[BearwWthoutBorders] John Beecher

[Hunter Gray]

Note by Hunter Gray/Hunter Bear [John R Salter, Jr], January 8  2005:

Several consecutive days have seen Severe Weather Watches in these Eastern
Idaho parts -- predicting the worst storm since 1950 -- but most of that is
now cancelled. Warm temps [mid 30s] and little new snow shot that all down.
High winds, especially up here,  do continue and gusts are reaching 60 mph.
No power outages yet -- but they can happen in our immediate setting.  Our
three family-connected Jeep Cherokees, each with 4WD -- mine, that of
Thomas, and Josie/Cameron's new one -- are all ready to go when needed.

Anyway, once around this camp ground:

About a year ago, I ran this piece of mine on the great free spirit and
radical poet, the late John Beecher -- and his wife and colleague of many
decades, Barbara, still active in western North Carolina. [We had briefly
lost contact with Barbara but were quickly back in touch.] This seems to be
the season in which many of us, from the Old Days [most of us with our
substantive medical challenges], are calling one another. [E mail is a
genuinely Great Wonder but there's nothing like direct conversation.]  Sam
Friedman, fine poet and activist, called for a great phone visit -- hale and
hearty but, as always, overworked!  A few days ago, Barbara Beecher called
and we had a very long and mutually encouraging conversation that carried us
both 'way up.  Last night, Susan Kelly Power, Yanktonnai Sioux of Standing
Rock reservation, telephoned and we had a good and optimistic talk.  Susan,
now of Chicago, is the last surviving person who attended the founding of
the [still quite active] National Congress of American Indians in 1944.  She
is
also the last living founder of the ever functioning American Indian Center
of Chicago which took shape in the mid-1950s -- the first Native urban
center in this country. Her daughter, Susan Mary Power, is a noted author
[e.g., The Grass Dancer, 1994].   I will soon be calling Jim Helten,
formerly of North Dakota and now of Eastern North Carolina, who has gathered
and written a vast amount of biographical material on John Beecher.  Jim was
crippled in a motor cycle wreck as a very young person in the Devils Lake,
ND, region -- and has been confined to a wheel chair for decades.  I was on
his PhD committee in the late 1980s.

In 2003, a new anthology of John Beecher's work appeared, One More River to
Cross.   It takes its title from the poem he dedicated to me about 40 years
ago.
  One More River to Cross:
  The Selected Poetry of John Beecher
  Edited by Steven Ford Brown
  NewSouth Books, 2003
  Paperback, $20.00 (253 pages)
  ISBN:  1-58838-103-X

THE NEXT GREAT STEP OF THE WAY: JOHN BEECHER'S GRASSROOTS POETRY
[HUNTERBEAR]

INTRODUCTORY COMMENT BY HUNTER GRAY/HUNTER BEAR [JOHN R SALTER, JR]  January
19 2004.
This article of mine -- commemorating the great Southern social justice
poet, John Beecher and his wife, Barbara -- appeared initially in
SOJOURNERS, the Christian social justice journal, March 1981.

In the spring of 1979, the first edition of my own book came out, JACKSON
MISSISSIPPI:  AN AMERICAN CHRONICLE OF STRUGGLE AND SCHISM.  I immediately
sent a copy to John and Barbara , and my inscription read:  "For John and
Barbara Beecher - Old, firm friends -- the kind of people who help make the
sun shine on the water.  With best wishes, always - John R Salter Jr  - May
10  1979."

John Beecher died in May, 1980.  We maintained close contact with Barbara --
who went back to North Carolina.  Eventually their library appeared at a
large Asheville bookstore -- and on ABE.  My book was there and the price
was very hefty.  When a few weeks passed with no purchasers, we bought it
and it now sits next to the many inscribed books John Beecher sent us over
the many years.


