May 11–18, 2000
cover story
Whose MOVE? Part 2
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Sole survivor: The only adult to escape the 1985 fire, Ramona Africa served seven years in prison for riot and conspiracy but would not renounce her MOVE membership. |
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by Noel Weyrich
Ramona Africa is calling late at night from a Holiday Inn in Kent, OH. It is the 30th anniversary of the day in 1970 when National Guardsmen killed four students during an anti-war protest at Kent State University. Among the celebrities invited to mark the occasion by speaking on campus are radical theoretician Noam Chomsky and MOVE’s de facto leader, Ramona Africa.
"First of all we let people know that these are not isolated incidents," Ramona says, describing her presentations at events like the Kent State commemoration. "People have to understand the connection between a Kent State and also incidents like the MOVE bombing, Waco… Amadou Diallo. You know, there’s a connection between all of these things, and that is the terrorism of government and how they resolve things with violence."
She tells people that children learn by example from our leaders, and notes with irony that "not long ago, after the Columbine atrocity, you had President Clinton on TV telling young people that they must learn to resolve conflict through means other than violence. Then the next news story was Clinton bombing children in Kosovo." MOVE and the other incidents merely prove, she says, that "you cannot rely on government to protect you, to ensure your freedom. John Africa, MOVE’s founder, teaches that to govern means just that. A governor is a throttle, something that controls, not something that ensures and enhances freedom."
Ramona helps support MOVE with speaking fees earned from college campuses throughout the country, and, thus far, at universities in Belgium, France and Italy. The Europeans, she says, are particularly receptive to her message.
"People outside of Philadelphia, but particularly outside the country, can’t believe that this happened in the U.S.," she says. "The U.S. portrays herself as the land of human rights, freedom, justice, democracy, the whole bit. When they learn that residents of this country were bombed and babies were burned alive, they can’t believe it."
Ramona Africa is the sole adult survivor of that conflagration. (A small boy nicknamed "Birdie" also escaped with her from the burning house.) She remembers crouching in the basement with all the other MOVE members and their children, feeling the heat and smoke as their rowhouse burned. And she remembers being fired upon by police when she tried to escape out the back-alley basement door. (Police have always denied shooting at MOVE members trying to leave the burning house, but at subsequent hearings, Ramona and Birdie each gave vivid testimony about bullets tearing at the building as they dashed down the alley.)
"Their intent was to exterminate every living being in that house," she maintains. "It’s nothing less than a miracle that Birdie and I got out alive." She would spend a month in the hospital getting skin grafts for burns to her legs, arm and back. Later, she became the only person convicted of any criminal activity on that day. Sentenced to a maximum of seven years for riot and conspiracy offenses, a state parole board offered her freedom after 16 months, on the sole condition that she cut her ties to the MOVE organization. She refused and wound up serving the full seven years.
The stubbornness of the parole board on this point, despite strong objections from some members of city government, now lends credence in some circles to Ramona’s claim that she was little more than a political prisoner during those years.
"When I was interviewed by the parole board, they never asked me would I agree never to be involved in any riotous behavior," she points out. "They didn’t ask me anything like that. The only thing they wanted to know was, would I leave MOVE?"
The same was true for other MOVE members who went to prison over the years, she says. "[The parole board] never ever questioned any of us about anything we were supposedly convicted of."
With her message honed by years of public speaking, Ramona discusses even the most painful memories — of the hospital, the fire, prison — in a calm and measured voice. She gets rattled only slightly by questions about MOVE’s culpability in the two standoffs with police and when LaVerne and Louise’s criticisms are passed on to her.
"People said it was profanity, the fact that we put food out for stray cats and dogs," she says defensively. "I’m not going to divert to that early ’70s stuff. There are a lot of people guilty of the same things, but they don’t attack them like they do MOVE."
She dismisses claims that MOVE harangued its Osage Avenue neighbors with profane diatribes over a loudspeaker, stating that the device was seldom used because MOVE members were too busy working.
After the MOVE fire, court settlements compensating parents of the dead children enabled MOVE to pay $265,000 cash for two three-story twin houses on Kingsessing Avenue, where they have lived quietly, by all accounts, for more than nine years. But if MOVE is a better neighbor now, Ramona says, it’s because society, not MOVE, has changed.
