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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or On Demand, I am so happy you're here today. On tomorrow's show, actresses Katie Holmes, Eddie Kaye Thomas, and Sarah Cooper join us to discuss their new play The Wanderers about betrayal and love, and religion. The Wall Street Journal said it was, "absorbing twisty and thoughtful, and the finest play of the year." Also, I have a listening party for jazz great Christian McBride's new release Prime.

That's in the future, but right now in the present, we're going to discuss the new podcast, The Africas vs. America.

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Alison Stewart: Let's talk about an incident in 1985 that earned Philadelphia a reputation as, "the city that bombed itself." Of course, the city as a whole didn't carry out The MOVE bombing, individuals with agency who made decisions did based on fear, bigotry, a warped sense of purpose, and history, lots and lots of history. In the spring of 1985, the tensions were high between Philly's police force and the Black liberation group called MOVE. The group which was part political organization, and part lifestyle commune didn't recognize much outside of its own beliefs and structures. They all took the surname, Africa.

They grew their own food. They taught their kids. They espouse wearing their hair natural. They were animal rights activists. Once gaining access to the set of The Mike Douglas Talk Show handcuffing him to a chair much like had been done to an animal on the show set. MOVE was on Philadelphia officials' radar and over time the members faced charges of noise violations for shouting political messages to bullhorns, making terroristic threats, illegal possession of firearms, and other charges. Now after the city shut off their water and electricity, the police ordered MOVE to surrender and vacate their home on Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood.

15 minutes later, two bombs were dropped from a helicopter onto the roof of the house in which seven adults and six children had barricaded themselves. The bombs and the fire afterward that spread to nearby buildings and that was not stopped caused 11 people to die and hundreds more civilians unrelated to MOVE's activities were left homeless and displaced. The MOVE bombing was found by a civil court judge to have been excessive force that happened in 1996. It wasn't until 2020 that the city passed a resolution formally apologizing for its handling of events.

A new podcast called The Africas vs. America uncovers testimony and evidence from that time and the backstory previously not in the public record, including conversations with the son of one of the MOVE victims. Joining me now to talk about it, please welcome Matthew Amha, a longtime producer with the CBC and host of this new podcast, The Africas vs. America. Matt, welcome.

Matthew Amha: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Alison Stewart: Do you prefer Matt or Matthew?

Matthew Amha: Either one works honestly, either one works.

Alison Stewart: Okay. Matthew, what did you know you wanted to explore about this story, which has been told a few times in different documentaries and obviously in different sources? Then what questions did you want to address specifically with this podcast?

Matthew Amha: I think some of what we wanted to explore, I think for one, it was to be able to look beyond the cliches that typically attend discussion of organizations like MOVE and discussion of Black liberation organizations generally. To be able to look past these archetypes of anger and violence and difference and to be able to tell a much more human story.

I think, really ours is the first that has endeavored to tell the full 50-year history of this organization that in many ways has existed as abstraction in the public memory.

I mean not only do tons of folks not remember the events of the bombing but the actual details of the organization itself have been washed away from the historical record as well. It was really our desire focusing on the intimate human stories of a family that was affected and remains affected by these great historical events.

Alison Stewart: We're going to open our phone lines for people who have any personal memories about the MOVE bombing of 1985 maybe you were in Philly, our reach goes almost to Philly. Maybe you heard firsthand from someone who was there. Maybe you happen to have some reason been there as well. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, of course, views have changed over time about how people view the police and how police force is viewed. Has something changed in your thoughts about MOVE in the past 40 years? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also reach out on social media @allofitwnyc.

You do a really good job of setting the stage of the bigger ideas of history not just about these people. That's all really interesting, and we'll talk about that in a minute. You pull out on the factors that ignited this interest in moving from a civil rights philosophy of say, Dr. King, to a philosophy like the ideology at the heart of MOVE. What were some of the factors behind this shift, especially for young people toward some more revolutionary ideology?

