MOVE was founded in Philadelphia in the early 1970s by Vincent Leaphart, a Korean War veteran and handyman from West Philadelphia who took the name John Africa. His teaching, compiled by supporters into a sprawling text called The Guideline, held that all life is one, that the industrial "system" poisons everything it touches, and that its law and technology are instruments of enslavement. Members adopted the surname Africa, ate raw food, and rejected the system's schools, medicine, and courts.
Based in a communal house in the racially mixed Powelton Village neighborhood, MOVE spent the mid-1970s in constant, deliberately confrontational protest — at zoos, pet stores, school board meetings, and political rallies — absorbing hundreds of arrests and beatings that the organization understood as the system revealing its violence. By 1976, after years of street confrontations and the death of an infant, Life Africa, during a police melee, the group and the Rizzo administration were on a collision course.