THE MORNING OF MAY 13th, 1985
Written 5/9/2001
Mumia Abu-Jamal, M.A.
All Rights Reserved
There are events in the life of a person and of a city that mark time.
For people of middle age, the Kennedy assassination is one example. People know where they were, and what they were doing, when news hit them that an American president was shot to death while cruising through an American city as part of a motorcade.
The Police Bombing (I call it that because MOVE people bombed no one) of MOVE men, women and children on Mother’s Day in May, is an event that marks time.
Not only does it mark time, but, it marked a turning point in American life, for the militarization of the police, and opened the door in the American mind for other such atrocities to come. The infamous Waco Massacre and the killing of white radicals on Ruby Ridge, Idaho, had their genesis on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. For what the state does to black folks today it will do to whites who don’t toe the line tomorrow.
The Mother’s Day Massacre means much more. It was a brutal, monstrous demonstration that proved what JOHN AFRICA had been saying for well over a decade; that there was no law; and that the system didn’t give a hot damn about law, for all the system cared about is force.
Everything that has happened in the 16 years since that Day of Massacre has proven that JOHN AFRICA explained that law simply meant balance or equality. If you looked at the political shenanigans that followed the Police Bombing of 1985, you saw every agency of the system act to protect the cops, the bombers, the baby killers, and those that employed them. Is that an exaggeration?
When have you ever seen a DA call a grand jury only to tell them that they should not return an indictment? It happened here. Was that balance or bias?
There is no law, this is the profound truth that JOHN AFRICA taught and that the system showed by the Police Bombing of May 1985, and its aftermath.
In JOHN AFRICA’S own words, the law is “a weapon for the rich, and a whippin for the poor” (from The Judge’s Letter).
The Police Bombing of MOVE is more than an historical moment it is an historical continuum. It is not extraordinary (except for the weaponry used) but is a clear reflection of events that happened all throughout American history.
July 27, 1816 is a date that doesn’t stir any real recognition, even upon black folks who know African-American history. That’s because the date is from a time when some parts of the country, like Florida, were part of another country, like Spain. Florida’s St. Augustine city (one of the first European settlements on the land, around 1565) was a place where captive Africans (in places like Georgia and the Carolinas) looked for freedom. In Florida, among the indigenous people, like the Seminoles, and even among the Spanish, Africans found a degree and kind of freedom that was unthinkable among the Americans. Thousands fled to the tropical and subtropical swamplands beyond America’s borders.
This enraged Georgian and Carolinian slavers, who agitated for war against Spanish territories, so they could extend their American slave territory. Near Apalachicola Bay, Africans and their Indian allies took over an abandoned fort left over from the brief period of British seizure of the land. The fort became known as Negro Fort, and became a place of refuge and safety in a time and place of chaos and confusion. It was a place where hundreds of Africans and Indians lived free of the exploitation and oppression of the warring European colonial forces around them.
July 27, 1816 marked the date that land and naval forces of the Americans attacked Negro Fort, and the day that Seminole fighters joined in the attack. The combined forces had little impact on the earthen walls until a red hot cannon ball was fired into the fort’s magazine area, striking over 700 barrels of powder. The resulting explosion killed over 250 people in the fort and wounded over 50 more. The two warriors who led the rebellion, an African named Garcan and a Choctaw chief, were later surrendered to the Seminoles, who burned them to death.
Two years later, the United States would pay Spain for the transfer of Florida.
There are 169 years separating Negro Fort from MOVE Headquarters, but there is also a timelessness that tells us how some things don’t ever change. Negro Fort was a center of freedom in a world where freedom for black and red people was a rare commodity. MOVE ‘s home was a place of freedom for a people who faced repression, rejection and alienation from the status quo.
It is fitting that the commander of the Mass-Murder raid on Osage Avenue began by braying into a bullhorn: “Attention MOVE! This is America!”
Indeed it was.
Some may say that it is absurd to draw examples from the bitter days of bondage to reflect what happens in modern times, for African-Americans are free.
The great German novelist, Goethe, once said, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Free. Blacks in the United States are legally free. They are, however, not free to drive without a kind of humiliation and terror that we have come to call DWB (Driving While Black). They are “free” to walk down the street knowing that, at any time, a representative of the state will stop, harass and interrogate them. They are “free” to spend their hard-earned dollars at a car dealership and to be charged more money for the same item (a kind of black tax). They are “free” to go to voting booths only to be turned away as presumed felons or told the records are missing, they don’t have enough identification, or as a last resort, that the machines don’t work. They are “free” to fill up the nation’s jails and prisons, at a rate not seen since the days of Apartheid in South Africa. They are “free” to have the highest levels of infant mortality in the nation, and the lowest life expectancy. Free.
What JOHN AFRICA showed on May 13th, 1985 is the true face of American freedom. It was the same face shown at Negro Fort in 1816. It showed everyone that just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right.
LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA!!!
©MAJ 2001
Text © copyright 2001 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
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