John Beecher

John Beecher (1904–1980) was an activist poet who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression and the American Civil Rights Movement. Beecher was extremely active in the American labor and Civil Rights movements. During the McCarthy era, Beecher lost his teaching job for refusing to sign a state loyalty oath; seventeen years later the California Supreme Court overturned this and reinstated him. Beecher's books included Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, In Egypt Land, and a 1974 Macmillian edition of his collected poems.

Beecher's early years

John Henry Newman Beecher was born in New York City on January 22, 1904. Beecher's family was descended from New England abolitionists (including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and his father was a steel industry executive. In 1907, Beecher's father was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama to work for the United States Steel Corporation; as a result of this, Beecher spent the rest of his childhood in the American South. Beecher's family had intended their son to become an executive like his father. However, as a young man Beecher went to work in the steel mills at the outset of the Great Depression. The labor abuses he saw there caused him to become active in labor movement issues. He also began to write the radical activist poetry he eventually became known for.

Beecher's later years

Beecher alternated college with working in the steel mills until 1925, when he was severely injured while building the Fairfield Sheet Mill in Birmingham. After recuperating, he entered Harvard Graduate School, then began working at a variety of jobs (including positions with the United State government's Emergency Relief Administration in various states across the South). During World War II, Beecher served as a commissioned officer of the interracial crew of the troop transport Booker T. Washington and wrote a book about these experiences. During the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted and fired from his teaching job at San Francisco State University. Three decades later the California Supreme Court overturned his firing and he was reappointed to his teaching position.

Beecher's writings

Like writers such as Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck who chronicled the massive displacements of the Great Depression and the growth of the American labor movement, Beecher used his books and poetry to address basic human issues such as justice and equality. Unlike these other writers, however, Beecher also addressed racism in his writing, a problem he felt was significant in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South. Beecher's books included Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, In Egypt Land, and a 1974 Macmillian edition of his collected poems. All are out of print, although a new collection of his poetry, One More River to Cross: The Selected Poetry of John Beecher, was published by New South Books in 2003.

External links

• An anthology of Beecher's poetry.
• Book of Beecher's poems
• Modern American Poets Biography of Beecher
• The Irony of John Beecher
• Beecher's papers are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Bibliography

• One More River to Cross: Selected Poems, foreword by Studs Terkel, edited by Steven Ford Brown, NewSouth Books, 2003
• Tomorrow is a Day, Independent Publishing Fund of the Americas, 1980
• Collected Poems, 1924-1974, MacMillian, 1974
• Hear the Wind Blow: Poems of Protest and Prophecy, International Publishers, 1968
• To Live & Die in Dixie & Other Poems, Monthly Review Press, 1966
• Report to the Stockholders & Other Poems, Rampart Press, 1962
• All Brave Sailors: The Story of the S.S. Booker T. Washington, L.B. Fischer, 1945
• Here I Stand, Twice A Year Press, 1941
• And I Will Be Heard: Two Talks to the American People, Twice A Year Press, 1940