The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists

Series II: Southern Activists

Sub-series 1: John Beecher

Appendix II.6: Transcript of Audiocassettes 01 and 02

Location: Birmingham, Alabama

Speaker: John Beecher

Interviewer: Jack Rabin and an unidentified man

Date: November 16, 1974

Repository: University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University, Special

Collections Department, Historical Collections and Labor Archives

Transcriber: Barry Kernfeld

Item number: Audiocassettes 01 and 02

In this transcript, “[?]” indicates an inaudible word and “[ ? ? ]” indicates something more substantial—two or three words, perhaps a whole phrase, and occasionally an entire sentence—that is inaudible.

The first hour of this interview is lost. The transcription begins on side 3 of 5, in the midst of a discussion of a New Deal housing project:

Rabin: Were they evicted?

Beecher: I evicted the coal miners. We didn’t have a single coal miner left, not one. They were still putting out this crap in Washington, about how this was a project. Actually, it could have turned into a project for the friends of the Bankhead family, because every time the Senator [ ? ? ] to call me [ ? ? ] with the speaker, Tallulah’s father, Will Bankhead. Every time he’d come back from Washington, I’d get a call from him. He’d come up, and I would sit in his living room while he told me about various families that he would like to see placed on the project. I would always give him the same answer. I’d say that we will certainly investigate these people, or we have already done it, and I’m sorry, but they make too much money. They don’t qualify.

Now I will admit that he was quite decent. Then he could go in to the people and tell them, “This man that the government has put in charge here, you know, bureaucrats down in Birmingham, that bureaucrat, won’t give you a place. I talked to him, but he was stiff-necked about it.”

So I never did. But I did do what Washington told me to do, and that was to run projects on an all-white basis. We would never dream of trying to integrate. I never even dreamed of turning one into a black project.

Rabin: Not even a black project.

Beecher: No, man, no. There were five communities, and they were all – I’m telling you. There were 700 homesteads. Every – or maybe 800. I forget all told now, because one of them had – alone, had – the one out at Trussville, I think we had 400 units, just in that alone. The others were – the other four were about a hundred each. So maybe there were 800 and some homesteads, something like that. Anyhow, there were all together – there were something like 3,000 or more people on this thing, white to a man, a woman, and a child. Not a black person. And not a coal minor on the coal miners’ project. Not one, which was what I was instructed.

Eventually it got to be too much. I quit.

Rabin: I could understand.

Beecher: I quit. It was a very interesting experience. I got a lot of experience – valuable – or what was valuable to me – experience in organizing communities and [?] and so forth. But I – in the end I was sick over what I considered to be social injustice. And then when they started putting the arm on me about evicting people, because they weren’t paying the rent, because they weren’t working enough to pay the rent, because they had to drive their cars back and forth innumerable miles to their jobs and keep them running. I couldn’t have anybody on there that earned less than $100 a month, as I recall or anybody that earned more than $150. So I was – and so it was a kind of a petty bourgeois.

I had one project in Bessemer which was pretty much working class, pretty heavily working class. But I had all kinds of white-collar people [ ? ? ]. They would hire people to do the farming. Eventually I had to set up co-ops to buy farming equipment. Then the community organization would hire a farmer from nearby to operate their stuff and to do all their gardens [ ? ? ].

Eventually it got so screwed up and was so contrary to what it was supposed to be, that I thought, all right, enough of this. But that was almost three years. So I resigned. Pretty soon they came. I was writing a novel and living in Birmingham. They said, “We’ve got a job that nobody but you could do,” etc., etc. They said, “We want you to go and work for the migrants in Florida and make a study of the migratory labor situation. You’ll be in charge of that, and then you can go back to your writing.”

So I did that and – it started in ’39 – ended in ’39. Then when this was finished they asked me to be a – to direct the program and set it up, and so I got [?].

But this was – it was still segregated, but we did really more for blacks than we did for the whites in that program. That was the only place in the New Deal where we did, that I know of, was in the migratory labor, and principally because most of the migratory laborers were [?], so we couldn’t very well [ ? ? ]. But – and they were given absolute equality of treatment.

In fact, I got a hospital built in Belle Glade, Florida. I found that in the Everglades, where the – at the height of the season, there were 50,000 blacks working in the fields, in the crops, there wasn’t one hospital bed accommodating a black person in the entire area.

