John Beecher

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. Beecher was 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. Following a 1967 decision of the California Supreme Court that disallowed such a loyalty oath, he was reinstated in 1977. Beecher's books include Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, and In Egypt Land.

John Henry Newman Beecher was born in New York City on January 22, 1904, to Leonard and Isabel Beecher. He was a descendent of the New England literary and abolitionist Beechers that included Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Lyman Beecher, and Henry Ward Beecher. 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 and Beecher spent the rest of his childhood in the American South.

Beecher's family intended their son to become an executive like his father. 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. The labor abuses he saw there caused him to become active in labor movement issues. He also wrote several of the radical activist poems he eventually became known for. He spent only a short time at the Virginia Military Institute before he found the school's hazing of new cadets a reason to leave. Beecher attended several colleges and earned his BA from the University of Alabama in 1924. He was severely injured while working on the construction of the Fairfield Sheet Mill near Birmingham in 1925.

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