THE NEXT GREAT STEP OF THE WAY: JOHN BEECHER'S GRASSROOTS POETRY
[HUNTERBEAR]


A great mountain lifted into the clouds when John Beecher,  American poet of
social struggle, died last May in San Francisco.  The scenery is not the
same for many of us for whom he was a major force in connecting hearts and
minds with the nonviolent battle for human rights.


I met him for the first time in Arizona in the fall of '59.  It was a bitter
time in my home state.  From Butte, Montana to the Mexican border, copper
workers were on strike, led by the International Union of Mine, Mill and
Smelter Workers.  Arizona was a bastion of reaction in those days. Adamant
recalcitrance from the huge mining companies backed by anti-labor judges and
lawmen,  coupled with a sweeping Federal "Communist conspiracy" trial of the
top Mine-Mill leadership then in session at Denver,  made the hard-rock
miners' struggle a flashback to the 1910s.

I was a graduate student in sociology then, at Arizona State University on
the outskirts of Phoenix.  Spending far more time in the field than in
classes, I was organizing miners' relief in the metropolitan area.  We were
using the excellent Mine-Mill film, SALT OF THE EARTH, depicting an earlier
strike in southwest New Mexico and matters were getting rough.  As soon as
we lined up places at which to show the film -- often with the help of Roman
Catholic parish priests -- church authorities, "anti-Communist leagues" and
the FBI worked in concert to bar us from schools, parish halls, and other
facilities.  Newspapers refused to run our ads, and cars and houses were
mysteriously broken into.

We plugged along and eventually found places where we could show SALT,
distribute literature, and collect strike relief.  At the first showing,
hostile police were parked outside, and we studied each incoming person with
an eye toward spotting foes.  A large man in his mid-50s walked resolutely
into our hall and took a seat.  He had, for the times, a massive beard.

"Who's he?" asked a friend.

"Damned if I know," I remember saying, "but he sure isn't from Kennecott or
the FBI."

He certainly wasn't.

He came up afterwards and that's when I met John Beecher, poet and temporary
faculty member at Arizona State.  We had little chance to talk then, for the
strike relief campaign was off and running successfully, but he reminded me
more of an old-time New England sea captain than a Santa Claus.  His
gentleness did not quite mask an obvious stubbornness as firm as the rocks
of Mount Katahdin.

The miners won the strike and, eventually, the Federal appellate courts
threw out the Communist conspiracy charges.

Then, at Arizona State University, our dean of students, a member of the
national council of the John Birch Society, summarily expelled several
undergraduates who had peacefully protested compulsory ROTC.  So we spent
the spring of 1960 in a demonstration campaign, the first conducted by
Arizona students in at least a generation, at the university, at the state
capitol, and the business offices of the members of the board of regents.
The ousted students were quickly reinstated and we immediately focused our
efforts toward the elimination of compulsory military service on the Arizona
campuses.

Picketing was hot and tedious and marked by some harassment. While several
faculty members gave us sub rosa encouragement from the shadows, only John
Beecher came forward to join us.  He did so with gusto and enthusiasm.   And
that's where I got to know him:  on the picket line.

Son of a U.S. Steel executive, John Beecher told me he'd been born in New
York City in 1904 but raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I was not at all
surprised to learn that he was  a great great nephew of the militant
abolitionist leader,  Henry Ward Beecher, and that he had, as a youngster,
worked 12 hour shifts in steel mills, an experience that had affected him
profoundly.

After his schooling at Virginia Military Institute, Cornell, and the
University of Alabama, John Beecher had traveled, then taught at Dartmouth
and the University of Wisconsin. In the '30s, he had spent eight years
administering New Deal programs in the South, serving low income whites and
blacks.  During World War II, he had been stationed aboard the first
racially integrated U.S. naval vessel, the Booker T. Washington.  Out of
that came one of Beecher's first major books, ALL BRAVE SAILORS.

