Eyes Have Seen

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."