Matthew Amha: I think for MOVE, for one, I really appreciate that question, that isn't a question that I've gotten so far. I think the MOVE, they were long in the early day, in the early days of what I would describe as a largely nonviolent organization. I think that's a description that many members in the group might challenge. I think by and large, they were largely nonviolent, and traditional in the sense where they would find an organization or person to protest, they would stand outside with placards, and they would have their say, and really have their go.

What ends up happening is that the state violence directed towards them become so unrelenting. Many of the women begin to suffer miscarriages as a direct result to the violence visited upon them. At one point in 1976, one of the women Janine Africa suffers the death of her newborn child. It is at that point that the group comes to understand or comes to believe that they're not the targets of an extermination campaign, that no longer was this, essentially a traditional clash between law enforcement and civil rights organization, but that the Philadelphia Police Department was actively trying to eliminate them.

It's at that point that they then begin to espouse a more radical framework towards self-determinism, towards self-defense, a kind of eye-for-eye philosophy if you will. All of that is baked into the death of this child named Life Africa that happened in 1976.

Alison Stewart: Initially, what did MOVE want? What were its goals for its members? What were its goals for us as a society being able to live together?

Matthew Amha: The MOVE philosophy is pretense on the protection of all life. A lot of what sets them apart is that their understanding of what was important and what needed changing, extended well beyond the traditional boundaries of, "Black Liberation." They were just as focused on issues concerning the environment and animals. Initially, a lot of their activism actually centered on places like the Philadelphia Zoo, or Barnum and Bailey Circus, because they understood the animals contained in those zoos to be imprisoned, just as the Black folks in federal prisons across the country to have been imprisoned in the same way.

They drew all of these kinds of connections to the war machine, the zoo to capitalism, and had a commentary about American life in a much more broad sense, and all of which was interconnected for them. Really, I think, to answer your question, in the early days, it was about why are people going to zoos and offering their money to these places to watch animals that are effectively being tortured, in their words. They could not come to understand that. They thought the circus should no longer be in practice. They thought that asking basic questions about why does the zoo exist in the way that it does?

Why are we all here paying our money and patronizing businesses that contribute to this kind of treatment of animals? Then coming off of that, they were also incredibly focused in the early days on the question of police brutality. Specifically, as it related to the police department, under the rule of a man named Frank Rizzo would then go on to become two-term mayor. They go from the environment to animals to becoming a real buffer between Frank Rizzo's Police Department and the Black community in Philadelphia at that time.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. I believe it's Nyla, Nyla is calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Nyla.

Nyla: Hi. Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Tell us your story.

Nyla: I wanted to say that, can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're on the air.

Nyla: Okay. I want to say that I was born in 1978, and I remember living in Philadelphia, the bombing happened while I was watching it on television, and I just remember seeing the flames. Now I'm 44, and I live in Brooklyn. It stayed with me since. Every single time I hear about the MOVE movement, it's just a trigger. I don't really know when to watch the documentary because it brings back bad memories. Much of it was very much grounded in Afrocentric ideology. We lived right there on Fairmount, right by the art museum, one of those highrises right there. This is what I knew.

I have to also say that there's something about the '70s and the '60s where blackness in Philadelphia was very unique versus other parts of the country, for what I understand. Most of us born there had very Afrocentric names. You could come from an upper-middle-class environment, but you were very much grounded in what the richness of blackness was in Philadelphia at that era.

Alison Stewart: Nyla, thank you so much for calling in. Yes, that's really [unintelligible 00:10:42], she brings up such an interesting point, the time and place that there was so much about, this a lot of it is about Philadelphia. It's not just about the actors, right?

Matthew Amha: Yes, absolutely. I think to Nyla's point, Philadelphia has a very particular character at that time. It is in many ways a kind of avatar for other things that are happening across the nation, but I think the police commissioner and would-be mayor Frank Rizzo, for example, when we talk about the police, he created a police department in his own image. This was a man that was known to be a kind of efficient and brutal street fighter when he was a street cop. Again, he created the police department in his own image. They were the same way. I think it had even gotten so bad that they were the subjects of unprecedented lawsuit from the state department in 1979 because the levels of police brutality had gotten so desperate. I think also, to her other point about the Afrocentric nature of the city at that time, a lot of the folks that we spoke to are the descendants of those that came up North through the great migration, so they have these institutional and familial memories about Jim Crow in the South, about the plantation, about sharecropping.