Extremely migratory, Beecher rousted about after the war, then settled at
San Francisco State College.  But in 1950, California passed the Levering
[loyalty oath] Act and, on principle, Beecher refused to sign, losing his
post.  He tried ranching for a time, and he and his wife, Barbara, started
their own press to print his keenly honed poetry and her incisive abstract
woodcut prints.  Their work was widely hailed by the courageous few of the
McCarthy era.  The Beechers had come to Arizona toward the end of the '50s.

I had never met anyone like him.  I was fascinated to my core.  We didn't
eliminate compulsory ROTC -- that victory came several years later -- but
our group, with Beecher's encouragement, did start the fires burning.  And a
friendship was forged with John and Barbara Beecher that gave me, as it did
so many others, an enormous amount of inner strength and direction.

I left Arizona for a year and taught college in Wisconsin.  I heard once
from Beecher during that period.  The Peace Marchers, led by the
indefatigable A.J. Muste, were marching from San Francisco to Moscow.
Somehow they made it into [and through] Arizona and, when they came to
Arizona State, Beecher simply left his teaching position and walked off with
them for the next several weeks.  In Wisconsin, Eldri and I were married,
and we made plans to go into Mississippi to teach at black Tougaloo College
and join the still barely existent civil rights movement in that murderous
citadel.

I saw Beecher briefly in Arizona in the summer of '61, just before heading
South. He had returned from his sojourn with the march and was focusing
exclusively on his poetry.  He handed me a copy of his latest work, IN EGYPT
LAND, which vividly depicts the '30s struggle of black Alabama
sharecroppers. We talked for a long time.  [Note by Hunter Gray, January 19,
2004:  Beecher inscribed our copy of the book with the kind words, "To John
and Eldri Salter  - This true story of the South  in the belief you will
help to change these things - John Beecher - 21 August 1961."]

As Eldri and I prepared to leave, John Beecher gave the only piece of direct
advice I ever heard from him:  "You're going into Mississippi.  It's the
most dangerous place of all.  You're going to be involved very deeply there
before it's all over.  Remember now, you can do a lot there if you don't
talk too much about it.  Just do it.  They're going to know who you are and
what you're up to soon enough, but by then you'll have it going."

I read IN EGYPT LAND many, many times.  It began:

"It was Alabama, 1932
but the spring came
same as it always had.
A man just couldn't help believing
this would be a good year for him. . ."

And led into struggle:

"Then one day
someone told her about the Union . . .
If everybody joined the Union she said
a good strong hand would get what he
was worth
a dollar [Amen sister]
instead of fifty cents a day.
At settling time the cropper could take
his cotton to the gin
and get his own fair half and the cotton
seed
instead of the landlord hauling it off
and cheating on the weight. . .

Then the door banging open against the
wall
and the Laws in their lace boots
the High Sheriff himself
with his deputies behind him. . ."

We went into the Deep South and our great adventure began which culminated
at that point in the Jackson Movement of 1963, the first, most massive
nonviolent civil rights upheaval in Mississippi.  By then the Beechers were
back in California, where John was poet in residence at the University of
Santa Clara.  He sent another volume to us, REPORT TO THE STOCKHOLDERS AND
OTHER POEMS,  a sharp, multifaceted attack on bigotry and materialism and a
vigorous call for democracy.

Then he sent me a single poem, dedicated to me, commemorating the Jackson
Movement, the Southern struggle, and the martyrdom of Jackson's Medgar
Evers.  The conclusion of "One More River to Cross" looked ahead to the
great and never-ending thrust of the grassroots:

"Who knows that some unpainted shack
in the Delta
may house one destined to lead us the
next great step of the way
>From the Osawatomie to the "Patowmac"
the Alabama Tombigbee Big Black
Tallahatchie and Pearl
and down to the Mississippi levee in
Plaquemines Parish
it's a long road
better than a hundred years of traveling
and now the Potomac again. . ."