"MOVE people do what is necessary," she insists. "When you’re talking to somebody and they can’t hear you, you speak louder. We don’t have to speak as loud as we did in the ’80s, because… it doesn’t take so much for people to understand how treacherous this system is. It’s a shame that babies and innocent men women and animals had to be burnt alive, murdered, for people to take another look at this system."
As for Louise and LaVerne, "I could care less what they think," Ramona says. "We don’t burn our energy on them. They don’t have a life. So they consume themselves with our life, with what we’re doing. We have more important things to do."
But then there’s that threatening missive on the Internet, warning of an impending MOVE confrontation. For the first time, Ramona grows more evasive than dismissive.
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Home again: Bought with cash won in a legal settlement with the city, 4506 Kingsessing has been MOVE’s quiet base for almost nine years. photo: Shoshanna Wiesner |
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"I don’t have the Internet, so I don’t know about that," she says, adding, "People know how we feel about our children. MOVE people will fight and die for our children. We’re very protective of our kids."
The Move Alert contains almost the same words.
The rambling screed released in February states that "We’re alertin[g] all MOVE supporters to a very serious and volatile situation [that] involves a MOVE baby and could lead to another May 13th." The text goes on to accuse the former husband of Alberta Africa, a white man named John Gilbride, of being a "weak traitor" manipulated by government agents intent on destroying MOVE. "The system knows that MOVE will fight to the death if need be, to protect MOVE children, and they are opportunistically using this situation to try to provoke an incident that they can use to attempt to kill MOVE, imprison MOVE, whatever."
Despite the overblown, purple prose, one Swarthmore College sociology professor who has studied MOVE for years says that the custody battle still ranks as a serious cause for concern.
"It’s not entirely surprising to me that a current custody controversy might be understood as potentially precipitating another confrontation," says Robin Wagner-Pacifici, author of the 1994 book Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia Versus MOVE. "Children and their status has always been at the center of these conflicts."
Gilbride and Alberta Africa were married in February 1992 and lived at the MOVE house on Kingsessing Avenue even after their little boy, John Zachary "Zack" Gilbride was born in May of 1996. By 1998, Gilbride, a supervisor for US Airways, tried to get his family away from MOVE by buying a house in Cherry Hill, but when Alberta kept returning with the boy to the MOVE house, Gilbride left and filed for custody.
"My client had to get out of there," says Sheryl Rentz, Gilbride’s attorney. "He just couldn’t handle that communal, isolated, secluded, closed environment, with these people trying to torment him and control his life." Rentz describes how, after a long day of work, Gilbride would come home to the MOVE house, only to find that some conflict among members had precipitated a mandatory all-night meeting to resolve the issue. "Then," Rentz says, "he’d have to go to work again the next morning." Gilbride was demeaned by the group if he objected, she says.
Through Rentz, Gilbride explains that he’s avoiding discussing the custody case directly until after the next Family Court hearing, which is slated for next week. Alberta Africa and her lawyer have also refused comment.
Ramona Africa, however, has plenty to say on the subject, claiming that Gilbride abandoned the boy, doesn’t love him and, because of his demanding work obligations, wouldn’t be a good father even if he did gain custody.
She also adamantly denies that Zack Gilbride was conceived artificially with a donor egg. "That’s not true, that is not true," she insists. "Because his attorney said it doesn’t make it a fact."
Rentz offers to show the medical records documenting the in vitro procedure, but she says that Zack’s origins are quite clear to anyone who looks at him. His father is white, the donor egg was drawn from a white woman, and although Alberta Africa is African-American, "Zack looks Irish," Rentz says. "He has blond hair and rosy cheeks."
"Zack simply can’t be raised as a MOVE child," Rentz continues. "This is a very different case than any other custody case. You have to talk about the environment they’re living in, the pressures that they live in, the MOVE lifestyle." In a prior hearing, Rentz attempted to show how the MOVE house is an unfit environment for children, by asking a 16-year-old boy raised by MOVE to read a newspaper on the witness stand. "He could barely read the Philadelphia Inquirer," she says, "which is written at what, a sixth-grade level?"
For months now, Rentz has been getting crank calls and hate mail merely for representing Gilbride. She’s not prepared to speculate, however, what might happen should her client win custody of his son, and Alberta Africa fails to give the boy up.
As oppressive as Gilbride’s attorney makes it seem, life with MOVE today is likely to be just a mild imitation of what it was like when John Africa was still around.
