1978-1985: State’s bloody vendetta against Philadelphia MOVE

"The police will be in there to drag them out by the backs of their necks."

"There will be a confrontation this time? There will be no barricades?"

"It's up to them…no barricades, Mike. They're going to be taken by force if they resist. No question about that. Children or not."

In 1978, Frank Rizzo escalated the war on the MOVE organization. The MOVE commune in Philadelphia's Powelton Village was razed by police bulldozers. An army of police fired untold rounds into the house despite the presence of children. Former Panther Delbert Africa was savagely beaten. During the police crossfire, one cop was killed.

"There was an incredible response by the city. I'm talking like 700 cops. A siege around the neighborhood. And it really continued day by day, day by day, until it built them to August 8, 1978, which is the case of a police assault on MOVE headquarters, maybe 500 policemen."

"What people may not know is that the arms that MOVE had were inoperable. That they were there to show the police that MOVE was serious about defending their home. But they had no firing pins. They couldn't work."

Jamal covered the MOVE story and attended the August 8 press conference, which Rizzo called to defend his brutal assault.

"The press has to take a little to blame here. They glorified a bunch of criminals. A new breed of journalism that doesn't want both sides. Only one side of the issue. The press is responsible for what's happening in this city."

Jamal became, in his own words, a widely known—and among cops—widely hated MOVE supporter, who went to jails to get the Africas' side of the August 8, 1978 confrontation. He was deeply impressed by the refusal of MOVE members to be broken during the trial for the death of the cop.

"I was seduced into the MOVE organization by the lovingness and goodness of its people and its members. I was probably enraged as well as sitting in a trial in an official capacity objective as a journalist and seeing that the law really didn't matter. It didn't matter whether a man was innocent or guilty. It didn't matter what the law says your rights were. You just had nine members of the MOVE organization being sentenced to 30 to 100 years for a crime that everybody knew they did not commit. Nine people cannot kill one man. What you had in Philadelphia in '81 was the naked state judicial terrorism of the Philadelphia Judiciary against the MOVE organization. It was like, 'let's wipe them out.'"

"It's impossible for me to say what my feelings were at that time, sitting in a courtroom, seeing that kind of naked injustice. It rankled me to the core."

In 1985, the state's vendetta against MOVE culminated in Mayor Wilson Goode's bombing of the Osage Avenue House which left 11, including five children, dead.

"It was the Philadelphia Police Department. It was the state government of Pennsylvania. It was the FBI, the ATF of the U.S. government, who bombed people on May 13, 1985. But no one would call any of those organizations or their employer the U.S. government terrorists. But why weren't they? They created mass murder, Holocaust, in a major city in America, and not one of them have ever been charged with any crime at all. Only Ramona Africa, guilty only of survival, is in jail following May 13, 1985."