Long Stand the House John Africa Built: Secular Spatial Order and Insurgent Sacred Space in 1978 Philadelphia

The raid began at 6 a.m. on August 8, 1978. Police cars packed the city block of North 33rd Street in the Powelton Village neighborhood of West Philadelphia. Bulldozers, fire trucks, and military-style tanks blocked access to the house where dozens of members of the MOVE organization lived, raised children, cared for stray animals, grew their own food, and worshipped free from the contamination of “the System.” This house was not only a residence for MOVE members, but also a sacred space in which MOVE members embodied their religion rooted in the leadership, teachings, and writings of founder and West Philadelphia native John Africa. A sign on the front porch broadcasted the house’s sacredness: “THE HOUSE OF JOHN AFRICA IS BUILT ON THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE. LONG STAND THE HOUSE JOHN AFRICA BUILT.” 

But to the city of Philadelphia, MOVE’s house was not a sacred space inhabited by devout religionists, but a health hazard and a threat to public safety occupied by potentially dangerous radicals. MOVE’s cultivation of sacred domestic space through communal living, composting food waste in their yard, and allowing the dozens of stray animals they sheltered to wander freely clashed with the city’s strategies of spatial governance. To the city of Philadelphia, these were not religious acts but violations of the city’s Health, Housing, Fire, Zoning and Safety Code. The August 8, 1978 raid—which resulted in death, incarceration, displacement, and demolition—was not a response to violence, but rather an instance of the Philadelphia police department using violence to enforce a city zoning law. In collaboration with the spatial power of policing, zoning laws were used as a tool to remove MOVE from their home and cleanse the city of this “cult symbol” through iconoclastic demolition.

This paper examines the 1978 police raid of the West Philadelphia headquarters of MOVE, a Black radical religious organization, as a clash of competing spatial imaginations. Tracing the conflict between the secular spatial imaginary of Philadelphia’s carceral governance and MOVE’s insurgent approach to cultivating sacred space, I demonstrate the secular spatial logic encoded in zoning laws and their carceral enforcement by analyzing MOVE’s metaphysical reordering of urban space as a direct challenge to the secular spatial order. Situating zoning laws within the context of 1970s Philadelphia’s carceral landscape, I develop a theory of the secular spatial order, which I define as the geographic imaginary about the proper location and practice of religion intimately connected to normative modes of inhabiting urban versus rural space, domestic versus public space, and how humans should cohabitate with animals. Analyzing the events leading up to the 1978 raid, I map the secular spatial order by tracing how MOVE’s neighbors, real estate developers, and city authorities responded to MOVE’s insurgent modes of making sacred space.

The story of the 1978 raid of 309 North 33rd Street is, in simple terms, the story of a property dispute. Beginning in February 1975, MOVE’s neighbors filed a complaint with the Department of Licenses and Inspections urging that the house be inspected for zoning violations. Utilizing the language of blight that had spearheaded Philadelphia’s urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 70s, MOVE’s neighbors asserted that inhabiting an urban setting required specific modalities of space-making: “living in an urban setting carries with it responsibility to be respectful and considerate of neighbors. If MOVE wants to ‘do their thing’ out on a farm, that’s okay with us. We do not think it is safe and healthy that they do it here on our block.” (Residents of Pearl Street Petition Against MOVE, PSIC, Temple University Special Collections, Box 51, Folder 10) MOVE’s metaphysical reordering of space challenged their neighbors’ ways of understanding both the religious and the urban, leading to anxieties about purity manifesting in accusations of hazardous health and living conditions that threatened to spill over property lines. MOVE’s sacred spatial sovereignty also posed a challenge to the neoliberal urban restructuring of 1970s Philadelphia that sought to “revitalize” working-class neighborhoods through city subsidized real estate investments. Real estate developers wrote to mayor Frank Rizzo urging him to evict MOVE and condemn the building to preserve the viability of their investments in Powelton Village. 

To MOVE’s neighbors, real estate developers, and zoning authorities, MOVE’s home was not sacred, but squalid; its unincorporability into the secular spatial order rendered MOVE’s headquarters illegible as sacred space. MOVE declined zoning authorities’ requests to enter their sacred space, citing a politics of hospitality that refused to cater to agents of the System who demanded entry without invitation. They continued to embody their abolitionist theologies and cultivate spatial sovereignty in the midst of coordinated disciplinary attempts from neighbors, real estate developers, and the Philadelphia carceral apparatus. The Department of Licenses and Inspections eventually filed a civil suit against MOVE in November 1975 to enforce the zoning ordinance. With the courts now involved, the conflict continued to escalate, leading to the judicial authorization of a starvation blockade to force MOVE to evacuate the house and, when that failed, authorization for the police raid that led to the death of an officer, the arrest and incarceration of nine MOVE members, and the desecration and demolition of 309 North 33rd Street.    

In theorizing this ultimately catastrophic property dispute, this paper attends to the multidirectional trajectories of power that constructed 309 North 33rd Street as a marginal geography. Philadelphia’s carceral targeting of MOVE’s sacred space certainly produced MOVE’s alterity; zoning authorities, developers, and community stakeholders could not place MOVE’s religiosity within the secular spatial order, rendering MOVE and their otherwise ways of cultivating sacred space illicit. Yet, MOVE was never interested in navigating the line between licit and illicit ways of being. MOVE sought to create a space apart from the System and its attendant spatial, religious, and carceral logics, erecting a boundary that demarcated their space from the profane world outside. By foregrounding MOVE’s agency in constructing their againstness, I seek to make visible the secular spatial order they sought to disrupt.