For a while it looked as if Mayor Rizzo’s vow to put MOVE out of business for good had been fulfilled.
Eleven of those who had been in the house on August 8 were tried in 1979 on charges ranging from simple assault to murder. Nine of them were tried in a single trial. Two were tried separately at their own request.
The hundreds of earlier trials had been, in effect, a dress rehearsal for what Newsweek would call “the bizarre trial of the MOVE Nine.” The trial looked like pandemonium to the uninitiated, but it was a well-orchestrated performance.
From MOVE’s first days, Vincent had seen trials as an opportunity to “put out information,” to speak the truth about The Guidelines. In the Powelton Village headquarters, MOVE had held long mock trials where its members would practice and perfect their tactics and responses. Now, with a national audience, they put that training to use and transformed the proceedings into months of guerrilla theater.
The trial began in early December 1979 and lasted until May of the following year. The defendants objected to the trial, calling it “rigged.” Though the court appointed “backup” attorneys, MOVE members ignored them and instead conducted the defense themselves. Their cross-examination of prosecution witnesses often descended into long, meandering harangues. The judge routinely ejected them from the courtroom.
Despite the testimony of witnesses who saw MOVE members firing carbines and other weapons that day, as well as ballistics tests linking the bullet that killed Ramp with a gun recovered in the basement of the house and a federal weapons purchase form showing that the gun and others had been purchased under a pseudonym by Phil Africa, the defendants maintained throughout the trial that MOVE gunfire hadn’t killed Ramp. The evidence against them had been manufactured, they said. The police had leveled the house to destroy evidence that would have exonerated them. They produced witnesses—a neighbor, a student, three reporters, and negotiator Walter Palmer—whose testimony suggested that the first shot of the day had come not from the MOVE house but from a mysterious man in a third-story window across the street and behind the police lines.
After months of testimony the court-appointed backup attorneys for MOVE made the closing arguments. They argued the case was too circumstantial: the murder weapon bore no fingerprints, and none of the witnesses could actually link any individual MOVE member to Ramp’s death. The arguments were unsuccessful; all nine were convicted of all charges and sentenced to thirty to one hundred years in prison.
In another courtroom in City Hall, a related trial was also under way in early 1981. Police officers Joseph Zagame, Charles Geist, and Terrence Patrick Mulvihill were charged with aggravated and simple assault and official oppression for their beating of Delbert Africa. Newspaper reports also placed Mulvihill’s partner, Lawrence D’Ulisse, at the scene, but he was not charged.
Witnesses, news photos, and videotape all documented the savage beating that Delbert had sustained on the sidewalk outside the MOVE house on August 8. The identity of the police who beat him was never in dispute. Even so, Judge Stanley Kubacki acquitted all three defendants without even permitting the case to be decided by the jury.
“Philadelphia is bleeding to death because of the MOVE tragedy,” he explained. “No verdict will stanch the flow of blood. It can only be stopped by setting up a lightning rod. I will be that lightning rod.”
Judge Kubacki was wrong to think his decision would end the “flow of blood.” Mulvihill and D’Ulisse would be facing MOVE again, on another day filled with death and rage. And within five years Geist would be dead, shot in the face by his wife with his own gun.
In July 1980, in the federal courthouse in downtown Philadelphia, came the most stunning trial of all: the United States v. Vincent Leaphart, aka John Africa. It had taken federal agents three long years to pick up his trail after he’d disappeared from Jeanne’s house. They had finally traced him to Rochester, where they arrested him along with Alberta, Alphonso, Jerry (Gerald Ford Africa), Conrad and others. Alphonso and Vincent were tried on conspiracy and weapons violations; the others faced a separate trial on riot and other charges related to the 1977 armed confrontation.
Federal prosecutor Marc Durant laid out the government’s case against John Africa in his opening argument: He and his followers had illegally acquired explosives in a plan to terrorize several major U.S. cities. The evidence in the case, collected during the three-year investigation, was abundant. It included Glassey’s testimony and taped conversations with MOVE members, the cache of explosives recovered from Witt’s car in 1977, and the testimony of the federal agents on the case.