Rabin: [ ? ? ]

Beecher: Around Waverly [?], in the central Everglades. So I was able to get them to build. I guess it might have been – I think it was – the first – long before the Hill-Burton Act [ ? ? ], it was the first government – federally funded hospital, completely federally funded hospital built in this country, outside of perhaps some of the marine hospitals and stuff like that.

Got it finished just about the time that World War II started, or Hitler had conquered Europe and so forth, and – or conquered Western Europe – and then they were in such a hurry to get out of it, they turned the projects back to – within a year or so – back to – they turned them over to the local authorities, to the counties. And they took my hospital that had been for black people and fumigated it thoroughly, repainted it, and then made an all-white hospital.

Rabin: This – these relief programs in Birmingham, they were for buying land, just for [ ? ? ]?

Beecher: The suburban – there’s a book the University of Alabama Press published on the suburban resettlement projects. [?] some professor at the university wrote this book. It’s a snow job on these projects. He went up there after I had left. My name doesn’t even appear in the book. My successor, a man I recommended, who was my chief assistant, an Auburn graduate named Sam Gibbons – Sam Gibbons posed to him as the father of the projects and everything else, and this guy bought this thing, hook, line, and sinker. He wrote – I forget his name – pretty much a favorable book about these projects, but don’t take that too seriously, because he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

This man was an Auburn graduate, an agricultural man, and as far as that part of it was concerned, he was very pleased with it. He – and a good lieutenant – but he apparently must have [?], suppressed all the truth.

Now how did they buy the land? It was built under the Department of the Interior and by a local corporation which was headed by Bob Jamerson. Bob Jamerson became the head of FHA [the Federal Housing Authority] in Alabama for many years. Before that, and during that, he was also the biggest real estate man in Birmingham. The Jamerson Company is the name of a real estate firm in Birmingham.

They gave Jamerson all this money that was committed to buy land. They – I believe it was in Trussville – had a miserable, old, deserted blast furnace out at Trussville, north of Brimingham on the AGS [Alabama Great Southern] railroad. All that was left of it was some falling piece of shacks. [?] blast furnace worked with largely black [ ? ? ]. It was one of the old hand-filled bell blast furnaces. They used to dump [?] in the top of it.

So they – that was one of the places they bought for subsistence homesteads. These old falling piece of [?]. That was supposed to be the main asset, that they would rehabilitate these shacks, which had never even had inside plumbing or anything. [ ? ? ] but I’m saying that there was [ ? ? ] shacks, and a huge slag pile.

I think – I don’t remember for sure whether anything was left of the blast furnace at all, or whether that had all been sold off for scrap iron – [ ? ? ] scrap, but I don’t think – but we did get a hell of a lot of slag. Quite obviously, you couldn’t farm that slag. It was enormous and took up the large part of the area. There was no decent farming land on it at all. So we didn’t develop it.

But at some point in the procedures – I think about 1936 or ’7 – [Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford G.] Tugwell wasn’t spending the money fast enough to suit the boss, and so the croupier, FDR, raked 40,000,000 shekels over to Harry Hopkins, who can spend it faster. They were trying to distribute purchasing power. So Tugwell went and pleaded with Roosevelt to let him have the [$]40,000,000 back, that he would show that he could spend it [ ? ? ] provisionally Roosevelt said, “What the hell.”

So Tugwell leaped on the plans surmounted by this crooked construction man that he had hired to get results, because if there are any straight construction men, I don’t know who they are, then or now – then or now. He arrived on the airplane in Birmingham. Arriving on an airplane was something that didn’t often happen in those days. This was about 1936. Air travel was in its infancy, and here comes Tugwell, surrounded by this mob. I mean real life Mafia or something.

The regional director, me – I was the local manager – we couldn’t even get close to him. He went out, and he surveyed the slag heap. He decided to build – it was miles out in a day when people could hardly afford to run cars [ ? ? ] - and he decided to build a 400 unit duplexes and little houses and then use – now this was sound enough – use the slag to build the roads. And then he named – he named it on the spot: Slagheap Village. And so a quantity of the 40 millions went into this thing.

Pete Hudgins and I – he was the regional director at that time – Pete and I were just fit to be tied. And so was, for that matter, Will Alexander, who was at that time assistant [?] of the Resettlement Administration.

But he went ahead, and of course, with the growth of Birmingham, it had become a very desirable petty-bourgeois area.

Rabin: Is that . . .?

Beecher: It’s out on the highway to Chattanooga.

Rabin: Oh.

Beecher: But of course it’s all white. Nothing to do with subsistence homesteading. But the point was that – of course the lands would never have been bought in the first place for the purpose of 1933. The purpose was to – it was a utopian purpose, to take people who were working at [ ? ? ], at steel mills, and give them a place so they could raise their living. This is essentially a utopian scene, unworkable and essentially reactionary. I came to this ultimate conclusion about it.

However, I happened to be at the Southern Historical Society – Association meeting in Hollywood, Florida, in 1972, and they had a panel on the New Deal. A young man from, I think, the University of California at Santa Barbara – maybe it was the University of California at San Diego. I forget. One of the two – was giving a program on the – these projects, the subsistence homestead projects of the Interior which were transferred to the [ ? ? ].

He gave a program which was largely composed of material he dug in some of the official releases from Washington. I told you about the releases about the coal. He still – you know, my Bankhead Farms was for the coal miners, after the last coal miner had disappeared from over 100 homesteads.

All right. There was a discussion, and – afterwards – and the chairman of the panel [ ? ? ]. [?] were talking about the literature on and all this kind of. So at the end of it I tentatively put my hand up and was recognized. I said, “I’m just a visitor here and a rank amateur. I am not familiar with the literature on the subject, but I managed five of those projects for three years, and I have a few comments I’d like to make about” – you know. The bottom kind of dropped out of the panel, or whatever happens to panels. [ ? ? ] somebody who is Lazarus rises from the dead to tell them what it was really like, happened to be there.

The young man came and talked to me afterwards for a little while. He said, “Wow, I’ve got to have [ ? ? ].” I was telling him how they acquired the land and who was staying in the homes and all this kind of stuff. You know, the Watergate side of the New Deal, which was not absent. There was a lot – an awful lot of crookedness, unfortunately.

Rabin: Did you . . .

Beecher: A lot of politics [ ? ? ]. [ ? ? ] After all, this is the United States. This is the way of life with us. [?]ing and political corruption have been here, I mean, ever since the beginning of the Republic. Whether they’re worse now than they were in the beginning, I don’t know. Obviously they look worse now, because they’re closer to us and because more money is involved, and this is a [ ? ? ] country, so – but there have been political scandals. There has [ ? ? ]. You know, all those kind of things – has been kind of a way of life with us. Whether the Nixon administration is worse than the Harding administration is something in the manner of degree, or the Harding was worse than the Grant, or the Grant was worse than the Jackson. After all, they had hardly adopted the Bill of Rights when they passed the Alien and Sedition Act.

So these paradoxes seem to be a part and parcel of the whole system. I try not to be cynical abut it. It is possible to run these things honestly, as I discovered. When I took over the Relief Administration in Wilmington, they sent me down there, because they wanted to reform it. And the reason they wanted to reform it is that the man who was running it was not playing [?] political gain, which was the government’s gain. The relief administrations belonged to the different governors. That’s why they made – it got to be so bad – that’s why the WPA supplanted the FERA [Federal Emergency Relief Administration]. But see, the FERA was in Washington, but in North Carolina, it was the North Caroline Emergency Relief Administration. In Alabama, it was the Alabama Emergency Relief Administration. In Mississippi, it was the Mississippi Emergency Relief. In other words, [FERA director Harry] Hopkins and them sub-granted, under certain conditions, to the states, whereupon the governor appointed an administrator, and the Relief Administration became a part of the governor’s machine, by and large.

They were required to have “qualified” people, quotes, in social services, insofar as they could find them, but the people that ran the construction projects, work projects, and all the rest were usually members of – you know, the same people that run the Highway Department and get the contracts and – the whole thing. This doesn’t seem to be generally recognized by the New Deal historians, and a certain revisionist movement will get underway, I imagine, before long, to – trying to tell the story as it was, and to try to cut FDR down to size. I mean, compared to some of these pygmies we’ve had since, he was such a great man, but FDR thought he was so God-damn smart that he could get away with a lot of this stuff. He too played some – a lot of politics with these agencies.

