Nose to Nose

Philadelphia confronts a cult

On Philadelphia's once elegant North 33rd Street stands a red brick Victorian house surrounded by trash, garbage and human excrement. Children and dogs play in the yard, while adults lean over a 6-ft.-high wooden barricade and shout obscenities at passersby. "This is our house, and we are not going to let the city take it," vows a young woman. "We will defend our house. We will defend our children."

From across the street, the police are watching, as they have been doing for 16 months, after city officials had decided that the house was a public nuisance and began trying to evict its residents. All belong to a self-styled back-to-nature cult called MOVE (according to members, the name does not stand for anything). Last week the odd state of siege--which has cost Philadelphia some $1.2 million for round-the-clock police surveillance--approached a showdown when a city judge issued warrants for the arrest of 21 MOVE members.

MOVE can be traced back to 1971, when Vincent Leaphart, a black handyman, took the name of John Africa and established the Movement Toward a More Christian Life, an antitechnology group, which is dedicated to giving America back to the Indians and abolishing all governments "from here to Moscow and Peking." His followers, most of them black, all adopted the surname Africa, bought the house for $4,800 and moved in with their children and dogs.

The communal group's lifestyle soon brought objections from neighbors. Members refuse to bathe with soap, and many wear their hair in unkempt dreadlocks. They "recycle" their refuse by dumping it in the yard, a practice that attracts hordes of rats. MOVE mothers give birth naturally, biting off their babies' umbilical cords. Their children do not attend school and usually go naked--even in winter. Members also reject burial; at one point they showed reporters the shriveled corpse of a month-old baby who had died from undisclosed causes.

MOVE members threatened to kill their own children if city health officials attempted to inspect the house. Later, brandishing M-l rifles, automatic pistols and sawed-off shotguns, they refused to admit building and fire inspectors.

Mayor Frank Rizzo, who earned a tough-cop reputation as police commissioner in the 1960s, surrounded the house with officers wearing flak jackets and carrying automatic weapons. Fearful of feeding racial tensions or harming the children, city officials decided not to use force. Instead, they tried to starve MOVE into surrender. For 56 days, the police isolated the block with sawhorses, aimed a water cannon at the house and cut off its gas, water and electricity. Finally, in May, the siege ended. MOVE members reluctantly turned their weapons over to the police and promised to vacate the house within 90 days.

Last week the members changed their minds. Said Chuck Africa, a spokesman for the group: "We only signed that agreement to crystallize what Rizzo is. To agree with Rizzo is to disagree with John Africa. We have never compromised before." At week's end police were prepared to move on the house. Said the mayor: "There will be no more bargaining, no more conversations, meetings or agreements. These people represent nobody but themselves; they're complete idiots." But the mayor may not have seen the last of MOVE. "We may be leaving the house," said Delbert Africa, MOVE'S coordinator of confrontation and target practice, "but we're not leaving Philadelphia." -

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