In addition to Glassey, the prosecution relied on another key witness: Jeanne Africa. By the time of the trial her view of John Africa had come full circle from the love and blind faith that she had once given him. In the intervening years she’d become a born-again Christian, and she now believed that John Africa was Satan. She believed that he “washes out your brain of the system, but he also programs you with his evilness and his witchcraft.”
The prosecutors’ strategy was, first, to lay out the evidence linking Vincent with the acquisition of explosives and firearms and a plan to plant bombs in major cities and, second, to show the jurors the extent to which he controlled the MOVE organization. Rejecting the services of a court-appointed attorney, Vincent and the other defendants chose to present their own cases. The defense strategy, as conducted by Alphonso, was hardly a strategy at all; it was more of an extended advertisement for John Africa’s ability to cure people of drug addiction, prostitution and other vices. He paraded MOVE members up on the stand, one after another, each testifying to the miracles that John Africa had performed in their lives. Frank Africa told the jurors “since being in MOVE I have seen all kinds of situations that I hadn’t seen before.
“A good example is August 8th. That day the cops came up to kill all MOVE people. They fired point blank at MOVE people. But nobody died that day and John Africa protected us just as he has always protected us. They came out there to kill us that day, but it didn’t happen.
“Here’s another example of a miracle: we ran out of water, and it started raining. It’s hard for people to accept these things as miracles, because it’s beyond their conception. They have to categorize it as something in this system. If you are only familiar with the system, it is hard for you to understand the power of truth. You don’t know what it is when you see it.”
Under Alphonso’s friendly questioning, MOVE member Eddie Africa testified to the perfection of John Africa: “John Africa is perfect. All perfect means is what is right. Your idea of what perfection is is mystical, because you see perfect as being impossible.
“Perfect means doing what is right all the time, and it’s possible to do what is right all the time. John Africa has done that. Your courts have not—such as those cops who shot the people who were handcuffed [a reference to a controversial police brutality case in Philadelphia in the 1970sl. They were set free, innocent. When the cop that beat Delbert Orr Africa, he was set free, told he was innocent.
“These are the courts you ask us to defend, you ask us to come to for justice—all right? Same courts that order the house to be torn down, that order us to be placed in a starvation blockade. That’s the courts that you tell us we’ve got to come to for justice. We’ve come to them. We’ve come to them not for justice, but to show them we know they’re not right.”
On cross-examination of Eddie, the prosecutor tried to establish that John Africa and the defendant, Vincent Leaphart, were one and the same—to show, in fact, that Vincent directed all of MOVE’s activities. He asked: “Is there a man, a single individual, a man who is John Africa who always is perfect? Or is that a spirit?”
“John Africa is a person,” Eddie answered. “John Africa is a black man. John Africa is right. We are working to be like him.”
“Is he one individual man who gets up in the morning and puts on his clothes, who you can see walking down the street?”
“Yes, he’s a man. He’s not no ghost flying around here. John Africa is a man.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Is he here today?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Can you point to him?”
“John Africa is with Alphonso. Vincent Africa is John Africa. John Africa is in—”
“Who knows the most about The Guidelines of teachings of John Africa? What man in this courtroom?”
“Vincent Africa.”
“Thank you.”
It was not a defense that seemed destined to win the hearts and minds of the middle- and working-class members of the jury. When all the “evidence” was presented, Vincent himself rose to address the jury for closing arguments. It was the only time the founder of MOVE ever gave an official statement about his organization and his philosophy.
He began softly, simply. Before he was done, he’d wept nearly a dozen times.
I’m not a guilty man. I’m an innocent man. I didn’t come here to make trouble or to bring trouble, but to bring the truth. And goddamn it, that’s what I’m going to do.
I’m fighting for the air that you’ve got to breathe, and I’m fighting for water that you’ve got to drink. 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.
