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In a 1999 essay, “Memories—Pain of Separation,” Debbie Africa recalls one of her favorite memories of the children of MOVE. The year was 1976 and the Philadelphia-based revolutionary back-to-nature organization was preparing to send their children to rural Virginia to escape escalating confrontations with the police and city government.
Having volunteered to bathe the 11 children ahead of the journey, Debbie Africa, 20 years old and a new mother, paints a tender and comical scene of attempting to coax the children, one after another, into the bathtub. She begins with Tree Africa, the oldest at five years old, whose “real keen motherly instincts” she was counting on to help with the younger children. Next was Missy, a precocious two-year-old with a “cute, round face,” who returned to the tub pouting “I wanna get in the tub too” after every child bathed. There was Delisha, four, who was “the boss” of the other children. Little Phil, whose voice was raspy like his father. “Sweet” Netta kept Debbie’s six-month-old occupied while she bathed the others. But Linda, “strong-willed” at the age of three, was the only child who refused to take a bath. It took Debbie ten minutes to convince her to wash up and, when she finally returned to the bathroom with Linda in tow, she discovered Missy back in the tub for a third time.
“I couldn’t do nothing but laugh,” she remembered, of her last day with the children. This was two years before the city’s starvation blockade to evict MOVE from their communal home in the Powelton Village neighborhood of West Philadelphia. Before the militarized siege and arrest of a dozen MOVE members on August 8, 1978. Before her 1980 conviction as part of the MOVE Nine to sentences of 30–100 years.
And before the children’s murder by the city of Philadelphia.
I was happy in a way, cuz they wouldn’t have to be left there in the city to put up with them cops, but sad too because I would miss them a lot. I never imagined ever with everything we had already been through with them cops, that I’d never see most of them again. We sent them to Virginia to keep them from being hurt; when we brought them back a few years later, they were killed May 13, 1985.
The past haunts
Janet, Janine, and Sue Africa recollect in a 2021 WHYY interview that it took a prison guard at State Correctional Institution Muncy in central Pennsylvania less than a minute to inform them, “They just had a firebombing at your house and your children are dead.” In solitary confinement, there would be no bereavement calls or visits, no news reports. There would be no official condolences or apologies extended, save a letter posted six months later from the Medical Examiner’s Office (MEO) acknowledging the deaths of their children:
We regret to inform you that your child has been identified by the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission’s Consultant as one of the victims in the MOVE house fire on Osage Avenue.
If you wish to claim the body, please have your funeral director contact us.
After MOVE relocated its headquarters to the Cobbs Creek area of West Philadelphia in 1981, the Osage Avenue rowhouse became the center of a renewed standoff with the city around the organization’s demand that officials release their political prisoners. On the evening of May 12, 1985—Mother’s Day—the city commenced its second full-scale offensive against MOVE by evacuating residents. At dawn, 500 police officers deployed to force MOVE to surrender, launched tear gas through holes drilled into the walls of the home, targeted a fortified bunker MOVE had erected on its roof with water cannons, and lobbed blocks of C-4 explosives onto the front porch, blowing it into the street. For 90 minutes, police fired 10,000 rounds of ammunition from military weaponry. At an afternoon press conference, the city’s first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, vowed that, after hours of unsuccessful attempts to draw, smoke, and blast MOVE out, the city would “seize control of the house by any means necessary.” In the early evening, police dropped a satchel bomb on the rooftop from a helicopter. The explosion’s impact was felt a mile away and immediately started a fire that the police commissioner directed firefighters to let burn. In her retelling, sole adult survivor, Ramona Africa, reveals further depths of state cruelty:
We immediately tried to get our children, our animals, ourselves out of the burning building. We were hollering, “We’re coming out!” [The police] immediately started shooting, trying to prevent anybody from coming out of that house. We were forced back in at least twice.
In one attempt, Ramona and 13-year-old Birdie Africa, escaped. However, as two full city blocks were allowed to burn to the ground, their family, five children and six adults, were burned alive:
Tree (14), Delisha (13), Netta (12), Little Phil (12), Tomaso (9),
Rhonda, Theresa, Frank, Raymond, Conrad, John Africa
The massacre of the MOVE children, who were made penal orphans by the incarceration of their parents, and their adult caregivers remains one of the most egregious instances of police violence in US history. That a municipal government would choose to bomb a home with children in it remains the most monstrous dimension of the greatest shame in the city of Philadelphia’s past, which continues to haunt its present—and the discipline of anthropology.