The United Freedom Front (UFF) was a small American revolutionary Marxist organization active in the 1970s and 1980s. It was originally called the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, and its members became known as the Ohio 7 when they were brought to trial. Mainly led by Raymond Luc Levasseur and assisted by Tom Manning, between 1975 and 1984 the UFF carried out at least 20 bombings and ten bank robberies in the northeastern United States, targeting corporate buildings, courthouses, and military facilities associated with "South African Apartheid, imperialism, and corporate greed." Brent L. Smith describes them as "undoubtedly the most successful of the leftist terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s." The group's members were eventually apprehended and convicted of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, and other charges.

Activities

The group was founded in 1975 as the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, setting off a bomb at the Massachusetts State House under that name but changed its name to the United Freedom Front later that year. The initial members were Raymond Luc Levasseur and Tom Manning, and their respective spouses, Pat Gros and Carole Manning. Levasseur and Tom Manning were both Vietnam War veterans, first active in Veterans Against the War, and both spent time in prison. The four had worked together in civil rights and prison reform groups before forming the UFF. Four other members joined the group in the following years: Jaan Laaman and Barbara Curzi (another married couple), Kazi Toure (born Christopher King), and Richard Williams.

The UFF opposed US foreign policy in Central America, as well as South African apartheid. In March 1984, the group detonated a bomb after a warning call at an IBM building in Harrison, New York, in retaliation for the company's selling computer parts to the South African regime.

The UFF's targets included South African Airways, Union Carbide, IBM, Mobil, courthouses, and military facilities.

Raymond Luc Levasseur (born October 10, 1946) is an American militant who was the former leader of the United Freedom Front, a militant Marxist organization that conducted a series of bombings and bank robberies throughout the United States from 1976 to 1984, in protest to US intervention in Central America and around the world, racism, and the South African apartheid regime.

Early life

Levausseur was born in southwest Maine, to French-Canadian immigrant parents from Quebec. Growing up, he experienced both poverty and bigotry, being called "frog", "papist", "lazy" and "stupid"—ethnic slurs and stereotypes targeting his French-Canadian background, French language, and Catholic upbringing.

Levausseur, his parents, and grandparents all worked in textile mills:

"My grandparents went to work in the textile mills at 13 and 14. My mother and father went into those mills at 16. My turn came at 17, when I misrepresented my age to a mill boss in order to work on a machine making shoe heels. From the earliest years I'd watched my family and predominantly French Canadian neighbors enter and leave the mills. Now I followed them into an exceedingly unpleasant experience."

In an essay written from Marion Prison in 1992 called "My Blood Is Quebecois", Levaussuer recalls how, to him, "[my] French and class identity were inseparable," and "the roots of my political vision and militancy extend deep into life as a French Canadian worker."

At 18, Levausser left Maine for Boston, where he found work as a dockworker.

In 1965, Levasseur enlisted in the United States Army, and was sent to Vietnam two years later, for a 12-month tour of duty. This experience began to radicalize him as the treatment and ridicule of the Vietnamese people and culture reminded him of the white supremacy he'd experienced growing up.