John Beecher
John Henry Newman Beecher (January 22, 1904-1978) was an activist poet who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression and the Civil Rights movement. Beecher was extremely active in the American labor and Civil Rights movements.
Beecher's early years
Beecher's family was descended from New England abolitionists (including Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin]). His father was a steel industry executive who, in 1907, was transferred to Birmingham to work for U. S. Steel. From the age of 3, Beecher grew up in the Birmingham District.
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.
Later years
Beecher alternated college with working in the steel mills until 1925, when he was severely injured while helping to build the Fairfield Sheet Mill. 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.
Writings
Like Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, who also 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, though, Beecher also addressed issues of racism in his writing, especially as Beecher saw this issue existing in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South.
Publications
- And I Will Be Heard: Two Talks to the American People, Twice A Year Press, 1940
- Here I Stand, Twice A Year Press, 1941
- All Brave Sailors: The Story of the S.S. Booker T. Washington, L.B. Fischer, 1945
- Report to the Stockholers & Other Poems, Rampart Press, 1962
- To Live and Die in Dixie & Other Poems, Monthly Review Press, 1966
- Hear the Wind Blow: Poems of Protest and Prophecy, International Publishers, 1968
- Collected Poems, 1924-1974, MacMillian, 1974
- Tomorrow is a Day, Independent Publishing Fund of the Americas, 1980
- One More River to Cross: Selected Poems, foreword by Studs Terkel, edited by Steven Ford Brown, NewSouth Books, 2003