Then coming off of that, there is a real desire to rediscover a connection with the continent, to rediscover a connection with stories like the Haitian revolution, to rediscover connection with stories like the Ethiopia's colonial wars against Italy. One of the folks that we feature is a man named Walt Palmer, who very early on in the 1960s, creates what he calls a freedom school to help institutionalize a lot of these stories in the minds and hearts of young Black children, men and women, boys and girls, who were dying to have their history known because it just was not evidenced in the curriculum at that time.

To her point, I think that's something that we really reflect in the show as well, the unique civil rights character that existed in Philly at that time.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Diane from Springfield, New Jersey. Hi, Diane, thank you so much for calling in to share your story.

Diane: Hi, thanks for having me. First, I have to say, as I live in New Jersey now, but I lived in Philly around the corner then, I agree fully with Nyla. There was a sense of blackness, of pride, that I did not realize did not occur in other parts of the country, and learned only as I moved to other places, but I have to say, as I lived around the corner from MOVE, and I remember clearly when all of-- This was actually the second of a set of events that happened with MOVE and the police. They were disruptive. It was hard to live with them, but they certainly did not deserve what happened.

Sadly, as much as the producer of the podcast emphasizes Rizzo, sadly, the action actually took place under the first black mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode. That felt like such a betrayal, but anyway, so thank you for going to the podcast.

Alison Stewart: Diane, thank you for calling in. Yes, we're covering a lot of the territory. You have the timeline correct in the podcast, just to be clear. You do point out that in the podcast, that some of the people who were complaining about MOVE in the neighborhood were middle-class Black families.

Matthew Amha: Yes. I think that is one of the deeply unfortunate ironies of what ends up happening with the story. I think to that caller's point, MOVE had become incredibly disruptive, and they were. They were at loggerheads with their neighborhood. At the time the bombing happens, they're living in a historically African-American community with largely Black upper-middle-class neighbors. Folks that are going to church, want to go to work and want to live a good life. MOVE at that time had become obsessed with freeing their members from prison.

They would stand outside at all times of the day and night on a speakerphone and be sloganeering to folks in the neighborhood about why they needed to join their movement and help get their people free. Obviously, people in the community did not appreciate this. Also to her point, what you see is the first Black mayor in Philadelphia's long history having to mediate between this incredibly radicalized group and the neighborhood. To her point, it is under his watch, not the watch of Frank Rizzo, that the bombing of the MOVE home actually happens.

We were able to speak with Mayor Wilson Goode. He's now a much older man in his 80s in a much more reflective place in his life. I think he is still grappling with exactly what happened, grappling with the great loss of life. Over the course of our conversation, you can hear him tearing up, you can hear him banging on the table, but I need to be honest in saying that he was still evasive when it came to responsibility and accountability. I would ask him these pointed questions about his place in this story, given that he was a Black man, and he was mayor, given that many to that last caller's point, believe him to have betrayed them.

Because they had foisted their hopes and dreams upon him and believed that he would be the man to lead them towards change. Instead, he facilitated this great disaster. I would ask him these questions and what he would do is apologize. He wouldn't necessarily reckon with the details of the questions. He wouldn't reckon with the testimonies of survivors or people that lived through the incident. He would just say, "I'm sorry." To me, that says that he's still working through what happened, despite the fact that it happened some 37 years ago now.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Matthew Amha. He's the host of The Africas vs. America. We'll take more of your calls. If you have any personal memories of MOVE or of the MOVE bombing, or maybe you have memories and your thoughts about the organization and about what happened have evolved over time, please give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out over social media @allofitwnyc. We will have more after a quick break. This is All of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All of It on WNYC. My guest is Matthew Amha. The name of the podcast is the Africas vs. America, an examination of the group MOVE, of what happened during the black liberation movement, what happened in Philadelphia during the MOVE bombing and after, as well as some very interesting stories that weave into it. One of the fascinating things, Matthew, about the podcast is that you talk to the next generation of the Africas, the descendants of John Africa. First of all, John Africa, can we get a little bit of background information on him, how he came to MOVE?