Rabin: Virginia had talked a good deal about that.

Beecher: Did she?

Rabin: Trying to be sure to get – to keep the Southern senators’ votes on its war measures.

Beecher: But even before that. People like Aubrey. Aubrey was about as clean a man as could be, Aubrey Williams.

Rabin: I was going to ask you about him, because he ran the NYA [National Youth Administration].

Beecher: He was Harry Hopkins’s assistant in Harry’s best days. Harry had two assistants: he had Aubrey, who was the social services assistant and the assistant administrator. Of course he had a huge organization. But Aubrey was assistant administrator, which was in charge of the social service [?], and Jake [Jacob] Baker was in charge of the work projects.

Aubrey and Jake Baker were as [?] as they can come. Jake Baker was an [?], and Aubrey was one of nature’s noblemen, who was absolutely clear as far as [?] controversy. He and Cliff [Durr] were like a couple of St. Francis’es who wandered into this thing. Somehow they found their way. They were incorruptible. But there were such people, because later on, there were no incorruptible people.

Rabin: Did you know Aubrey before . . .

Beecher: I never knew him well. I knew him very warmly. I didn’t know him beforehand. I didn’t know him when he was driving a laundry wagon in Birmingham.

Rabin: A laundry wagon? [ ? ? ].

Beecher: Yeah, he used to live in a very unfashionable area known as Fountain Heights, That’s where he was raised. [ ? ? ]. That’s where – [ ? ? ] a redneck or a peckerwood area. Aubrey was raised in Fountain Heights and drove a laundry wagon I think for the Ideal Laundry. He washed for white people only. It was their sub-caption. Aubrey drove the wagon [?] by the mule. And then of course he grew to be a great man.

But these were early days. He was – he worked for Ludman’s Department Store. I for get what [ ? ? ] he was. He was head of personnel or something. Ludman’s [ ? ? ] Department Store.

The story of Aubrey Williams should be told by somebody.

Rabin: [ ? ? ].

Beecher: A beautiful man, a man who was crucified by a group of [ ? ? ].

Rabin: Crucified?

Beecher: Absolutely.

Rabin: I didn’t . . .

Beecher: That’s what happens to the honest people in this world.

Rabin: I knew he had left there.

Beecher: He had to. He decided that – he walked down the street in Montgomery, and people look at him, and they wanted to kill him. There he was dying of cancer. At least – and then he moved to Washington. At least he [ ? ? ] grandchildren [ ? ? ].

Rabin: So actually his . . .

Beecher: He left Montgomery because – Marshall Field established in Montgomery after the war [ ? ? ] this Southern farmer, through the notion, very utopian indeed, that they’d use this paper to liberalize the Southern farmer. Aubrey bought this and so did Marshall Field, this idea that they could do that.

But of course they reckoned without the reaction, which came from Truman, the Democratic McCarthy.

Rabin: That’s a sad . . .

Beecher: Cliff has told me about Truman. Truman is one of my least favorite people.

Rabin: This book . . .

Beecher: This whitewashing of Truman, making him a great popular champion on a white horse, it makes me throw up.

Rabin: The Merle Miller biography?

Beecher: Nah.

Rabin: I just picked that book up last night.

Beecher: Did you?

Rabin: [ ? ? ]

Beecher: I haven’t read it yet, so I shouldn’t be talking. And I’m really not talking about that book, but the whole idea – of course Harry was – compared to some of the people that came after him, he had some – he wanted a national health plan and so on. But the Loyalty Program – God all mighty, it wrecked more lives, and it did more damage and encouraged – the idea to fight McCarthyism is to go him one better, almost. It’s asinine.

Rabin: In his book he says he’s always been and he was always against loyalty oaths . . .

Beecher: Yeah.

Rabin: . . . which took me just about as . . .

Beecher: After he had used it in this monstrous program which is still plaguing us. We still haven’t gotten rid of that. Of course we had it under Roosevelt too.

Rabin: I didn’t know that.

Beecher: Everybody that worked for Roosevelt or for the New Deal took a non-communist oath.

Rabin: I’ll have to ask Cliff if he signed one.

Beecher: You better believe he did.

Rabin: Also, it was more of a non-communist . . .

Beecher: That’s right.

Rabin: . . . rather than a loyalty.

