RAY LUC LEVASSEUR TO SPEAK AT UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

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.