What are the two or three things that happened during his lifetime that brought him to shape-- That actually helped shape MOVE and what he wanted MOVE to be.

Matthew Amha: John Africa was a man from West Philly, a neighborhood called the Black Bottom or the Bottom. He was the founder of MOVE. I think the conventional answer to this question is that John Africa went to war in Korea, and he was changed by what he'd seen. He came back and wanted to start an organization. He was changed by the great loss of life that he'd seen. He was changed by the fact that he began to think about, "Why are all of the men on the front lines of this war, the men that are dying in the highest numbers, all poor young Black men from neighborhoods just like mine?"

Out of that, a political identity is born, but I think a kind of more complicated view is that a couple of years before that, early or actually late in his teenage years, his mother passes away suddenly. His mother dies from pneumonia, and she dies very suddenly. She dies following what should have been pretty basic treatments. He begins to understand, he begins to see a healthcare system that treated Black women as secondary and out of that moment. I think to me that is really the radicalizing moment for him. That in conjunction with his experience as a Black GI propels him towards radicalism in some ways.

Alison Stewart: The surname Africa is not the name he was born with. In the podcast, you note, "The act of renaming oneself is storied in the African American tradition. Ultimately, all the members of MOVE would take up this surname." What did you make of the meaning of this particular way of renaming oneself? Maybe not as an individual, but as a collective.

Matthew Amha: Yes, these were people who were in search of family. Who were in search of purpose. I think in the way that so many among us turn to religion, so many of us turn to different organizations in search of meaning and in search of purpose. What they decided to do is a collectivism, which in and of itself is born out of the rich African-American tradition. I think it's important that they took the name Africa because that is their way of signifying the importance from the land from which we all come in some way.

It's a historical analogy for them. I think it's also important in that not only were they members of an organization, but they very much considered one another to be family, like real family, blood family. I think the fact that they all joined names in that way and the fact that the name was Africa is incredibly significant to their history.

Alison Stewart: In the podcast, you talk to John Africa's son at length and he's telling you so much, but at one point he stops and he makes a point to you that a lot of these stories he's telling you are super personal and that he does have some sensitivity about how they'll be used and revealing so much to you. What did you tell him at the beginning of this series that made him trust you enough to tell you these personal stories? What responsibility did you feel with these stories?

Matthew Amha: I think to your point, a lot of the most important work that went into this series happened away from the microphone. It happened long before I began to write the series with our team. It was in personal conversations that I was having with some of our central characters. Me and Mike Africa Jr, I think to your point as well, we have to get it over this deeply held and really well-founded skepticism that many of the members have of the media because for so many years MOVE understands the press to essentially be extension of the state and an extension of the police.

The press would parachute into their lives, steal their stories and reinterpret them back to the public and would describe them as caricatures and stereotypes and would really perpetuate the dehumanization that was so often visited towards them. With me and Mike, it was really a process of maximum honesty and me telling him that I had no desire to malform the group into a caricature to turn them into avatars. I wanted them to be people, full people, which means complicated, which means contradictory, and which means people trying to find a way and make sense of themselves.

I think he really understood that. I think he was also welcomed by the fact that I was honest with him about my own experiences with the press. I am from Toronto, Canada. I am a young Black male journalist. I come from the kinds of communities that have also suffered from the kinds of media treatment that MOVE suffered from as well in that I have had friends die in my neighborhood and I wake up the next morning and I see them turned into villains on the front pages of our major newspapers. I think to myself, what is the actual media process that facilitates this and how do I change it?

