The Levasseur papers are an important record of a committed revolutionary and political prisoner. Beginning with his work in the early 1970s with the Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), a prisoners' rights organization, the collection includes communiques and other materials from revolutionary groups including the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, the United Freedom Front (UFF), the Armed Resistance Unit, and the Black Liberation Army; Levasseur's political and autobiographical writings; numerous interviews; selected correspondence; and a range of material on political prisoners and mass incarceration.
Consisting in part of material seized by the FBI following Levasseur's arrest or recovered through the Freedom of Information Act, and supplemented by newsclippings and video from media coverage, the collection has particularly rich content for the criminal trials of UFF members and the Ohio 7 seditious conspiracy case, as well as Levasseur's years in prison and his work on behalf of political prisoners.
Although the collection is organized roughly into three series -- Writing and radicalism, Trials, and Prisons, and political prisoners -- there is considerable overlap.
