Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents From the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners

Look what just arrived back from the printers:

This is the book that killed two months of my summer, doing layout like i’d never done it before and finally breaking in InDesign. It’s a 912 page brick, full of historical documents collected by Matt Meyer (of Resistance in Brooklyn and the War Resister’s League), all giving a very particular and interesting perspective on some of the key campaigns to free political prisoners over the past twenty years.

Apart from the foreword by Argentinean former political prisoner (and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) Adolfo Pérez Esquivel there are also afterwords by Lynne Stewart and Ashanti Alston. Not to mention writings by Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, Ramona Africa, Dan Berger, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Terry Bisson, BO, Marilyn Buck, Safiya Bukhari, Chrystos, Angela Davis, Susie Day, Bill Dunne, Jill Soffiyah Elijah, Bob Lederer, Jose López, Oscar López Rivera, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Jalil Muntaqim, Luis Nieves Falcón, Leonard Peltier, Ninotchka Rosca, the San Francisco 8, Assata Shakur, Meg Starr, Jan Susler, Linda Thurston, Desmond Tutu, Laura Whitehorn, and many more.

As the back cover blurb explains:

Let Freedom Ring presents a two-decade sweep of essays, analyses, histories, interviews, resolutions, People’s Tribunal verdicts, and poems by and about the scores of U.S. political prisoners and the campaigns to safeguard their rights and secure their freedom. In addition to an extensive section on the campaign to free death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, represented here are the radical movements that have most challenged the U.S. empire from within: Black Panthers and other Black liberation fighters, Puerto Rican independentistas, Indigenous sovereignty activists, white anti-imperialists, environmental and animal rights militants, Arab and Muslim activists, Iraq war resisters, and others. Contributors in and out of prison detail the repressive methods – from long-term isolation to sensory deprivation to politically inspired parole denial – used to attack these freedom fighters, some still caged after 30+ years. This invaluable resource guide offers inspiring stories of the creative, and sometimes winning, strategies to bring them home.

This is almost a reference book, providing snapshots of the work being done on the oustide, and of the condtions on the inside of amerika’s gulag system. For me personally, some of the most interesting pieces were the contributions by political prisoners, many of which were sent in to Resistance in Brooklyn for photocopies booklets they produced in 1992 (Dissing the “Discovery”) and for the “John Brown 2000” conference. Let Freedom Ring also provides a good framework through which to get an idea of some of the forces in the national liberation movements of the internal colonies – Indigenous people, Puerto Ricans, Chican@s, and Black/New Afrikan people – and a glimpse at the reasoning and worldviews that have motivated people from these movements from the 1960s on.

For more details, feel free to check out the appropriate page on my Kersplebedeb website: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/letfreedomring.html

Seeing as this is a brick, weighing almost three pounds, postage is going to be a pain in the ass. In fact, by my reckoning Canada Post is going to charge me almost $20 to ship a copy anywhere in the u.s. – definitely a bother.

To ease the pain, i’m going to be charging $15 postage and for a limited time will be throwing in a FREE copy of the 2009 Certain Days Freedom For Political Prisoners calendar with every order. You can email me (info@kersplebedeb.com) for more details, or else just use the paypal button here to pay online:

and yes, i will be posting about Certain Days soon, but in the meantime you can check here for more details: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/cal2009/index.html