Domesticity, Race, and “Civilization” in MOVE’s Philadelphia, 1978–85

In the 1970s and 1980s, Philadelphia police and other officials repeatedly clashed with members of MOVE, a radical black movement founded by John Africa. These interactions culminated in 1985 when police bombed the house in which MOVE members lived, killing eleven people and burning down dozens of houses in a primarily black neighborhood. Leading up to the bombing, the Philadelphia press focused on MOVE’s “uncivilized” lifestyle, including their health code violations, potential endangerment of children, and general disregard for heteronormative domestic family structures. MOVE members, by contrast, argued that “civilization” itself was in fact barbaric, citing the “unnatural” exploitation of land and people on which US American society was based.

This paper situates this clash over “civilization” in the context of moral panic and policing, as well as religious freedom law, in the 1970s and early 1980s. It examined three interconnected episodes. First, it analyzes early attempts by police to understand MOVE by reading anti-cult literature and analogizing the group to the Moorish Science Temple and Nation of Islam. Second, it considers 1981 religious freedom case of Frank Africa, an incarcerated member of MOVE who was denied accommodations because his beliefs were deemed not religious. Third, it studies public rhetoric from MOVE members as well as the press and city officials in the weeks and months preceding the bombing, focusing of the rhetoric of civilization. As a whole, the paper shows how gender and domesticity were central to the racialized civilizationalist assemblages by which MOVE was understood by police and the press, in the context of moral panic. At the same time, it studies MOVE members’ own arguments that contested this construction of civilization, critiquing its implicit white supremacy and colonialist framework, as well as the realities of physical violence and exploitation.