Don’t you see, if you took this thing all the way—all the way—you would have clean air, clean water, clean soil and be quenched of industry! But you see, they don’t want that. They can’t have that.
I’ve been a revolutionary all my life. Since I could understand the word revolution, I have been a revolutionary. And I remain a revolutionary, because, don’t you see, revolutionary simply means to turn, to generate, to activate. It don’t mean it should be evil and kill people and bomb people. It simply means to be right. If this world didn’t revolutionize, everything would stop. If your heart didn’t revolutionize, you would stop. If your lungs don’t revolutionize, you would stop.
He paused and then began another train of thought: “Deer don’t run down people—but people run down deer. Monkeys don’t shoot people—but people shoot monkeys. Yet monkeys are seen as unclean and people as intelligent.
“You can go as far as you want in the forest, and you won’t find no jails. Because the animals of the forest don’t believe in jail. But come to civilization, that’s all you see.”
That was the entire defense—days of testimonials and a sermon about clean air and water. It stood against a case that federal agents had spent three years building, a case the prosecutor later called his strongest ever. But when the jury returned after five-and-a-half days of deliberations, the courtroom was stunned. By unanimous vote it had found Vincent and Alphonso innocent of all charges.
Vincent left the courthouse carrying a box of fresh fruit, exchanged a few words with reporters, and climbed into a waiting car surrounded by ecstatic supporters. As the car sped away it was the last time he would face reporters and television cameras.
By the time Vincent’s trial started most of MOVE’s far-flung members had come back to Philadelphia. The arrests in Rochester closed down the operation in that city. The house in Richmond closed halfway through his trial.
Vincent had originally set up the Richmond “Seed of Wisdom” chapter to be nonconfrontational, a place where the children could stay during the confrontation in 1978. But trouble had started within days after the women and children arrived. Prompted by reports that children were being abused, welfare officials in Richmond demanded to have a doctor examine them and asked to see birth certificates.
Sharon Sims Africa and her sister Valerie, the two adults who had stayed on in the house with the kids, refused. When the officials threatened to return with a court order, the two women prepared for a siege. They boarded up the doors and windows and mounted a loudspeaker in the front window.
The scene that was played out in Philadelphia was repeated in Richmond. By the time the police returned with the court order the house was sealed off. The police set up barricades around the house and moved into position. Mounted on horseback and carrying rifles and tear gas grenades, the Richmond police surrounded the house for two-and-a-half hours before they retreated. Major James Parks of the Richmond police told reporters they had pulled back because they didn’t want a confrontation: “We respect their religious beliefs. We’ll see if something can’t be worked out.”
Fearing the children would be taken, the adults and children stayed barricaded in the house for nine months. Money came from MOVE headquarters by way of the Western Union office. Neighbors did their shopping for them. Finally, by May of 1978, the money stopped coming, as the Philadelphia house suffered under its own siege.
For a year and a half afterward, the Seed of Wisdom house was left alone, although the Richmond police were watching it carefully and had already been in touch with the police in Philadelphia. In contrast to the violence in Philadelphia, life in Richmond settled into a quiet routine. Sharon and Valerie took jobs to bring in some money. Sharon started seeing Frank, a man in the neighborhood who had a fondness for going out in the middle of the night for coffee.
Sharon was with him one evening when a police car pulled them over just after they’d left the house. They had a warrant for Sharon’s arrest for kidnapping, neglect, and other charges. At the same time they’d raided the house and picked up Valerie.
The children were placed in foster homes for three weeks while MOVE raised money to bail out the two women. When they got the children back, they were in a “horrible state,” Sharon later told a reporter. Their hair had been cut and washed; the infants were wearing diapers; they’d been exposed, for the first time in their lives, to cooked food and television. That night she and Valerie took the children back to Philadelphia.
The two women returned to Virginia for the court hearing. When the attorney for the state learned they’d taken the children away he moved to have them held in contempt. Court-appointed attorneys for the children argued that the children should be removed from the care of the two women and made wards of the state. Although the judge did not grant the contempt order, he did give custody of the children to the state—an essentially empty act, since the children were already outside of the state’s jurisdiction.