Beecher: It was a specific thing.

Rabin: Ah. Roosevelt was accused of being Red.

Beecher: Yeah.

Rabin: Yeah.

Beecher: Yeah. And so they forced – I mean, I signed the thing. At least it said, “I am not a communist.” Then later on, in 1950, when I wouldn’t sign the California loyalty oath, it was because I didn’t know what it meant. Nobody else did. Pat Brown, who was Attorney General at that time – you know, the father of the newly elected governor, Jerry . . .

[End of side 3. The recording stops in mid-sentence as the tape runs out. Side 4 resumes in mid-sentence.]

Beecher: . . . sign this oath. I said I am not now, I am not then, and I haven’t for the past five years. I will not become a member of any organization, political or otherwise, which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States or the State of California by force or violence or any other unlawful means, except as follows. That was how the oath went. You know, it was not even grammatical.

But it was a meaningless thing. You were just handing somebody a loaded gun in the atmosphere of the time. But any prosecutor and brainwashed jury could – they didn’t know what was coming then, 1950. The Korean War was strong, and all those things, and that they would use that thing to not only kill your freedom of speech, but put you in jail perhaps, if you signed a petition. I thought it was – not that I was personally threatened by it or any association with it. I’ve always said I have not been a member of or associated with. I think [ ? ? ]. So even if you had known somebody that they could prove – it was fantastic. Of course it was declared unconstitutional, but it took them 17 years to declare it unconstitutional, and you can get pretty angry in 17 years, if you’ve been blacklisted as [ ? ? ].

Anyhow, that stuff began in the Roosevelt administration with the [?] appointment of [?] Davis. [?]. And then Martin Dies came along. The House Un-American Activities Committee was formed during the Roosevelt Administration. The Smith Act was passed during the Roosevelt Administration. So we mustn’t forget these things. I don’t remember whether it was passed over Roosevelt’s veto or not, do you? – the Smith Act.

Rabin: I believe it was signed.

Beecher: He signed it, which was a thoroughly viciously thing, the Smith Act.

Rabin: Virginia Durr. You said you knew her very . . .

Beecher: I knew her as a teenager in Birmingham. We both were raised there. I knew her socially, so to speak.

Rabin: I’ve always been interested in her education, how she became an activist. Women were not in general activists that day and time.

Beecher: She and I, when I first knew her, used to argue all the – I forget. We still do. I suppose that’s a form of her activism, is to argue and debate over [ ? ? ] instead of a greeting and [ ? ? ] and tell him how wonderful you were. And she and I – and what we argued about, I can’t imagine. Even today, we argue over – not basic stuff, but I think peripheral things, and also that we enjoy doing it. [ ? ? ]. I’m extremely fond of her, and she of me, I think.

But I don’t know what activated her, except that, she – as I recall – I guess you have this on your tapes – her father lost his money, and – through a [ ? ? ] awful crook in Birmingham. [?That was a real blow]. She had to go to work. She learned to be a secretary and went to work at Wellesley, down at Wellesley, and this grieved her mother no end. But she worked as a – she was an accomplished sec – she was Cliff’s secretary for years. That’s how she got, I guess, got to be an activist.

When I knew her of course in New Deal days, and she was – next to Eleanor Roosevelt, she was the great activist lady in Washington. They lived over in Alexandria on Seminary Hill. She [ ? ? ]. All the New Dealers like [ ? ? ] and others and [ ? ? ], who were really out in the field and sweating with the problems. [ ? ? ].

And of course she got involved in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. I think that probably as much as anything else made an activist out of her. [ ? ? ] but in any case she happened to have activist tendencies. Living in Washington she had a taste of political activity. [ ? ? ] intrigue. Although if you’re politically active, you have to do a certain amount of intriguing I think [ ? ? ].

Rabin: You had mentioned, I believe yesterday, that you were at their first meeting.

Beecher: Yes, in Birmingham.

Rabin: Why did they hold it in Birmingham if all the other . . .?

Beecher: That’s a good question. I guess they felt that Birmingham was where to be at. It was the – at that time, a great industrial city of the South. I really don’t know what went in – I had nothing to do with the selection of the city. I had nothing to do with the planning for the meeting. I simply attended it – or attended some sessions if I could spare time from my duties with these projects to attend. I don’t know why. It used to be Clark Foreman could tell you that.

Rabin: Did people feel tense? Were there – was there a lot of tension?

Beecher: We felt tense after the police came in there, and they started to herd the people from one side of the auditorium to the other. Louise Charlton, who was active in the conference and a very nice person who was Federal Commissioner in Birmingham to some sort of a political [ ? ? ]. I’ve never known for sure what a Federal Commissioner was supposed to do, but some kind of officer of the court, right? Louise was a marvelous person. Louise got up and pleaded with them. She said, go ahead and [ ? ? ] because otherwise they’re going to break it up. [ ? ? ]. [ ? ? ] segregated the audience. [ ? ? ] Eleanor Roosevelt. These are the things that Louise would remember.

But not being anything more than just a person who attended, I can’t give you any inside information why they chose Birmingham, although later on, when I was the Southern FEPC [Committee on Fair Employment Practice] representative, I chose Birmingham for the South-wide hearings which were held in 1942 in Birmingham, when Mark Ethridge, the great liberal from Louisville, who was the first chairman of the FEPC, got up, without warning to any of us.

I was the chief field representative. I had been running the office, the field office. [ ? ? ]. But there was an awful lot of feeling in Birmingham. We had the support of the press, surprisingly enough, and we had a marvelous man who was running the papers at that time [ ? ? ], Jim Chapman. Jim saw to it that we got very, very fair treatment in the press.

However, Dixon – Frank Dixon, the Governor of Alabama, who was the nephew of Thomas Dixon, the author of The Clansman and the architect – unwitting architect of the re-birth of the Ku Klux Klan by Hiram Evans and [William] Simmons [ ? ? ]. You know that famous film? What’s the name? Out of his book, The Clansman? The Birth of a Nation.

Rabin: The Birth of a Nation.

Beecher: Yeah. This Thomas Dixon’s nephew was Governor of Alabama, Frank Dixon, and he was a racist through and through. And [?], according to [ ? ? ], he and the president of the TCI and so on – [ ? ? ] at the time [ ? ? ] TCI – were planning to give us all the gelder’s treatment, but decided that if they did that, that FDR would have sent in black troops and declared martial law in Alabama, [?] black troops [?]. I was impressed with [?]. This is what was told to me. It figured. It could have been true.

Anyhow, we had the hearings there. And all that [ ? ? ]. But, as I started to say, Mark Ethridge, the famous publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and the epitome of Southern liberalism, got up and made an unscheduled speech at the opening of the hearings in the midst of this tension in the federal courtroom in an old post office in Birmingham. He got up and he said, “Not all the armies” – this is June ’42, [ ? ? ] – “Not all the armies of the Allies and the Axis together could make the South give up segregation.” He said, “We are not challenging segregation.”

They had been saying that we were going to. We were going to force them to give up segregation. We would take the “Colored” signs off the drinking fountains, which – all we were trying to do at that time was to get blacks employed. We were trying, and from that we got a welding class started in Houston, Texas, where there was a lot of ship-building, some of which was controlled by Jesse H. Jones, the duke of Houston.

They were not training – I’ve done a lot of – I’ve written about that. [ ? ? ] – you know Studs Terkel’s Hard Times [ ? ? ]. He didn’t use that part. But I wrote a book in his poem – a poem in his book called “After 80 Years” that tells a lot about that time.

We were not training. It was very difficult to get the U.S. Office of Education to set up any defense training at all for blacks. We were training thousands of people – women – to be welders and to work in aircraft factories or shipyards. Every oil-field worker was flocking into Houston and some of them were going to work in the shipyards without any experience at all.

But blacks? Finally, by dint of great insistence and so on, we got a little class started for the negro welders in Houston. When they finished their course and were ready to go to work in shipyards, they got on the Southern Pacific and went to Wilmington, California – to Los Angeles, to go to work in Wilmington, California, in the shipyard. They could not work in Houston.

I went to Houston. They sent me there to make an investigation. I did, and [ ? ? ] ask [ ? ? ] blacks. I took all of their complaints. I wrote a long report, sent it to Washington. Said you need to have public hearings [?] Houston [ ? ? ] injustice in Houston. [ ? ? ] answer. Never had a hearing in Houston [ ? ? ]. Jesse Jones didn’t want it. We almost didn’t have one in Birmingham, but that a long story. I don’t want to get into that. If it hadn’t been for Eleanor Roosevelt, that would [ ? ? ].

