Live Aid was THE event of 1985. The concert to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia, viewed by 40 percent of the world’s population, was broadcast live from London and… not New York, not Los Angeles, but Philadelphia. A few months earlier, the city’s police had bombed the home of a revolutionary communal organization, MOVE, killing eleven residents, including five children.
The city hoped that by hosting the epic concert, the bombing would be forgotten. It was. Mike Africa, Jr., who lost family and friends, wants to change that through his book, On a Move, and his 13 Run Challenge.
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MOVE was founded by John Africa in 1972. “He had a simple mission,” Mike, his great-nephew, explains, “protect life, people, animals, and the environment. And he encouraged other people to protect life too.”
The members of MOVE, who believed that the lives of all living beings should be treated as equally important, demonstrated against puppy mills, zoos, circuses, Three Mile Island, industrial pollution, and police brutality. “If you’re not angry at the state of the world, you’re either blind or insensitive,” Mike says. “You know, the air don’t have any breaks in it. If there’s pollution in the air in Philadelphia, if people in New Jersey expect not to be polluted, then there’s something wrong with that.”
MOVE’s militancy, however, alienated many. “A lot of people might have agreed with John Africa, might have agreed with MOVE, but you know, sometimes when you have a conviction about certain things, you might rub people the wrong way if it’s too strong for them. It could be something good, but if you’re obsessed with it and it’s the only thing you want to talk about, eventually it becomes stale and unpleasant. And John Africa, his conviction and what he believed was so strong, that he just constantly tried to make people see it.
“So that created a riff for a lot of people, even though what MOVE was saying was right about the environment, about the animals. They were kind of heavy handed with how they delivered it. And the people that they were the most heavy handed with were the police, politicians, people that they felt protected these institutions, protected these corporations.”
That heavy handedness inevitably led to conflict. “There were different skirmishes, different zoo protests that the police came, locked people up for misdemeanors and what not. And eventually it got to the point where MOVE members said, ‘We’re not taking this anymore. We’re tired of being arrested for speaking our piece. We have the right to freedom of speech. And if we’re going to be arrested, you’re going to break the law, then we’re going to defend ourselves against you if you come at us.’ August 8, 1978, the police sent a few hundred cops to MOVE’s house to evict them and said they were gonna take them basically by any means necessary.”
In the standoff that followed, a police officer was shot and killed. Witnesses contended that he was killed by friendly fire, but nine MOVE members were charged and sentenced to 30 – 100 years in prison. Two of them were Mike’s parents. His mother was pregnant with him at the time; he was born a month after she was imprisoned and taken from her a week later.
The MOVE members who were still on the street protested for their release. “The city was alerted that MOVE was serious and that they wanted their political prisoners freed. But the city refused, even though the mayor at the time, Wilson Goode, admitted that he believed that the officer was shot by friendly fire. But that didn’t stop them from coming at MOVE harder the next time. This time it was May 13th, 1985. The City of Philadelphia’s response to MOVE protesting to free the other members was to fly a helicopter over our house and drop a bomb on it.”
“Philadelphia was chosen to be the city for Live Aid because of the bomb,” Mike says. “The producers of Live Aid were trying to figure out whether they wanted to do it in Los Angeles or New York. And Wilson Goode heard about it and he told them that if you guys do it here in Philadelphia, we will give you all of the venues and all of the security; everything you need, we’ll give it to you for free. Because they were trying to cover up what happened May 13th and they were trying to boost the morale of the people in the city of Philadelphia.”
Of course, as a child, Mike was unaware of what was going on behind the scenes, all he knew was that he wanted to go to an amazing free concert. “I asked my grandmother if I could go to the Live Aid concert and she said no. And I asked her why. She said, “Because these people are coming to Philadelphia to do a concert, talking about they’re trying to support Africa, but they don’t care at all about the bomb that was dropped on the Africans.”
Mike’s background has given him the philosophy of life that he lives by. “I learned that you have to do for self,” he says. “That’s one of my favorite lines that I say about things about life. ‘You have to do for self.’ Another one is, ‘Happiness is a choice.’ People can do things to make you smile. They can say things to make you feel good. But you know, that’s like candy. It tastes good at first, but it wears off and it’s not sustainable.
“And then the other one is, ‘Hurt people heal people.’ All the time, you hear people say, ‘Hurt people hurt people.’ You know, like it’s a given. Like if you’ve been hurt, you’re going to hurt somebody. And that really boggles my mind. If you know what it feels like to be hurt, why would you want to do that to somebody else? So instead of hurting someone because you’ve been hurt, why don’t you use the hurt that you know you didn’t enjoy, that you know was traumatizing, that you know was painful, why don’t you use that as an example to heal other people?”
Physical fitness was another important element of Mike’s upbringing. “MOVE members were always in skirmishes. They were always in fights with somebody; neighbors, police officers, or each other, sometimes. So they would always exercise to be strong; in revolution you have to be strong, right? So that was always just part of our life growing up. You do push ups, you exercise, you eat healthy.
“And then one day I learned that I do my best thinking running, and I feel better. I was out running one day and it just hit me, damn, that’s a good idea. Whatever it was, whatever the idea was. So then it became a thing, what else can I use this running for? What other thoughts do I need to consider?”
One day his aunt, the only adult survivor of the bombing, told him that he needed to take the lead on getting his parents and the other MOVE members freed from prison. “I accepted that, and I was trying to figure out certain things to do to get the people free. And I said, ‘I know I do my best thinking when I run. So I’m not going to stop running until I come up with the answer.’ And this one period, over the course of a couple of days, I ran 54 miles. I ran like Forrest Gump. It just made me feel better, and by the way, at the end of the run, I had the answer.”
The significance of running in Mike’s life is why he’s chosen it as a way to honor the bombing victims and raise awareness of the injustices that were done to his family. There were 13 people in MOVE’s house when it was bombed on May 13th. Of the eleven that were killed, five were children who were friends of his.
“When we were children, you know how it is when you’re a child, you and your friends run. That’s the first fun activity you do in life. Your hide and seek, your freeze tag, your whatever. When we was kids growing up, that’s what we did all the time, running from each other, hiding from each other, chasing each other, tackling, and the children that were in the house, May 13th, I think about them all the time. And I just felt like I wanted to honor them in a way that lends some understanding to the type of things that we did together, and running, that was it.”
Mike started his 13 Run Challenge this past May. He will complete a 13 mile run each month, leading up to the 40th anniversary of the MOVE bombing. On the final run, in May 2024, he will run to the cemeteries where the children are buried.
The 13 Run Challenge is also a fundraiser. The house that was bombed was owned by Mike’s aunt, and after the bombing, the city seized it through eminent domain. “She tried to get it back, but the police turned it into a police substation and they wouldn’t give it back to her. It remained a police substation for 35 years. So I’ve been trying to get it back. While she was on her deathbed, she said that all she wanted was her house back. January 10th, 2023, I was able to secure it. So we had it back, but they didn’t give it back to us. We have a $400,000 mortgage on it So the 13 Run Challenge is a fundraiser too; it supports Reclaim Osage to get our house back.”
Through it all, Mike has used physical fitness as a way to get through hard times. “Do your push-ups, do your sit-ups, do your squats. Get your exercise in because that exercise will connect you to life. It connects you to life. If you do that, you will feel that connection.”
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