About Me
Background
I was born, raised, and still live in DeKalb County, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. I’ve been an activist since the early 2000s, and have been involved in a number of community projects across Georgia. My research interests include the history of anarchistic and directly democratic social movements, with special attention to under-appreciated radical histories of southeastern North America. For the past dozen or so years, I have worked closely with elder activists and revolutionaries on the publication and public engagement of critical history and historiography with an emphasis on direct democracy and social ecology.
Independent Publishing
In 2012 I co-founded On Our Own Authority!, a radical publishing house based here in Atlanta. Our goal was to publish works that emphasized themes of direct democracy, social ecology, and the direct self-emancipation of oppressed peoples. We’ve published about 20 books so far. Our most widely known titles are Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays and Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom, both written by Dr. Modibo Kadalie, an elder of the Civil Rights, Black Power, Pan-Africanist, and Social Ecology movements. I had the pleasure and honor of writing introductions to both volumes. We also had the pleasure of republishing two works by the famous Guyanese revolutionary Eusi Kwayana, The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics, and Scars of Bondage: The First Study of the Slave Colonial Experience of Africans in Guyana, the latter of which was co-authored by Tchaiko Kwayana.
From 2017 until 2019, I was also a member of the AK Press collective, where I worked as a project editor on a number of noteworthy books, including As Black as Resistance by Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson, and Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, which was a New York Times Bestseller.
Autonomous Research
In 2017 I was invited onto the Convening Council of the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology in Midway, Georgia. The institute is a gathering place for researchers based mostly on the Georgia coast with interests in the region’s history of self-emancipation movements. ARIDDSE members work collaboratively to develop, publish, and promote each other’s work.
I’ve compiled, edited, and introduced three volumes of classic anarchist writings of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, including: The Commune: Paris, 1871, To Remain Silent is Impossible: Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in Russia, and Why Anarchists Don’t Vote: Radical Criticisms of Representative Government.
Through my work with Modibo Kadalie and ARIDDSE, I became interested in writing local histories “from below.” In 2024, I published my first full-length book, “All Will Be Equalized!”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands 1526-1890. This book is a historic overview of movements against slavery and colonialism that were distinguished by multi-racial solidarity in the land we now call Georgia, from the time of early Spanish colonialism until the end of the U.S. Civil War.
Community Work
In 2016, I co-founded the Atlanta Radical Book Fair with a small group of experienced local activists and our friends at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American History and Culture, with whom we had collaborated to develop a series of author events and community conversations in Atlanta since 2012. At the annual Atlanta Radical Book Fair, we host left-wing anti-authoritarian authors, speakers, publishers, booksellers, and community organizations from across the southeastern region and beyond.
I earned a Georgia Master Naturalist certification in 2020 and have worked as a preschool teacher and naturalist educator with two local preschools, until the summer of 2022, when I accepted a full-time position as a union organizer with United Campus Workers of Georgia.
In January 2023, I was among the co-founders of Community Books of Stone Mountain, a volunteer-run bookstore focusing on social movement history and stories of liberation. The store hosts regular community events in the form of film screenings, author presentations, teach-ins, and facilitated community conversations. In December of that year, I was appointed to the City of Stone Mountain’s Planning Commission.
“All Will Be Equalized!”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands, 1526-1890
$25.00
From Afro-Indigenous communities of the Sea Islands and the Okefenokee Swamp to inter-racial networks of anti-Confederate resistance during the Civil War and post-war labor strikes by Black and white granite workers at Stone Mountain, this new study of Georgia’s freedom movements tells the story of oppressed peoples of African, Indigenous, and even European descent who fought together against slavery and colonialism while building multi-racial communities of resistance in remote areas outside of state or colonial authority.
Article Links
“From the Geechee Coast to Africville: When Modibo Kadalie met Eddie Carvery,” Orobo Journal, 27 July 2025.
“Anti-Confederate movement heats up in Stone Mountain,” Atlanta Community Press Collective, 8 March 2025.
“A Plantation Burned in Georgia,” Orobo Journal, 21 November 2024.
“Digging For Democracy: History and Archeology from Below,” ROAR Magazine, 17 March 2022.
Modibo Kadalie and Andrew Zonneveld, “Pan-Africanism, Social Ecology, and Direct Democracy,” ROAR Magazine, 25 January 2022.
“The 1526 Anti-Slavery Rebellion and the Birth of Afro-Indigenous Maroonage in Georgia,” Orobo Journal, 18 October 2023.
“State Power and the Masculinization of Science,” Orobo Journal, 22 September 2023.
Video / Audio
Andrew Zonneveld’s “All Will Be Equalized!” — Interview on CFRC Prison Radio 17 September 2025.
“All Will Be Equalized!” with Andrew Zonneveld and Modibo Kadalie at Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair 2024
“A Conversation on Intimate Direct Democracy with Modibo Kadalie & Andrew Zonneveld on Intimate Direct Democracy.” Srsly Wrong Podcast, 22 April 2022.
“Against Electoralism” (with Nani Ferreira-Mathews), Firestorm Books, 11 August 2022.
“Modibo Kadalie and Andrew Zonneveld at the Halifax Anarchist Book Fair,” Halifax Central Library, 2 September 2022.
Andrew Zonneveld 