John Beecher

The late JOHN BEECHER (1904-1980), a Birmingham, Alabama native and descendent of the abolitionist Beechers, was groomed to take his father's place as an executive in the steel industry, but when he went into the mills as a young man at the outset of the Great Depression he rebelled and began writing powerful, radical, activist poetry chronicling the economic ills of the 1930s, the steel mill environment, and the evils of Jim Crow segregation. The powerful and spare verse that fills One More...See more

The late JOHN BEECHER (1904-1980), a Birmingham, Alabama native and descendent of the abolitionist Beechers, was groomed to take his father's place as an executive in the steel industry, but when he went into the mills as a young man at the outset of the Great Depression he rebelled and began writing powerful, radical, activist poetry chronicling the economic ills of the 1930s, the steel mill environment, and the evils of Jim Crow segregation. The powerful and spare verse that fills One More River To Cross earned Beecher national recognition as a twentieth-century prophet of protest. His other books include Report to the Stockholders , To Live and Die in Dixie , In Egypt Land , and a 1974 Macmillan edition of collected poems, all out of print . See less