During my internship at the Freedom Archives, I worked mainly on recording, organizing, and digitizing materials relating the Resistance Conspiracy Case (RCC) and creating a finding aid to make them further accessible for community members, researchers and students. The Resistance Conspiracy Case Collection contains materials related to a group of six white north-American anti-imperialists who were sentenced to lengthy prison sentences for “using illegal means to influence, change, and protest policies and practices of the US government.” Once captured they were subjected to different forms of psychological torture but they never renounced their beliefs or cooperated with the State and continued acting in solidarity with revolutionary struggles around the world. A good part of the RCC collection are solidarity letters written to radicals from different struggles who were all united against US Imperialism, including the Puerto Rican independence movement; women’s liberation, AIDS activism and the black liberation movement. I have pulled some samples of my favorite pieces from the collection in an attempt to put these liberation struggles in conversation. The pieces that I have highlighted here express voices from each of these movements articulating their position in regards to U.S. Imperialism and concrete actions they took to fight back. What struck me about this grouping of materials is the commitment to militant struggle for liberation and self-determination. Each of these movements varied in their ideological and political beliefs and utilized diverse tactics, but they were unified against white supremacy and the Imperialist state while working in revolutionary solidarity with all oppressed peoples in the fight for autonomy. The value of the Freedom Archives to me is the ability to connect with a genealogy of ideas and action in a larger history of struggle. The Archive holds space for direct and immediate engagement with the material expression of those who came before us to allow organizers and researchers to think critically about what it means to be a part of radical history.
-Leah
Afrikan People’s Party 1974 
Alejandrina Torres 1987 
Ashaki Binton 1978 
Breakthrough 1990 
International Women’s Day
* The following slides give an idea of some of the breadth of material housed in the Freedom Archives. For clarity, aesthetics, and to give a sense of the provenance of each material, what is shown is a collage of, in most cases, the title or cover page placed to the left of the content in question.