Rabin: Do you think of [?] Eleanor as much more liberal than [ ? ? ]?

Beecher: Oh yeah.

Rabin: Were you in Alabama or around Alabama in ’55 during the bus boycott?

Beecher: ’55, no. ’55, I was in California. I went to California in ’48 and was in California and Arizona until ’64, when I came back to work as a correspondent in the civil rights movement, although I still had – wore another hat. I was poet in residence at the University of Santa Clara, outside of San Francisco. Then I finally came back South to live in ’65.

Rabin: Around the Selma March.

Beecher: I was in the Selma March. I was one of five people that George Wallace denounced on “The Today Show” the morning after the march was over. He said the march had been a subversive plot by some well-known radicals [ ? ? ]. He named Carl and Anne Braden. Anne wasn’t even there. And John Lewis, who at that time was head of SNCC [the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee], [ ? ? ] education [?]. C. T. Vivian, Reverend C. T. Vivian of SCLC [the Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. And me. He identified me as the editor of the militantly pro-communist magazine Ramparts. But I was one of the associate editors of Ramparts at that time, as well as a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.

We won’t get into Selma. I didn’t have anything more to organize – to do with organizing it than you did. I just came in there to cover it. And I was never so surprised in my life when I found out that I was considered to be a prime organizer. [ ? ? ]. I was a kind of a participating observer [?].

Rabin: Did you join it at [?] or at [?]?

Beecher: No, I was – I had a car. I would park the car, and I would march with them for a while. Then they would take me back to my car and so on. So actually, I was staying in Montgomery with the Durrs, sleeping on the couch. A lot of other people were there too.

Rabin: Were the [?] there?

Beecher: I remember that – I don’t know. Tom Emerson’s son was I think staying in their house. Tom Emerson was a professor at Yale – a professor of law at that time. I remember Pollack was there, who was dean of the Yale Law School, and [C.] Vann Woodward, the historian. I don’t think he was actually sleeping on the floor or anything, but [ ? ? ]. I’d known Vann off and on ever since his Tom Watson book came out in the ’30s.

Rabin: About Tom Watson. I did a little research on him [ ? ? ] Georgia. Almost a schizophrenic outlook, it seems. It seems that that’s very indicative also of Alabama. I’m trying to sort out a little bit of that, to try to find out if that – there is an element of that also in Alabama [ ? ? ].

Beecher: Hugo Black, if you want, is an outstanding example of it. Virginia [Durr] probably wouldn’t agree with me about this, but she was 100% loyal to Hugo. But you probably know Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton’s book on Hugo Black. I had dinner at her father’s home some time in the ’30s, when Hugo Black was first in town. Hugo Black by that time was so unpopular in Birmingham that in many places you’d walk into the newspaper offices – Ted Van der Veer was the editor of the Birmingham Age Herald, chief editorial writer. He was a very good friend of mine. Virginia was a little girl. I don’t know: 10 or maybe only 8 or something like that. And my wife, at that time, who since died. We were invited to dinner with Hugo Black at Ted Van der Veer’s house. Ted and his wife Elizabeth and Hugo Black. Hugo was very scintillating and witty. He was the wittiest man in the world. He really was. Particularly [ ? ? ].

His career had been a somewhat mixed one. He made his name, as you probably know, originally, for exposing the practice of the third degree against black people in the Bessemer jail. [ ? ? ] picked them up and investigate them and then try to beat confessions out of them. Hugo Black was County Solicitor, what we call the [?] of Jefferson County. He was this young guy who had come from the stix, Clay County, and gone to the University of Alabama and gone through the law school, and [ ? ? ]. Made quite a name for himself by exposing the tactics of the police in Bessemer.

Then the next time he surfaced, he was the defense attorney. By that time he was no longer the county solicitor. He was in this firm – I forget the name of the firm – the defense attorney of [E. R.] Stevenson, who had murdered the pastor of St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, which is now the [?] Cathedral in Birmingham.