It was raining that day by the time Sharon and Valerie got back to the house after the hearing. They ate lunch, packed their belongings, and closed up the house. As they drove away from the house for the last time, the car got stuck in the muddy driveway, and they had to get out in the downpour and push it. They finally got free and drove away, headed for Philadelphia. As they left, a police cruiser turned the corner, passed them, and pulled into the driveway, bringing warrants for their arrest.
In 1981 these people of MOVE—the women and children from Richmond, the children of the jailed members, members who had been released from prison—all began to converge on Louise James’s little row house on Osage Avenue. They came not as part of any grand design, but simply because they now had nowhere else to go.
Adding to those who returned were new recruits. Ramona Johnson, a black prelaw student at Philadelphia’s Temple University, became interested in MOVE from the trials and soon quit school to join up.
Twenty-year-old Theresa Brooks, a black woman from an upper-middle-class family in New Jersey, also began to follow the teachings of John Africa—much to the anger and bewilderment of her family. She had dropped out of college and had been a member about six months when she wrote a long letter to her family explaining her decision:
Family:
This letter is addressed to each of you. I’m putting what I have to say in letter form, not out of fear to tell you face to face, but I’m doing it this way with the hope that you’ll be able to understand & hear all that I’m saying. Feel free to read it a couple of times so as not to miss a thing! Many of you have already formed your own opinion about me & my involvement with MOVE. You already have preconceived ideas about them. What you need to do is listen to me. 1st let me tell you all, I love each one of you. Those of you who’ve decided to disown me, not talk to me or whatever, it doesn’t change my love for you.
Since many of you have formed opinions about me, I’ve decided to write this letter with the intention of clearing up a few things. I’m a committed, uncompromising MOVE supporter. I’m not brainwashed, as some of you have stated. If there’s been any washing being done, it’s washed my brain clear!!
Anything a MOVE member tells me or anyone else, they qualified. How much of the stuff Rev. ____________ puts out does he qualify? He’s a leader, where has he lead you? If you question anything you here come from MOVE, it can be cleared up & qualified! Can Rev. __________ make that same claim?
. . . I’m a committed MOVE supporter because MOVE is right. They are totally committed vanguards of revolution. They’re a united organization, dedicated to speak out against all & any wrong. This includes wrongs in the courts, in the jails, in the church & on the street.
MOVE believes all life is important. Man, animal, marine & vegatation all are just as important. Man took it upon himself to labal himself as superior & animal life inferior. The same man who said whites are superior to blacks!!
. . . MOVE is sensitive and loving. Yes, sometimes they are loud and hostile when someone is trying to kill your child, you’re gonna holler & yell as loud as you can so someone will hear you. This is the same thing MOVE does. They’re yelling about the wrongs being done to them & all the rest of the oppressed people. They are totally committed to truth, right & justice.
. . . Concerning the garlic—some of you have commented on that. Many of you know garlic is good for you. It’s a natural medicine that kills poisons & bacteria that we breath in take in threw food & air. If anyone’s noticed I didn’t get the flu this year. Oh, so you didn’t either. Well how many of you were out walking l-3 miles in the rain & snow. Coming home nights cold and wet. As far as the smell goes I can deal with that. To stop eating garlic because it smells is a pretty weak reason to give it up & take the chance of getting sick, or even letting unwanted toxins live in my body.
. . . I’m not asking you to join MOVE. I’m asking you to listen to me, ask me questions, don’t judge me. Not one of you is qualified to judge me on the information you’ve read in the papers or heard on the news, or even gotten from a Phila. cop. To try & judge me on that would only allow you to misjudge me.
The Family Africa is also my family. Blood don’t make a family . . . . All my family is important to me. Think about what I’m saying. Many of you reading this letter know darn well there ain’t that much understanding in this family.
. . . Blacks are always crying about the prejudice towards them. Yet the same blacks have ignored to hear MOVE’s crys of prejudice towards them.
I’m not ignoring their crys. I hope you all don’t either. MOVE isn’t just fighting for themselves, they’re fighting for us all.
Please give me some feedback! Makes sense, doesn’t it?
The Power of truth is final. I’m speaking nothing but the truth.
To quote John Africa: A just person will ignore his pride when he hears what’s right. An unjust person will ignore what is right & hold fast to his goddamn pride.
Ona move—
Despite the friction, Theresa’s mother kept in touch, once sending her a parcel of clothes and occasionally visiting the house. She noticed a change come over Theresa in 1983. Theresa began to talk in what her mother called “street talk”—uneducated slang. She remembers that her daughter’s demeanor changed accordingly. All of the changes, she said, coincided with the arrival at the house of Frank Africa.
After serving nearly three years in prison on riot and conspiracy charges, Frank James Africa was paroled in 1983. Parole records show that he settled into an apartment and lived quietly. Toward the end of 1983 he requested permission from his parole officer to move into his boyhood home at 6221 Osage Avenue. By the time the parole office acted on his request, Frank had already moved.
Technically it was a violation of his parole to move without permission, but the request had been a routine one and his parole officer approved it after the fact. He sent Frank’s file to the west Philadelphia parole office.
After receiving the case, the west Philadelphia parole officer followed standard procedure and visited the parolee’s new address to determine its “suitability.” When he arrived at 6221 Osage, he saw a row house in need of paint, with a vegetable cart parked on the street outside. When he knocked on the front door, a man in dreadlocks answered.
The parole officer explained who he was and why he was there. The man at the door told him that Frank wasn’t home, but he invited the officer to come in and talk to the other people in the house. Later the officer filed a report stating that although the people living at 622l Osage Avenue were engaged in an “alternative lifestyle,” the house offered a “stable environment” for Frank James Africa.
Perhaps it is simply coincidence, but the return of Frank James Africa to his mother’s house marked the beginning of problems with the neighbors on Osage Avenue. Until then the other neighbors had tolerated MOVE’s presence in the house. Some had been more than tolerant; they respected MOVE’s goals even if they didn’t agree with its methods. Clifford Bond was one of them.
Bond had come to the neighborhood by a roundabout route. Born in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, he lived in Media, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico before he married and settled with his wife into the home she’d grown up in. A schoolteacher and nutritionist, he had little active interest in politics or revolution. Even so, he agreed with a lot of what the MOVE people had to say—about injustice and how the people who were in power always seemed to get ahead at the expense of the little guy. So despite the history of violence in Powelton, Bond wasn’t too worried when MOVE came into his neighborhood. In fact, he’d often stop to buy fruit from the handcart that they kept in front of their house, and he’d occasionally take the time to stop and talk some philosophy with Conrad Africa or one of the others.
All of the neighbors prided themselves on their ability to live and let live. On that single narrow block there lived a Buddhist family, a police detective, and an elderly white man who’d stayed behind when other whites had left in the fifties. Even so, those who lived nearest the MOVE house began to experience some problems. Just as had happened with Vincent’s original apartment in Powelton, adjacent houses soon became infested with roaches. People started seeing small, ill-clad children digging through their trash. At night they could hear people running across their rooftops.
During the day the MOVE adults would round up the children and lead them out the back of the house, down a gangplank that stretched across the alley and onto the narrow sidewalk that ran behind the houses, and lead them half a block to the wooded expanse of Cobbs Creek Park. There the children received an education in the skills MOVE deemed important. Instead of reading or arithmetic, they worked at calisthenics. They ran in the park and bathed in the creek. At night, when the weather was good, they slept on the rooftop.
Late in 1983 the violence that had followed MOVE from its beginnings came to Osage Avenue.
The neighbors say that it began as a fight over a parking space, though it had been preceded by increasing tensions between the neighbors and the people of MOVE. On September 4, they say, neighbor Butch Marshall parked in front of the MOVE house in the space usually occupied by MOVE’s cart. In the argument that followed, Marshall was beaten and bitten in his face, back, and groin so severely that neighbors had to take him to the hospital.
