Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal

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, Fanni 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. Little did he know that the internal and public outcomes of the waning Mississippi Freedom

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. He lives in Montreal.