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Free the MOVE 9 Prisoners! Remember May 1985 MOVE Massacre The police firebombing of black Philadelphia on 13 May 1985 was racist mass murder. Eleven people, five of them children, members of the mostly black and radical back-to-nature MOVE commune, were slaughtered. Police shot at MOVE members as they tried to escape their burning Osage Avenue house, and the ensuing inferno was deliberately allowed to rage for five hours, reducing a block of 61 homes to smoldering rubble and leaving hundreds homeless. For the “crime” of being the sole adult survivor, Ramona Africa was sentenced to seven years in prison and served every day. We wrote in protest immediately afterward that this racist atrocity was the bloody signature of the Reagan years, intended “to send a message to black America and ‘radicals’ of every stripe. ‘Anti-terrorism’ means massive government terror against anyone who is out of step in Reagan’s America” (WV No. 379, 17 May 1985). The bombing of MOVE, ordered by black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode and orchestrated by the Feds, was the culmination of over a decade of harassment, beatings, arrests and brutal assaults by a police force determined to ruthlessly repress any expression of black dissent in the racist hellhole of Philadelphia. Seven years earlier, on 8 August 1978, an army of nearly 600 Philadelphia cops surrounded and stormed the Powelton Village MOVE home to evict its defenseless residents. Cops blasted thousands of rounds at the house, killing Police Officer James Ramp in the cross fire. At a press conference later that day, then-Philadelphia D.A. Edward Rendell (who is now Pennsylvania’s governor) declared that police would have been “within their rights to have, subsequent to the shooting of Officer Ramp, stormed the house and killed all of the 12 people in the basement.” Nine MOVE members were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in prison, framed up for conspiracy and murder stemming from Ramp’s death. The MOVE 9 prisoners watched in horror from their Pennsylvania prison cells the 1985 incineration of their families and comrades. In 1998, Merle Africa died in prison, having spent nearly 20 years behind bars. Today the racist capitalist state continues its vendetta against MOVE and its most eloquent supporter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was framed up and sentenced to death in 1982. Last month, after enduring 30 years of persistent persecution in prison, Janine Africa, Janet Africa and Debbie Africa, three of the eight surviving members of the MOVE 9, were outrageously denied parole. Parole decisions for Michael Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa are still pending, and Chuck Africa is eligible for parole next year. The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, sends monthly stipends to the eight MOVE prisoners, as well as Mumia, as an expression of solidarity with those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression. We wrote in 1985, stressing that a communist party must serve as a tribune of the people, that “it is our obligation to etch this racist atrocity into the memory of everyone we can reach, and on behalf of the working class to hold out the promise of proletarian justice” (WV No. 384, 26 July 1985). The MOVE prisoners and Mumia Abu-Jamal must be freed! The American workers revolution will avenge the MOVE martyrs! * * * Letters demanding freedom for the MOVE prisoners should be sent to the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, 1101 South Front Street, Suite 5100, Harrisburg, PA 17104-2517. The names for each of the commissioners are at: www.pbpp.state.pa.us. Copies of letters should be sent to: William Phillips Africa, AM 4984, SCI-Dallas, 1000 Follies Road, Dallas, PA 18612-0286.
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