those who have been denied their human and civil
rights fight for it. But educate the white community about white
supremacy. Organize them to fight against white supremacy.
Collectively, there would be an united front of freedom fighters and
anti-war, anti-imperialist white progressives.<br><br>
And you know what happened? Progress! The rhetoric of Black power
frightened many young whites who went home only to adapt to the very real
white power structure: A new era of "law and order," in
which the government legislated a strategy of prohibition specifically
targeting Black Americans. We uphold our laws and the order of white over
Black! Black politicians rhetorically calling for unity in the presence
of Black (predominantly Democratic!) voters, behind closed doors, agreed
to the new era’s agenda of law and order. <br>
Progress!<br><br>
In Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo became Police Commissioner from 1968-1972 on
the "iron fist" platform. According the independent
journalist Hans Bennett, Rizzo boasted his police force would be "so
repressive that he’d make Attila the Hun look like a faggot"
("Attention MOVE! This is America"). Rizzo was fair: He
targeted the entire Black community, but he had a particular hatred for
MOVE and its members.<br><br>
Rizzo’s "iron fist" philosophy remained in effect.<br><br>
In Jailhouse Lawyers, Mumia Abu Jamal recalls MOVE’s "distinctly
multiracial" membership.<br><br>
It would not be odd, from a MOVE perspective, to see Chinese MOVE
mothers, Puerto Rican MOVE fathers, or white MOVE daughters. According to
John Africa’s worldview, MOVE wasn’t nationalist but naturalist, open in
principle to all human beings.<br><br>
Such an arraignment, an ordering of people, defies the new era of law and
order.<br><br>
With Rizzo in power, repression focused on Black Philadelphians and MOVE
especially suffering under a barrage of home raids, police automatic
weapons and arrest, "the white faces, the Chinese faces, the brown
faces quietly, often tearfully-yet fearfully-disappeared from the front
lines," writes Mumia.<br><br>
In 1981, with the arrest of John Africa, co-founder, Donald Glassey waved
the white flag and testified against Africa and MOVE. Mumia writes,
"Glassey later admitted to wearing a body wire for the government in
an attempt to set up other MOVE members."<br><br>
John Africa represented himself and the jury found him not guilty.
But that would not be the end of attacks on an independent-thinking group
of Black Americans known as MOVE.<br><br>
At the height of Ronald Reagan’s reign, and, despite the election of the
city’s first Black Mayor, Wilson Goode, the Philadelphia Police
Department was determined to put an end to the organization.<br><br>
On May 13, 1985, police and bomb squads arrived at 6221 Osage. The voice
on the loudspeaker said, "This is America!" As Bennett writes
in "An ‘Unconscionable’ Act: Remembering May 13,
1985$B!m(B:<br><br>
The two bomb squads repeatedly detonated explosives in the side walls,
and then destroyed the front of the house. But the confrontation came to
a standstill by the afternoon, with MOVE still inside.<br><br>
Where’s Mayor Wilson Goode?<br><br>
Linn Washington, Philadelphia Tribune columnist and Temple University
Professor discovered that a MOVE member not present in the house, Jerry
Africa, "attempted to negotiate with Mayor Goode during the
standoff." Jerry Africa, civil rights activist Randolph Means, and
former Common Please Court Judge Robert Williams, writes Bennett, tried
to reach Goode repeatedly by phone.<br><br>
He [Jerry Africa] wanted to tell Goode that MOVE would disengage from the
confrontation if Goode would agree to an investigation of the Aug. 8,
1978-related MOVE convictions.<br><br>
Mayor Goode "would not take their call." But the first Black
mayor of Philadelphia held a press conference to declare "he was now
ready "to seize control of the house...by any means
necessary."<br><br>
No, this is not Malcolm! This is law and order at work.<br><br>
The afternoon standstill ended when Philadelphia police dropped a C-4
bomb on the home, which started a fire that authorities allowed to burn.
According to Bennett, the bomb was "illegally supplied by the
FBI" ("Attention MOVE! This is America"). By the end of
May 13, 1985, the police assault had killed 5 children and 6 adults,
including John Africa.<br><br>
I see 2337 West Monroe, in the city where I was born and raised, Chicago.
