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John BeecherJohn Beecher, 1904-1978 The late John Beecher, though descended from the abolitionist New England Beechers, was a Birmingham, Alabama native due to his fathers assignment there as an executive in the steel industry. Beecher himself was groomed for a similar role, but when he went into the mills as a young man at the outset of the Great Depression, he rebelled and instead began to write powerful, radical activist poetry. A contemporary of Woody Gutherie and John Steinbeck, he became a similar chronicler of the massive displacement of the economic upheaval of the 1930s. During World War II, he served as a commissioned officer of the interracial crew of the troop transport Booker T. Washington, and wrote a book about these experiences. In the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted and fired from his teaching job at San Francisco State University. Three decades later the United States Supreme Court overturned his firing and he was reappointed to his teaching position. Always, he wrote powerful, spare verse that in lesser hands might have been ruined by its outrage. His 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. 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 Stockholers & Other Poems, Ra,mpart 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
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