Move 9 member Eddie Goodman Africa released from prison after 41 years

Two members of black radical group remain behind bars

Lawyer: ‘This is a significant victory and day of celebration’

Eddie Goodman Africa, middle in ochre shirt and blue trousers, is flanked by family members and supporters outside Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Handout

Eddie Goodman Africa, middle in ochre shirt and blue trousers, is flanked by family members and supporters outside Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Handout

One of the enduring wounds of the black liberation struggle of the 1970s has moved a step closer to being healed with the release of the seventh member of the so-called Move 9, almost 41 years after their arrest for the collective murder of a police officer.


Eddie Goodman Africa, 69, was released on Friday from Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania, more than a decade after he became eligible for parole. His return to the community reduces to two the number of Move members who remain behind bars, in a creeping resolution to some of the most bloody confrontations between police and black radicals of the 1970s and 1980s.

Eddie Africa’s decades in prison were the product of a running battle between Philadelphia’s notoriously brutal police force and the Move organization. Move was a hybrid group that combined black liberation radicalism with a form of early environmentalism, each of its members taking the last name Africa to denote that they regarded themselves as one family. Read more