Eyes Have Seen, From Mississippi to Montreal is a vivid and searing memoir about growing up black in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In the difficult and often dangerous years of ubiquitous racism, Anderson recounts how family, good neighbours and the cultural underpinnings of Newman Quarters kept him grounded and capable of embracing the racial and tyrannical crosswinds of the American South of the 1950s and 60s. With electric candour, Anderson writes about joining the Mississippi civil rights movement at the age of fifteen, the burgeoning anti-Vietnam War activism, and reimagining the underground railroad to Canada.

“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.”

It is also a story of exile, of living under the assumed name of Clifford Gaston from 1966 until 1977 when amnesty was granted to draft dodgers, of dodging arrest and deportation, of forging a new home in another country so far away from family and friends.

Fred Anderson was born 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) in the Mississippi Delta, Alabama, and Southwest Georgia. He fled in the winter of 1966, to Montreal as a Vietnam war resister. 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 and is a member of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. He was employed as program manager, overseeing gender-specific therapeutic interventions for several English-speaking rehabilitation centres for adolescent girls. Later, he would assume the same responsibility in Northern Quebec in the service of Inuit and Cree adolescent girls. Fred Anderson lives in Montreal.