MOVE and Race Part 1

One of the first slurs hurled in my direction by my former MOVE “family” after leaving the group was that I, in my traitorous act, had become a racist.

And we all know what that means.

To be a bigot in our society is to be the scum of the earth. The concept brings to the mind images of drunken neo-Nazis and genetically suspect Klansmen attempting to resurrect some kind of imaginary, racially pure, utopia.

At the time this invective was being hurtled at me via cyberspace I laughed off the attacks as desperate and vile ad-hominem with no basis or merit to be had.

After all, I spent years laboring to “Free Mumia”, had lived with black people, considered black people “family”, and would confront and despise bigotry wherever it reared it’s head.

But after nearly two years of being out of MOVE and after plenty of reflection, research, and the facing of some cruel realities, I have come to realization that there was some truth in the “Tony Allen is a racist” attacks. Just not in the way that people would think.

Unknowingly, unwittingly, and despite all of my well intentioned activism, while in MOVE I was helping to prop up and make excuses for, hatred. Not just against whites, but against blacks, the opposite of what I thought I was doing.

Allow me to explain.

MOVE is known as being a predominantly “black” sect. And while it is true that the majority of people who carry the last name Africa in MOVE are black the majority of it’s supporters and the vast majority of the cult’s recruits after 1985 have been white. White, middle or upper middle class, and from solid families. How this phenomena came to be will be explained later. What I want to expound upon in this article in plain terms just how MOVE the issues of race and class are played out within MOVE’s authoritarian structure and do so to the detriment of the blacks within the group, especially the children.

Everyone knows that MOVE’s rhetoric is oozing with racial overtones, accusations, and hyperbolic equivocations. One very recent example is when MOVE compared the Nazi holocaust of Jews with the perceived persecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. This is of course nonsensical propaganda, and very bad propaganda at that.

But there are far more nefarious things going on behind the scenes of MOVE than the crude construction of rotten ideals, there is also the implication of these ideals.

It is known that MOVE does not educate their children, or at least not their black children.


While in MOVE, I saw with my own eyes, girls who had two and three children of their own, struggling to read “The Cat in the Hat”. These unfortunate victims of MOVE’s contempt for the life of the mind could barely write their own names and knew only enough math to get them in and out of a store with only a fair chance of not getting ripped off. They were all black.

Another child in MOVE, this one white, and younger than these young mothers by at least half, was being tutored by professional educators, participated in swimming competing filled with other white kids and even took dance classes. He also lived in a large well kept house in the fantastically expensive suburb of Cherry Hill New Jersey.

This is the reality of MOVE. The one that everyone especially likes to ignore.

There is more to this however than just an Orwellian twist of a utopia turned upside down, there is the fact that many a well intentioned white, rogressive, “revolutionary” is sanctioning this enforced climate of ignorance, and do so knowingly.

The question that begs to be asked is whether such a brazen disregard for the future of these children would exist if they were of another race?

Would the Rotunda for example allow for a group that does this to white children a forum from which to spread their brand of toxic anti-intellectualism?

Do such questions even need to be raised? Don’t we know the answers already.

More to come on MOVE and race...