MOVE member Jerry Africa says this account of the incident isn’t accurate. Though he wasn’t living at the house, he was there almost every day and heard the story from those who were, he says. According to him, the trouble had begun months earlier, when Marshall’s kids started making fun of the MOVE children and, later, bullying them. When the adult MOVE members complained to Marshall, Jerry Africa says, Marshall threatened them with a gun.
Alberta Africa—who was in prison at the time—says that Marshall started the argument on September 4: “Conrad was standing next to the curb, and when Marshall pulled up, he bumped him with the fender—on purpose, you know. When Conrad said something to him, he said, ‘Fuck you, I’ll do it again.’ That’s how the fight started.”
Like the allegations of violence in Powelton, she says that the neighbors’ early complaints against MOVE are the result of prejudice, misunderstanding, and biased reporting in the press. Police and the papers routinely ignored MOVE’s complaints and played up those who spoke against them, she says.
The neighbors, curiously, have a similar complaint. They say that their pleas to the police and to the city were discounted or ignored. Because of MOVE’s violent history, they say, the city went to extraordinary lengths to avoid any confrontation and declared their neighborhood a no-man’s-land.
After Butch Marshall was attacked, neighbors Carrie Foskey and Inez Nichols collected names for a petition to the city. They drew up a laundry list of complaints: the garbage that was left open so that animals could feed on it, the dogs and cats that ran loose through the neighborhood, the raw meat that MOVE left outside for strays and rats, the fence that MOVE members had constructed across the alley, blocking access to the neighbors’ rear garages, the sale of produce in a residential neighborhood, the attack on Marshall and another that had occurred shortly afterward on another neighbor.
The neighbors, banding together into an informal alliance, also contacted their elected representatives. One, state representative Peter Truman, urged the neighbors to wait just a few months. A historic election was taking place: Philadelphia was on the verge of electing its first black mayor, and surely the neighbors didn’t want to do anything that would cast him in a bad light.
Wait until after Wilson Goode is elected, Truman told the neighbors. After the election, he said, “I’ll go out there and tear that fence down myself.”
In the fall of 1983 the smart money in the mayor’s race was on Wilson Goode. He ran a flawless campaign, defeating former mayor Frank Rizzo in the Democratic primary and going on to sweep a three-way race in the general election. A black man who had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, he had accomplished what many had predicted was impossible, bringing together everyone from poor blacks of north Philadelphia to the business leaders of downtown. His election signaled a new Philadelphia, one that was ready to turn its back on the old politics of division and privilege and embrace a vision of unity.
Goode didn’t bring a strong political agenda with him when he became mayor. Since he had been managing the city under Mayor Bill Green for the last four years, the day-to-day direction of the city continued in much the same manner. His choices for the city’s top administrative jobs, for example, were based on pragmatism and experience rather than ideology. Retired army general Leo Brooks, who had managed a sprawling defense supply center in Philadelphia, was a widely praised choice for managing director. Gregore Sambor had been next in line for the commissioner’s job in the police hierarchy after the departure of Commissioner Morton Solomon, and Goode named him to that post. Fire Commissioner William Richmond continued in his job. Others in Goode’s cabinet were selected from his former staff or were holdovers from the Green administration.
That promised to be the tone of Goode’s administration: practical and noncontroversial. There would be no grandstanders. Goode’s government promised to be just that—good government—and when he won, it seemed to be a victory that all of Philadelphia could savor—and not least of all the people living on Osage Avenue, who believed that now they had found someone who would listen to their grievances.
But things did not turn out quite that way. After the election Pete Truman did not come out and tear down the fence. Nor did anyone else from the state or city government respond to their call for action. The incidents of violence and harassment continued.
The violence on the street was matched by increasing violence within the home itself. One day in early December neighbors watched in alarm as Louise ran down the street chased by her son, an ax in his hands.
