Baraka . . . . stands with Wheatley, Douglass, Dunbar, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, and Ellison as one of the eight figures (in my opinion) who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture. His change of heart and head is testimony to his honesty, energy, and relentless search for meaning.
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From "Amiri Baraka and Langston Hughes," from Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch.
No creative genius was needed to write the scenario, no prophet required to predict the pattern. When, in the mid-sixties, LeRoi Jones’ once cryptic, once-allusive poems started to become more expansive in form and more transparent in meaning; when his tightly wrought one-act plays started giving way to ritual and pageant; when his essayistic analyses of society began to thrust like daggers and plunge like javelins—when, in short, Amiri Baraka began to emerge from behind the identity of LeRoi Jones—the media had it story.
In the mid-sixties, a growing disenchantment with American society as a whole coalesced in Mr. Baraka as a rejection of white America and any hopes he had harbored of building a truly multiracial nation. Mr. Baraka then focused his artistic efforts in and on the black community and became an active and adept politician as well.
A biographical essay provided by the Manuscript Department of the William R. Perkins Library, Duke Unviersity, the home of the major repository of Beecher's papers.
1934: the date is an approximation, but the poem, "Beaufort Tides," is a depression era poem by John Beecher (1904-1980), who became a poet and a rebel while working twelve-hour shifts at an open hearth steel furnace in Birmingham, Alabama. His fellow workers include both whites and blacks, and he writes poems about their lives and about the historical and economic determination of their suffering from the mid-1920s until the end of his life.
John Beecher’s "Beaufort Tides," takes an astute critical perspective on the history of race relations in the US, especially in the South. The first stanza of the poem sets up a decaying picture of the South. The poem evokes an end to economic prosperity in the same breath that it alludes to the end of slavery. Since the result of "No slavers" conducting commerce is "Rotting hulls / are drawn up on the shore," slavery as a system of racial oppression is articulated to a notion of slavery as the very foundation of the US’s economic power.
The first of eight sections to John Beecher’s "Report to the Stockholders" (1925) points up the threat posed by industrial conditions to worker bodies:
he fell of his crane
and his head hit the steel floor and broke like an egg
he lived a couple of hours with his brains bubbling out
and then he died
and the safety clerk made out a report saying
it was carelessness
and the craneman should have known better
from twenty years experience
than not to watch his step
and slip in some grease on top of his crane
His name was suggestive: even so a superficial reading of his poetry proves conclusive: John Beecher was a radical poet, perhaps America's most persistent for 50 years, the heir of an Abolitionist tradition and proponent of the dispossessed seizing power. His most enduring lyrics are about the downtrodden's fight for economic justice, human dignity and political freedom. He heard the music in their voices with uncanny accuracy.
It is ironical but in a sense logical that an authentic "proletarian" poet today--one who writes directly from the experience of the people, from the depths of poor people's lives, and mainly poor black people; a poet who speaks their language, and whose poetry in turn can be understood by these people--should be the descendant of a famous old New England family of dissenters, iconoclasts, atheists and freethinkers (among the clergymen members), ardent abolitionists, native non-conformists.
John Beecher's first poems, like those of Van Doren, appeared in the year 1924, but Beecher's tradition is that of Sandburg, Lindsay, and the Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon River Anthology. Beecher’s verse is, however, not poetry at all.