This podcast gave me an opportunity to try to do that. To try to do that while still remaining loyal to the tenets of great journalism, which are research, which are corroboration verification, and all of that. To just have a more humane and human approach to the story so that they might feel comfortable in talking to me.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some more calls. Audra is calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Audra. Thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Audra: Hi. Thank you for all that you do. I'm really calling in with the statement from Matthew, I'm so proud of you. Don't even know you, but this is such an important topic. The conversation is way past due. I was 15 in 1985 when MOVE was bombed. It has such an incredible effect on how I view the American government and how I view our reactions to anybody that's considered radical or outside of the standard, to be honest, white, conservative, normalcy. I'm really pleased and heartened that you are treating this event and this historical event with such sensitivity and seriousness.

I don't think that America has really reckoned with what we did to the Africans and I don't think that the long-term effects on us as a human race have really been accounted for. I think this is a super important step, although how many years later for this to be addressed? I appreciate your work.

Alison Stewart: Audra, thank you for calling.

Matthew Amha: Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Daryl from the Bronx and I know you'll be able to answer this question, Matthew. Daryl, thank you for calling in, and thanks for holding.

Daryl: Thank you, Alison Stewart. May I call you Alison and Matthew? Would you spell your last name for me and-- Let me just ask the questions really quickly because this is a different format that I'm used to. I really appreciated you when you were on television 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whenever it was. I wish they'd kept that show on PBS. Zach, the producer said that you covered the taking of the body to the University of Penn and then failing to inform the family that they had the body all this time. Are you also covering their current activities with regard to freeing the journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal? Did you speak to Pam Africa extensively?

Alison Stewart: All right. That's two parts. Zach will give you the spelling of Matthew's last name. What Daryl's referencing is this forensic anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania. We've actually covered this on the show before. Listeners who this sounds familiar. This is for folks who didn't get to hear that segment. There are, gosh, there's a video of her hailing the bones of one of the victims of the bombing. It's a child and the way that she is talking about the bones is in a way that is really disrespectful. You cover this element of this story. It's a tangent, but it's important. It actually adds to the totality of the conversation.

What did you want listeners to understand about this part of the story? That one of the MOVE bombing children's bones are at university being used for study?

Matthew Amha: This is a varied question and I think it gets to the heart of what the previous caller, Audra was also talking about. When she's describing the fact that she is still marked by what happened and so many of the folks that were around at that time are still marked by what happened. It was important for us to begin in a contemporary place to make clear that like, this is still an act of story. This is still ongoing. The dust has not settled, people are still affected by this. We actually begin, as you've said, with the remains of a girl believed to be 14 years old. Her name was Katricia Dotson Africa, Tree Africa.

We begin with her remains being handled by a professor that was teaching a course at Princeton University. Her remains were featured in this course without the knowledge of her surviving family, her blood relatives, or the members of the MOVE organization that are still here. Many of them found out that her remains were being used in this way, with the rest of the public. You can only imagine the impact that would've had on everyone there. They were told for a long time that all of these remains had been reconciled, that everyone had been buried and accounted for. That wasn't true.

The remains of this girl were sitting in a box at Penn Museum in the city of Philadelphia for decades without the knowledge of the family. As you've said, we open up with this tape of the professor who as I think it's relevant in saying, was a white woman, handling these remains, talking about their smell. She describes them as juicy. I think a lot of people are really disturbed by having to listen to these descriptions, these carnal descriptions of a 14-year-old girl. We decide to open that way to my original point, to really drive home the fact that this is still an active situation.

That this is still unreconciled and that justice, whatever it is that we believe that word to mean has not happened yet for the MOVE family.

Alison Stewart: It goes to your point about humanity, I think.

Matthew Amha: Yes, exactly.

Alison Stewart: The name of the podcast is The Africas vs. America. I also want to point out it's seven episodes long. I think I listened to the first four, seven in total.

Matthew Amha: Yes ma'am.

Alison Stewart: It's a good deep dive. My guest has been Matthew Amha. He's a podcast host. Matthew, thank you for being with us and sharing your reporting.

Matthew Amha: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

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