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Matt Meyer

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Matt Meyer is an educator-activist, based in New York City. Founding PJSA Co-Chair along with USF Dean Jennifer Turpin, Meyer has long worked to bring together academics and activists for lasting social change. A former public draft registration resister and chair of the War Resisters League, he continues to serve as convener of the War Resisters International Africa Working Group. With Bill Sutherland, Meyer authored Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation, of which Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, "Sutherland and Meyer have looked beyond the short-term strategies and tactics which too often divide progressive people . . . They have begun to develop a language which looks at the roots of our humanness." Meyer is author of Time is Tight: Transformative Education in Eritrea, South Africa, and the U.S.A., based in part on his experiences as Multicultural Coordinator for the NYC Board of Education's Alternative High Schools and Programs. He has edited the Fellowship of Reconciliation's "Puerto Rico: The Cost of Colonialism;" War in Africa and an African Peace; and the forthcoming two-volume Seeds of New Hope: African Peace Studies for the 21st Century.

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.

Contributors include: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Dan Berger, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Bob Lederer, Terry Bisson, Laura Whitehorn, Safiya Bukhari, The San Francisco 8, Angela Davis, Bo Brown, Bill Dunne, Jalil Muntaqim, Susie Day, Luis Nieves Falcón, Ninotchka Rosca, Meg Starr, Assata Shakur, Jill Soffiyah Elijah, Jan Susler, Chrystos, Jose Lopez, Leonard Peltier, Marilyn Buck, Oscar López Rivera, Sundiata Acoli, Ramona Africa, Linda Thurston, Desmond Tutu, Mairead Corrigan Maguire and many more.

Praise:

"Within every society there are people who, at great personal risk and sacrifice, stand up and fight for the most marginalized among us. We call these people of courage, spirit and love, our heroes and heroines. This book is the story of the ones in our midst. It is the story of the best we are."
--asha bandele, poet and author of The Prisoner's Wife

“This extraordinary volume powerfully and eloquently brings together the voices of so many U.S. political prisoners. Taken one at a time, the stories, poems, communiqués, and analyses are not only heartbreaking in the suffering, courage and indomitable fortitude they manifest, but also paint a clear and damning picture of routine U.S. repression. When read as a whole, this book can do no other than inspire a new generation of activists and revolutionaries to free these prisoners and to bring down this whole wretched system of exploitation, theft, and murder. Thank you to the editors and to the contributors, and thank you most especially to the political prisoners themselves, who are giving their lives and are teaching us by their example how to be free men and women.”
--Derrick Jensen, activist and author of How Shall I Live My Life

"As a convicted felon, I have been prevented from visiting many people in prison today. But none of us should be stopped from the vital work of prison abolition and freeing the many who the U.S. holds for political reasons. Let Freedom Ring helps make their voices heard, and presents strategies to help win their release."
--Daniel Berrigan SJ, former Plowshares political prisoner and member of the FBI Top Ten Wanted List.

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Dan Berger: Political Prisoners in the US - This two-part interview with author/activist Dan Berger was conducted in the Winter of 2009. The interview is mostly based on Berger's essay "The Real Dragons: A Brief History of Political Militancy and Incarceration: 1960s to 2000s," which is featured in the book "Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners" (PM Press, 2008).

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Let Freedom Ring: Jaan Laaman, Ohio 7 anti-imperialist political prisoner
The Prison Industrial Complex and Political Prisoners: Z Magazine
Let Freedom Ring: The Political Media Review

Let Freedom Ring: A Book Review

By Jaan Laaman, Ohio 7 anti-imperialist political prisoner

Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners, is a very new, very informative and very useful book. It is edited by Matt Meyer and published by PM-Kersplebedeb.

This is a huge book, over 800 pages, comprised largely of just what the subtitle says: documents from the movements to free U.S. political prisoners. This includes significant historical documents like the complete indictments, presentations and findings of three International Tribunals that have investigated the reality and conditions of political prisoners held by the U.S. These were: Special International Tribunal on the Violation of Human Rights of Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in United States Prisons and Jails (1990), International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the USA (1992), and International Tribunal on Human Rights Violations in Puerto Rico and Vieques by the United States of America (2000)...

The Prison Industrial Complex and Political Prisoners
By Hans Bennett
Z Magazine, February, 2009

Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free US Political Prisoners, is an epic 877-page compilation of both pre-existing documents and original articles. Explaining the context of its release, editor Matt Meyer cites the recent persecution of the San Francisco Eight, who are former Black Panther Party (BPP) members being charged with a 30-year old crime. Beginning with the 2006 grand jury, “the state threw down a gauntlet. When it became clear that the investigations were reopening cases based on evidence obtained primarily through torture, the message was unmistakable: Be afraid, be very afraid, and don’t even think of fighting back. When these same men stood strong, firm on the principle that they would not take part in a new, government sponsored witch-hunt, they sent a counter-message on behalf of us all: we will not allow our communities, our struggles, our communities, our very lives to be criminalized by a corrupt and racist criminal justice system.” This spirit of resistance to state repression flows throughout Let Freedom Ring.

Let Freedom Ring
By Ernesto Aguilar
The Political Media Review

The Sixties presented social movements with some of recent history’s most spectacular schisms, many of which continue to be debated. Assimilation versus revolutionary nationalism versus cultural nationalism; and Old Left aesthetics versus New Left rejection of convention were among them. But none so clearly defined the troubles of that period like the verbal and other skirmishes over militancy.

Pacifism, the use of political violence and the peculiar merging of the two that came to be called self-defense were prominent fixtures of the Vietnam War era. The integrationist sit-ins contrasted with the incendiary solidarity acts of groups like the Weather Underground, which were at times motivated by those same sit-ins as well as the fiery deeds and iconography of the Black Power movement, which itself clashed at points with the mainstream civil rights movement in how each saw the way forward.

Though it isn’t about those debates, Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners cannot be divorced from such either...

Author Portfolio

Meyer, Matt and Bill Sutherland. Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation. Africa World Press, 2000.

Meyer, Matt and Elavie Ndura-Ouedraogo, eds. Seeds of New Hope: Pan African Peace Studies for the Twenty-first Century. Africa World Press, 2008.

Meyer, Matt. Time is Tight: Transformative Education in Eritrea, South Africa, and the U.S.A.

Meyer, Matt, ed. War in Africa and an African Peace. Blackwell, 2000.

Matt Meyer

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