Through all the early years of MOVE, Louise’s own commitment to the organization had run hot and cold. Now, it seemed, she had become the victim of a vendetta within MOVE itself. It is not clear exactly why; Alberta Africa has said that she “wasn’t willing to do some of the work that needed to be done”—that she wasn’t facing up to her own shortcomings and trying to overcome them. It is true that she had not abandoned the life style; despite her espousal of MOVE doctrine, she had lived a fairly ordinary life on Osage Avenue.
Whatever the reasons, Louise apparently began to be singled out for punishment. According to a police report, she said that she was forced to live in her bedroom as the members knocked out the walls of her house and boarded up the windows. They used her telephone, running up hundreds of dollars in long-distance charges. They intercepted her mail.
In a police report filed later, Louise said that John Africa had once ordered Frank to beat her after Sharon Sims, her niece, refused his order to marry Jerry Africa. She told police that one day in October Frank had seen her slip a letter into her pocket and confiscated it. John Africa had called the other MOVE members into Louise’s bedroom and ordered her to read the letter out loud. It was from a MOVE member in Muncy prison, and it attacked Louise virulently. After reading a few sentences of obscenities and rants, Louise refused to go on.
Vincent, she told police, had turned to Frank and ordered him to beat her until she started to vomit. Then Frank took a pillow and put it over her face.
“Do you want her cycled?” he asked, looking at Vincent.
“No,” he said. “Not this time.”
It was not long after that, Louise said, that she told her brother she wanted to spend a week in Atlantic City. He told her she could pack some things into two trash bags. She did, and she left the house, never to return. She went to live with her sister LaVerne, but the harassment did not end. LaVerne had dropped out of MOVE along with her daughters Sharon and Gail. Like her sister Louise, they received dozens of poison-pen letters from jailed MOVE members. The house was besieged with phone calls—some days she received as many as sixty—as other members called her day and night and accused her of being a traitor.
There is some evidence that Frank was secretly trying to save his mother by driving her away from the house. When LaVerne left MOVE a few months before Frank’s attacks on his mother, she had a long private conversation with Frank. He told her that he was concerned about his mother. Because the efforts to secure the release of the MOVE members who were still in jail hadn’t succeeded, Vincent was planning yet another confrontation. Frank wanted her out of the house before it occurred, but he was worried that if he told her about the plans she would try to interfere to protect him. If the beatings and abuse were part of Frank’s plan to get his mother out of the house before something happened, they accomplished his goal.
By the end of 1983 all of Vincent’s energies seemed to be directed toward winning the release of the jailed MOVE members. Legal avenues had been tried and had failed, so now he was determined to provoke the city into action. And he planned to use the neighbors as his pawns in the game.
On Christmas morning Betty Mapp heard a sound outside her living room that she had never heard before. At first she thought it was Christmas carolers, but as she listened more closely she realized with a shock that no carolers would use language as vile as what she was hearing.
It was the sound of an angry, almost unintelligible voice: “Motherfucker Santa Claus!” it began, then launched into a string of obscenities and threats. MOVE had set up a loudspeaker on the front of the house.
Someone called the police. They came and then simply drove away without getting out of the car. Working in shifts, MOVE members ranted for eight hours that Christmas Day.
Over and over again they called for the release of thirteen jailed MOVE members. On the day after Christmas they began again. And again on the days that followed. When neighbors went to the MOVE house to complain, members freely explained their strategy: The city wouldn’t listen to MOVE’s grievances, but sooner or later they’d have to do something about the neighbors’ complaints. Go to City Hall, they urged the neighbors; the loudspeakers would be silenced only if the city responded to their demands.
By New Year’s Eve it was clear to the neighbors that the loudspeakers—and the obscenities—were there to stay. And despite the phone calls to the police and to city officials, no one was going to lift a finger to help them. First it had been the meat and the bugs and the strays, then the attacks. Now they were being forced to live under a nonstop amplified audio assault.
The new year of 1984 did not look promising.