One of the largest open wounds from the black struggle for liberation came close to healing last Saturday, after the release of a member of the "Movement of the Nine" group, Dilbert Or Africa, who was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment for a crime he says he did not commit.
Dilbert Afrika left the State Reform Institute in Pennsylvania on Saturday morning, after spending a long time persuading the authorities responsible for parole, to release him from prison. He is the eighth among the nine members of the movement, which consists of five men and four women, among whom will be released, and some of them who died in prison, except Chowk Africa, who remains behind bars.
Provisions
The nine members were arrested and sentenced to sentences ranging from 30 years to life, following the police siege of their residence in Philadelphia, which they claimed exchanged fire with the trapped on August 9, 1978. During the siege, the policeman James Ramp was shot with a single bullet, but the movement was denying Always none of its members has anything to do with the killing of the policeman.
Lawyer Brad Thomas, one of the members of the team that was defending Dilbert Africa, said the decision to release him on parole "confirms that the debate about the movement's release has been going on for several decades."
The movement was formed as a committed group, not only to liberate blacks from persecution and racial discrimination, but to preserve the environment as well. They lived as a family and the word “Africa” was the last name for all of them.
Within two years, Dilbert Africa could tell his story to The Guardian by email, and mentioned how he got involved in the fight for blacks when his girlfriend presented him to the Black Tigers Party in Chicago, another group that was struggling to defend the rights of blacks in America in the 1960s. Last, he moved to Philadelphia and joined the movement, and was at the movement's house in Bolton Village in the summer of 1978 when police surrounded him.
Dilbert described Africa how during the siege he left the house and was arrested by two of the police. One of the policemen drags me out of my hair, and the other kicks me in my head. ”
Solitary confinement
During six years of his imprisonment, Dilbert Africa was kept in solitary confinement, because he refused to cut his hair, which made him big braids, and he believed that he was part of the movement's philosophy. He remembers during an interview with the Guardian over the Internet how he was not alone in solitary confinement after he developed a method of communicating with other prisoners in other cells by way of the wall.
In 1985, after Dilbert became his seventh year in prison, another tragedy occurred. He learned that the Philadelphia police struck a second blockade on the house where the movement resided, and this time the police threw a firebomb from a helicopter on the house, which The fire spread to the entire neighborhood, which was largely black, and the fire destroyed 61 houses, killing 11 people from the movement, including many children.
Among the children who died was Delicia, 13, the daughter of Dilbert Africa. He explained to the Guardian how he received the news of her death, saying: "I cried and tried to do any violent act, but I was helpless."
In his last interview with the Guardian, he described how he managed to stay four decades behind bars, and said, “I was constantly trying to move, because not doing so was a bad thing. "I suffered from everything that this system was able to create against me."
During six years of his imprisonment, Dilbert Africa was kept in solitary confinement, because he refused to cut his hair, which made him big braids.