Ray Luc Levasseur to Speak at University of Massachusetts

You can click the image above to see a PDF poster for the evening.
Makes me wish i lived in Amherst...

Ray Luc Levasseur: Defendant in the
Great Sedition Trial of Western Mass Returns After 20 Years...
Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7PM
UMass Campus Center 1009, Amherst, MA

With opening remarks by Bill Newman, Director, Western Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

In 1989, Ray Luc Levasseur, along with his comrades Pat Levasseur and Richard Williams, stood trial in Springfield, Massachusetts on Federal charges of seditious conspiracy. After ten months of deliberation, in the most expensive trial in Massachusetts history, a jury found all three not guilty of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government through armed force. In his first public address in the Pioneer Valley in twenty years, Levasseur will reflect on the past and present significance of the Springfield sedition trial. He will also discuss his life experience as a French-Canadian youth growing up in a Maine mill town; as a Vietnam veteran; as an anti-imperialist revolutionary active in the Civil Rights, antiwar, and prison reform movements; as a prisoner arrested with other members of the “Ohio 7” and incarcerated for twenty years for his involvement in a series of bombings carried out to protest U.S. backing of South Africa’s racist apartheid regime and Central American right-wing death-squads; and his 2004 release and ongoing involvement in movements for social justice.

Levasseur’s prison writings and his closing statement from Springfield sedition trial are available on the following websites: http://home.earthlink.net/~neoludd/ and http://home.earthlink.net/~neoludd/statement.html.

Sponsored by: Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, UMass Amherst; UMass Amherst Program in Social Thought and Political Economy; UMass Amherst Department of History; Food For Thought Books; Vermont Action for Political Prisoners; Rosenberg Fund for Children; and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

With partial support from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the Dean of Graduate School, UMass Amherst.