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Fred Anderson was born in Mississippi in the late 1940s. He was among the youngest full-time SNCC workers in an organization defined by its youth. He was a courageous young rebel, a teenage wunderkind, who at 15 was working as an organizer alongside such civil rights luminaries as Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Hollis Watkins, Stokely Carmichael and his mentor and future Montreal roommate Bob Moses.

Anderson is a Forest Gumpian type figure, who was present for many of the seminal moments in the history of the civil rights movement. He participated in Freedom Summer, was in the room when it was announced that the three civil rights workers- Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman- were missing, and attended the historic 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

On Jan 6, 1966, SNCC became the first major civil rights organization to come out against the Vietnam War. The statement the group issued was bold and categorical. It did not equivocate.

“We believe the United States Government has been deceptive in its claim of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the Government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people. The United States Government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders…We ask where the draft for the freedom fight in the United States is?”

Towards the end of 1966 Fred Anderson left the United States to avoid being sent to fight in Vietnam. He moved to Montreal with his friends Herman Carter and Bob Moses, and for the next 10 years lived underground not revealing his true identity out of fear that given his role in SNCC he’d be targeted by the FBI, apprehended and sent to prison in the US, as he had heard had happened to other Black civil rights activists and war resisters who’d escaped to Canada.

Anderson became engaged in political organizing and community life in Montreal.

He attended the historic Congress of Black Writers Conference at McGill University in 1968- one of the major Black Power gatherings of the decade.

During the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, still the biggest student occupation in Canadian history in which Black, Brown and White students protested against racial discrimination in the classroom at the then Sir George Williams University now Concordia, Anderson played “a critical organizing role” behind the scenes trying to mobilize the community to support the students. He drafted petitions and wrote editorials in community newspapers.

He had close relationships with the prominent Black student leaders Anne Cools, a future Canadian Senator, and Rosie Douglas, future Prime Minister of Dominica, both of whom were jailed for their involvement in the Sir George Williams events.

He was close friends with a Who’s Who of the English Canadian literary scene. Novelists Margaret Laurence , Timothy Findlay, W.O. Mitchell and Mordecai Richler. He considered Austin Clarke, Giller Prize winning author of The Polished Hoe, his best friend.

But he also counted many members of Quebec’s literati and radical political community as close confidants. He knew the Quebec independendiste firebrand Pierre Bourgault and had close relationships with Quebec poets Roland Giguere and Victor Levy- Beaulieu. He was very close with physician and Governor General Award-winning novelist Jacques Ferron, Roch Carrier-beloved author of The Hockey Sweater, acclaimed writer Dany Laferrière, and the Quebec historian and author of A People’s History of Quebec, Jacques Lacoursière.

He was involved with the NBCC (the National Black Coalition of Canada)- arguably the most significant pan-Canadian Black organization in history - and later helped found the Concordia Summer Institute for community organizers.

Fred Anderson has been a lifelong change agent. His journey has taken him from the Deep South of the United States to the Far North of Canada where he has worked in Cree and Inuit communities. Fred Anderson is a formidable builder of relationships and institutions, and a bridge between solitudes. He’s just written a memoir that documents his extraordinary life. It’s called Eyes Have Seen: From Mississippi to Montreal.

Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, has been a defender of human rights for most of her life. Her maternal grandfather fought for the French Resistance during the Second World War.

Callamard was born in 1963 into a lower middle-class family in a small village in Southeastern France about 60 kilometres north of Avignon. She attended Sciences Po Grenoble for her undergraduate degree.

Earned a master’s in international and African Studies at the renowned Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC where she was one of a handful of White Students – an experience she describes as transformative.

And she received her PhD at the New School in New York City.

Prior to becoming Amnesty’s Secretary General, Callamard was the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.

Adrian Harewood sat down with Agnès Callamard in May 2025 at the head office of Amnesty International Canada in downtown Ottawa. We spoke about, growing courage, fighting impunity investigating the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the current state of human rights in the world and the ability of Amnesty International to affect change.

This week, we’re doing something a little different. We’ve teamed up with our friends over at Canada’s National Observer to share the first episode of their gripping new podcast, The Takeover.

This series pulls back the curtain on a rising movement of politicians, think tanks and billionaires working to dismantle global climate commitments…

All of this at a time when huge parts of Canada enter extreme heat warnings under record-setting temperatures and wildfires burn across the country.

In this first episode, journalist Sandra Bartlett travels to London to attend one of the biggest conservative conferences in the world.

You can find The Takeover on your favourite podcast app or on Canada’s National Observer’s website.

We’ll be back next week on In Bed with the Elephant with more conversations that matter. But for now, here’s episode one of The Takeover.