At the age of fifteen, Fred Anderson left home and was sucked into the maelstrom of the U.S. southern civil rights movement. He became active with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil rights organization, working with some of the well-known leaders including John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer and more. As the movement voiced opposition to the Vietnam War and support for liberation movements in Africa and other Third World countries, including Palestine, the FBI targeted it, while military draft boards systemically and disproportionately inducted social activists and poor Blacks, including Fred Anderson. When he refused to go to war, he chose 'Flight to Canada,' where he became Clifford Gaston, the name he went by until the amnesty granted draft dodgers in 1977.

Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal is a memoir about embracing the racial and tyrannical crosswinds of Hattiesburg and the south of the 1960's and riding the tailwinds of SNCC, civil rights, anti-Vietnam War activism and reimagining the underground railroad to Canada.

From the author: "Little did I know that the internal and public outcomes of the waning Mississippi Freedom Summer and my personal fate would collide with my ancestral struggles and hurl me into the narrative of runaway fugitives seeking exile in Canada."

Fred Anderson's profile page

Fred Anderson was born (1947) in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He left home at an early age to join the Civil Rights Movement, becoming a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organizing in the Mississippi delta, Alabama, and Southwest Georgia. He refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War and fled to Montreal (Quebec) Canada in November 1966. He attended Sir George Williams University and was awarded the 1973 Board of Governors Medal for Creative expression in Literary arts. Fred was instrumental in co-founding two black research institutes and a black literary forum. He was employed as a program manager, overseeing, gender-specific and therapeutic interventions for several English-speaking social services and rehabilitation centres for adolescent girls. Later, he would assume the same responsibility in the Quebec Arctic in the service of Inuit and Cree adolescent girls. Fred is a member of the Quebec Writers' Federation. He now devotes his time to writing and wildlife photography.

"Fred Anderson's story is a gripping tale that maps the terrain of Black family and exile at a moment of a certain Black becoming. The Civil Rights Movement and Black Power continue to reverberate for all of us and Anderson's intimate account of his experience through the movement and exile to Canada is not just one of triumph but a reckoning with a past that is not yet behind us. Anderson's memoir is a guide to what we must now live too. His account of the 1960s spans Mississippi to Montreal and Black metropolitan life and politics is laid bare. We need accounts like these to fill the voids in the official archives and more importantly to puncture the myths of national difference. Read this memoir and sit with its many truths and its difficult triumphs!"

? Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo. His last book is The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom.