Move 9 women freed after 40 years in jail over Philadelphia police siege

Janine Phillips Africa and Janet Holloway Africa released 

Group maintains James Ramp was killed by fellow officers

Ed Pilkington in New York @edpilkington
Sat 25 May 2019 11.48 EDTLast modified on Sun 26 May 2019 11.34 EDT

Members of Move in front of their house in the Powelton Village section of Philadelphia in 1977. The group have always said James Ramp was killed by fellow officers. Photograph: Leif Skoogfors/Corbis via Getty Images

For 40 years, Janine Phillips Africa had a technique for coping with being cooped up in a prison cell for a crime she says she did not commit. She would avoid birthdays, Christmas, New Year and any other events that emphasized time passing while she was not free.

“The years are not my focus,” she wrote in a letter to the Guardian. “I keep my mind on my health and the things I need to do day by day.”


On Saturday she could finally begin accepting the passage of time. She and her cellmate and sister in the black liberation struggle, Janet Holloway Africa, were released from SCI Cambridge Springs in Pennsylvania, after a long struggle for parole.

The release of Janine, 63, and Janet, 68, marks a key moment in the history of the Move 9, the group of African American black power and environmental campaigners who were imprisoned after a police siege of their home in August 1978. The pair were the last of four women in the group either to be paroled or to die behind bars.

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