Summer in the City

EARLY ONE MORNING in mid-August, 400 Philadelphia policemen milled outside a ramshackle Victorian house five blocks from the University of Pennsylvania campus, awaiting orders from their superiors. The policemen knew roughly what task was expected of them before the cool morning became a sweltering summer day; they were to rout about 20 members of an organization formed by former college professors, drunks, and poets from their headquarters-home, located in an area of the city known for its semiradical population largely composed of students and working-class blacks. The police looked forward to this confrontation with this hard-to-define group. They didn't like this organization called MOVE--a name no one has really been able to decipher. The cops thought that MOVE members stank, detested civilization, had no respect for authority, and should be treated harshly as common criminals. One suspects the police were also exhilarated by the drama of the situation: the no-good revolutionary dregs of society against the epitome of authority and respect for the existing order. Just like the old days. Here was a chance for them to show off their neat equipment, their military precision, and even their valor. It would be fun, no one would be seriously hurt, and the police would win with ease, reminding everyone who is boss in town.

The play-acting ended quickly and unexpectedly. After Police Commissioner Joseph O'Neill ordered a bulldozer in to tear down a wooden MOVE-erected barricade, the basement of the three-story house was flooded. There was still no sign of surrender from the enigmatic MOVE members. O'Neill then ordered two dozen members of the special stake-out unit to walk inside and come out with the radicals. As the policemen gingerly walked inside, cries of infants were heard over a loudspeaker that MOVE members had used to hurl invectives at police. MOVE members had long sworn they would not come out alive. They warned that the police, by attempting to forcibly make them appear in court on violations of the city's health codes, would end up having to kill innocent mothers and their babies. Police ignored these warnings--probably because they could not conceive of anyone dying for an ideology they found so ludicrous. To the police, the MOVE members were just retrograde attention seekers who would surely crumple.

The cops found no one in the house. The MOVE members had hidden themselves in a corner of the basement. O'Neil then ordered a crane to begin demolishing the house as warnings were shouted over a police loudspeaker for MOVE to surrender. More water was poured into the basement. Trained police sharpshooters aimed at the house. Suddenly, someone fired a shot and the battle began. Policemen and firemen fell to the ground--some wounded, some trying to avoid bullets, one dead. After minutes of gunfire, the bedlam suddenly ceased, MOVE surrendered. But the toll was heavy: one police officer dead; about 18 policemen and firemen injured, many of them seriously; two MOVE members injured; and three MOVE sympathizers injured. It was the first political shoot-out in America in quite a while.

The white community reacted with outrage over the shoot-out. The Philadelphia papers were filled for days with endless details concerning the dead officer's funeral arrangements, his wife's tears, and his son's grief. One thousand members of the Fraternal Order of Police came to the funeral. In the meantime, there was outrage in the black community--not over the death of the white policeman, but over the vicious way the police handled the entire situation. Despite claims by Mayor Frank Rizzo and his political hacks that the MOVE organization was universally hated in Philadelphia, most of the black neighbors who lived near MOVE did not resent the group as much as the middle-class whites living on the other side of the city. Right after the shooting, 300 infuriated black neighbors gathered at the scene of the battle to yell at police, throw rocks and inveigh against the blatant racism of the police. The protestors said the violence could easily have been avoided had the police left MOVE in peace.

MOVE sympathizers insisted that the entire tragedy resulted simply because the MOVE members were black and subscribed to an uncommon ideology. Pictures of police maliciously beating unarmed MOVE members after they had surrendered substantiated the accusations of racism and fueled racial antagonism. Once again, Philadelphia was split right down racial lines. The anger of the black community was matched only by the outrage of the whites, who felt a white police officer had died because of the recalcitrance of what they considered to be nothing but a bunch of lazy black hippies.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding the MOVE shoot-out throw an interesting light on racial conflict in America's cities. They illustrate how what appears on the surface to be a racial conflict actually goes much deeper and ultimately rests on sharp class divisions in our society today. To understand this, one must know a little about MOVE's ideology. First and foremost, the group opposes technology. Its members reportedly eat only raw meat, rarely take baths, raise rats and dozens of dogs. MOVE members refuse to use modern plumbing. They hate cars, airplanes, consumer markets and anything else that is a product of modern society. Second, MOVE is not proto-typically radical. They hate capitalism, but they also hate socialist governments that also believe in the worth of science and industry. They only incidentally harp about class conflict and proletarian oppression. Third, the group is revolutionary. Although they despise cities, they feel a moral obligation to stay in the urban centers and fight what they construe to be the enemy. MOVE members say they will eventually head for the halcyon hills, but only after the war is won. Fourth, the group is (perhaps the past tense is now more appropriate) quasi-religious in nature. Technology sometimes becomes the devil who possesses the police and politicians who oppose MOVE.

Of course, the vast majority of middle-class whites vigorously rejected the validity of all the tenents of the MOVE ideology. The blacks, however, were much more receptive--that is why 300 of them hurled bricks at the police shortly after the shoot-out. The reasons, again, go deeper than simply skin color. Whites can hardly be expected to accept social criticism as readily as blacks, who have long borne the onus of American capitalism. It logically follows that whites would therefore disagree more fervently with a group such as MOVE when the group points an accusing finger at the laws, philosophy and politics which keep the economic system intact. MOVE clearly bothered middle-class whites, and the vehemence of that backlash indicates at least a measure of truth in the group's accusations.

PERHAPS THE MOST discouraging aspect of the Philadelphia fiasco was the editorial response from the local media, whose members are composed primarily of white, cautious newswriters and editors. These papers make money because of the numerous middle-class white subscribers throughout Philadelphia and its expansive suburbs. The media reflected the moral casuistry of its readership, failing to face the essential moral question that begged to be raised throughout the days surrounding the event: What is wrong with a society that causes alienated, frustrated groups of people such as the members of MOVE to arise? If our society is as perfect as the Philadelphia notables claim it to be, then what fed the dissatisfaction and anomie that led MOVE to face self-destruction rather than to surrender to the dominant forces of their age? This question never appeared in all the dozens of articles and editorials that appeared after the shoot-out. Yet the greatest thinkers in history have all mused with considerable ambivalence over these very questions. If perhaps the MOVE members can be labled crazed psychotics, their ideas cannot be dismissed so easily. For this reason, Rizzo should have left them alone. Their weird antics and heterodox ideology should have been left as a reminder to us all that we can never be completely sure about the correctness of the direction in which we are all inescapably heading.