Venue: Librairie Résonance (40 Rue Beaubien E, Montréal, QC H2S 1P8) Date: April 26, 2025 Time: 4:00 PM
Tickets: Free
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/8970094829786412
Co-presented with Librairie Résonance and Livres Baraka.
Join Arts in the Margins, Librairie Résonance, and Livres Baraka for a conversation between author Fred Anderson and Gordon Weakes to mark the launch of Fred’s new memoir, Eyes Have Seen, From Mississippi to Montreal (Livres Baraka). They will discuss the music that shaped Fred’s experiences growing up and as part of the Civil Rights movement.
The event is free to all. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and to be autographed.
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.
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 a 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.
More about the book: https://www.barakabooks.com/catalogue/eyes-have-seen/
Gordon Weekes is the host of Anatomy of Caribbean Music, which examines the origins and evolution of Caribbean Music, including calypso, reggae, and kompa, and their relationship to African and Latin American music. There are also interviews with well-known Montréal musicians. The program airs on 1690 AM CJLO Radio Concordia on Saturday afternoons from Noon until 2 pm.