I went into full-time civil rights field work for the next several years,
and the Beechers wound up at Miles College, a small black school in
Birmingham.  Then I was organizing in other parts of the country --
Washington, Iowa, Chicago -- and the Beechers were in North Carolina,
Massachusetts, Florida.  Now it was the '70s.  But there were always, to
Eldri and me, the boldly written postcards,  the fiery poems, all of the
expressions against war and injustice,  and the ringing affirmations of
liberty and humanity and the creation.  He piled wood on our fires at
critical points.  Once, in a strongly affirmative letter of reference on my
behalf, he commented:  "He wears no man's collar."

And the times were indeed changing.  Beecher's poems were now being
published by major houses, Birmingham declared "John Beecher Day", and TIME
magazine joined the multitude of other reviewers who had poured praise on
Beecher's works.

The light was shining from on high but none of this, of course, changed John
or Barbara Beecher one whit.    He remained the stubborn Katahdin-like
advocate for humanity and she his no less firm colleague.  In the late '70s,
they were back in North Carolina.

Word had come to them some years before that the California Supreme Court
had axed the Levering Act.   Now, by special concurrent resolution of the
California legislature,  John was offered  his old San Francisco State
teaching job.  Beecher was ill but his spirit was as sharp and bristly as it
had always been.  Principle and justice, he and Barbara decided, made it
mandatory for them to return to the job he'd lost almost  30 years before.

They went.  He began teaching.  His illness worsened and he met his classes
in a wheelchair.    John Beecher was actively recording his autobiography
and anticipating the fall, 1980 publication of a book he'd written long
before in the unfriendly witch hunting years, TOMORROW IS A DAY: A STORY OF
THE PEOPLE IN POLITICS [Vanguard Press, Chicago] when he passed into the fog
and beyond to join the long string of earlier fighters, back to the
beginning of time.

Not long ago I read one of Beecher's poems to a class of mine, Navajo Indian
college students.  To the northwest of our reservation, up in Utah and
Nevada especially, white people are dying as a result of the illness
produced by nuclear testing in the '50s and early '60s.  On the vast Navajo
reservation itself,  predatory uranium mining companies have desecrated the
earth and set forth a poisonous legacy of radioactivity that has already led
to many Indian bones under the turquoise sky.  The class grew silent as I
read "Moloch," written 20 years before:

"Butch Bardoli was just a ranch kid
a tow-head like yours or mine at seven
his pockets full of marbles
pieces of string
a tiny car or plane maybe
he'd got with a box top
Nothing extra about Butch
just the usual sort of small boy
and when the big cloud mushroomed
high into the cobalt desert sky
over the Reveille mountains to the south
he stood in the yard with the six other children
who went to the Twin Springs school
and watched with scared eyes

Now Butch Bardoli is dead of leukemia
or cancer of the bloodstream
It was just his hard luck to be born
there in that almost empty part of Nevada
where mountains thirty miles away
seem close enough to touch
and the dust devils whirl
on long hot summer days

As a great man said
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs"
a man named Nikolai Lenin
not George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or
Abraham Lincoln
but we seem to have come over to his way of thinking
it does make a difference though
when it's an egg from your own nest
a beloved son perhaps
that gets broken for the omelet

Somewhere on the desert
a new cross stands
above a very short mound
and still the poisonous mushrooms climb the cobalt sky
over the Reveille range
But Butch Bardoli
sleeps on "

[Initially published in REPORT TO THE STOCKHOLDERS AND OTHER POEMS.  John
Beecher had inscribed that copy to our growing family:  "For the Salters -
John, Eldri and Maria in friendship and admiration - John Beecher - June 19,
1962."  The poem is included in COLLECTED POEMS, 1924-1974]

The Navajo class continued its silence for a time after I finished.  Then a
young woman spoke.  "He must have been a holy man," she said, "to have seen
such visions."

Indeed he was.  John Beecher was a very holy man.

HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR]   Micmac /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]