John Beecher (January 22, 1904 – May 11, 1980) was an activist poet, writer, and journalist who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression and the American Civil Rights Movement.
After graduating from public high school at age fourteen, Beecher went to work in the steel mills of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company.
He then pursued graduate studies in sociology at the University of North Carolina, where he worked on Howard Washington Odum's Southern Regions of the United States (1936).
[1] During World War II, he volunteered and served as a commissioned officer of the interracial crew of the troop transport SS Booker T. Washington and wrote a book about his experiences, All Brave Sailors.
[1] Reviewing it in the New Republic, Ralph Ellison wrote that it provided "a heartwarming but somewhat sentimentalized picture" that excluded even the healthy amount of interracial conflict that could be expected.
"Despite their high political consciousness," he wrote, "for a mixed group of Americans a-sail on the rough seas of our race relations, Beecher's seamen encountered an embarrassment of fine weather."
[citation needed] Beecher spent the 1960s primarily as a journalist writing about social injustice, and also as a teacher, while enjoying the renewed prominence of his poetry.
[citation needed] As a writer and journalist, he contributed to publications such as The Nation, Ramparts, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times.
A New York Times reviewer commented: "John Beecher's complaints are specific: injustices against the Negro, against labor, against the newly arrived in this country.
[1] John Beecher died of lung disease on May 11, 1980, and was buried in Los Gatos Memorial Park in San Jose, California.