1969. Dozens of Chicago Police working with the FBI forcefully
entered the home there, firing and executing a sleeping Fred Hampton.
Mark Clark was able to respond with one shot after police entered the
home. In Philadelphia, years later, Police Commissioner Gregor Sambor
used the same line of defense: MOVE fired first with automatic weaponry!
However, "the only weapons found in MOVE’s house were two pistols, a
shotgun, and a .22 caliber rifle: no automatic weapons."<br><br>
The MOVE Commission concluded that the women, children and at least two
of the men may have been in the basement and, most likely, they were
burned alive or shot by police as they tried to exit the house. Yes,
police fired at the residents as they tried to escape! It is also
possible that 1 or 2 of the men died in the morning before the bomb was
dropped on the house. Bennett writes, the "police used over 10,000
rounds of ammunition, including 4,500 rounds from M-16s; 1,500 from Uzis;
and 2,240 from M-60 machine guns."<br><br>
Some 60 homes in the Black middle class neighborhood were destroyed.
Ramona Africa, the remaining survivor, who barely escaped and who
suffered severe burns, was charged, writes Bennett, with conspiracy to
riot and "multiple counts of single and aggravated assault."
Survivors of the police assault at 2337 West Monroe in Chicago received
similar charges: aggravated assault and attempted murder of those who
forcefully entered their home to kill.<br><br>
Ramona Africa served 7 years of a 7 year sentence, refusing to
renounce-she must renounce-herself, her family, her people-MOVE in
exchange for parole. In the 1986 trial, Ramona told Bennett, jurors were
told that they would hear of "wrongdoing" by the police and
other government officials at another trial.<br><br>
Don’t worry about that now. Focus on this Black American!<br><br>
And, of course, another trial focusing on white "wrongdoing"
never materialized. As Ramona says, "not a single official, police
officer, or anybody...has ever been held accountable for the murder of my
family."<br><br>
The corporate media, the propaganda arm of the government, teaches one
and all to consider those Black Americans who want to feed Black
children, who want to educate them to defend their spirit and guard
themselves against police assaults a vicious lot of criminals. They
refuse to adapt to the policies of the "iron fist" on the
Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, Muslim, poor, and working class. How do you
deal with the memory of this crime against a people by its
government? Do you ignore it, pretend it never happened, lockstep
into law and order stupor?<br><br>
The events of May 13, 1985 resulted in the deaths of 11 people, but
exposed that for many whites and, Blacks who capitulate, Black Americans
are never entitled to think and exist outside a system of thought and
behavior that defames them. The Martin Luther King who spoke of dreams
was fine, but the King who spoke of American aggression and violence,
America’s pursuit of oil and other material resources at the expense of
Black equality had to be silenced.<br><br>
I will close with "An Open Letter to Steven Marche of Esquire,"
May 8, 2009, written by rapper, Prodigy, from prison. I will quote from a
photo copy of his handwritten letter in which Prodigy responds to
Marche’s charge that white supremacy is nothing more than a
"conspiracy theory."<br><br>
The fact is Mr. Marche, the conspiracy to physically and mentally enslave
the Black race so that these European vampires and their offspring can
live like Kings and Queens in the ‘New World,’ is very much so fact, not
theory...<br><br>
So this conspiracy affects the entire population of the planet. It’s far
from ‘toxic paranoia and narcissism’ that you claim it to be in your
article, Mr. Marche...<br><br>
This isn’t some delusion of personal persecution. No, this is very real
and factual global persecution of people’s mind’s, body’s, and soul’s
(sic)...<br><br>
Their game of covert, physical and mental slavery is so deeply inbedded
(sp) in our society and subconscious minds, that (sic) it now run’s on
auto-pilot. We all actually do their job for them by submitting to
a poisonous way of life... <br>
If each person would commit to a personal change of their own bad habits,
to a more healthy, inteligent (sp) way of life, we would see our world
transform into a much better place...<br><br>
It’s time to wake up a[nd] start living an American reality... <br>
I forgive you for your ignorance and contradictions, after all, we’re
working on ‘fixing ourselves’ aren’t we? Peace-Prodigy<br><br>
Asante Sana, Prodigy!<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
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