I was raised a Catholic, and my mother was Irish. We knew Father [James] Coyle very intimately. He had been slaughtered in cold blood by this Klan minister. Hugo Black defended the minister and made it appear to the jury that Father Coyle had – apparently had gotten this girl in trouble who was the minister’s daughter and had then hired a Puerto Rican to marry her. The Puerto Rican was part black, and they drew the shades in the courtroom, so he would look dark, and all that kind of stuff. It was a very, very small affair, which – over which Virginia [ ? ? ].

So my mother [ ? ? ] Catholic [ ? ? ] came out of my [?] or something. She was obsessed with the whole thing. She thought it was a travesty.

Hardly anybody in Birmingham dared to say a word, because the Klan was running everything. You couldn’t even – a Catholic couldn’t even teach in the public schools [ ? ? ].

Rabin: [ ? ? ].

Beecher: The Klan used to send delegations around to different business offices that had Catholic employees and said, so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so employ Catholics, and if you don’t fire them, the Klan is going to [ ? ? ].

The Klan was very powerful. I went – when I went to high school – I was very young to go to high school. [ ? ? ]. I was just a little bitty kid. I finished elementary school when I was 10, and my people kept me [ ? ? ]. I went to high school in the steel mill district in Birmingham. I was 11. I remember I had this friend [ ? ? ]. He said, “Don’t let anybody out here know you’re Catholic.” Of course I [ ? ? ] make a difference.

Later I worked in a steel mill, and I was still real young. And there were a lot of Klansmen out there [ ? ? ]. One of the [?] was telling me stories [ ? ? ] church [?]. But Birmingham was rugged when Jimmy Jones was chairman of the city commissioners for a long time [ ? ? ].

But again to you into this [?] thing. Next door to me was a Klan official who was also my scoutmaster. I was the senior patrol leader of the troop. He was a good neighbor, a lovely man, really, except for his [ ? ? ]. His wife’s brother was [ ? ? ] for a time the Governor of South Carolina. Their son – one of their sons, Robert B. McNeill, became quite a [?] celebrity in the South. He was minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Columbus, Georgia, when he was driven out for arguing for fairness to blacks in a Look magazine article. He wrote a very interesting book called – autobiography – called God Wills Us Free that Hill and Wang published about 1968 or maybe it was ’67. I don’t know. He was one of the – I know him quite well today. He’s – he finally left the ministry and is a professor at Wilkes Community College in the mountains of North Carolina today. But he started off with all these prejudices and then became the very reverse of the thing that [ ? ? ].

Rabin: [ ? ? ].

Beecher: Birmingham is omni – politically omnipotent for years.

Rabin: Do you think that there’s a relationship between that and the fact that Birmingham – Birmingham seems to have registered a great deal of violence in civil rights, worse than Montgomery.

Beecher: It was – they used to call it “bad Birmingham,” and it was the murder capitol of the known world when I was a kid. It was violent. I did a tape with Studs Terkel at the time of the Selma March about violence in the South, based on my own [?]. And a lot of my poems deal with it, deal with the violence of my childhood [ ? ? ].

Yeah, but the Klan was – I have a poem in there. It’s called Alter Christus, which is Latin for “another Christ,” which is about this priest who was our pastor, Father James E. Coyle, who was a very [?] and beautiful man. He had been the head of Catholic education in the state before he became a pastor in Birmingham. If ever there was a saint, it was that man, who was slaughtered.

Rabin: Is it a very long poem? I was going to ask you to read it.

Beecher: Alter Christus? I don’t put Hugo in there. [ ? ? ]. No, I wrote – that particular poem, Alter Christus, is . . .

Rabin: I like, by the way, that thing In Egyptland.

Beecher: Oh yes.

Rabin: That’s, I think, quite analogous . . .

[End of side 4. Side 5 commences in mid-sentence:]

Beecher: . . . a seminar in the negro at Chapel Hill. I had read in the left press about these events the year before, in ’32, while I was teaching at Wisconsin. I resigned Wisconsin and went to Chapel Hill because I wanted to come back South. This was in ’33. I think that Guy Johnson’s seminar on the negro was the first thing of its kind, certainly in the South and perhaps in the country.

I told him about this thing, and he didn’t – an article, and he didn’t know about it. I said I’m going to write my seminar paper on this. So I spent my Christmas vacation getting such information, and I wrote an article which – for the seminar which he then recommended to [Howard] Odum to publish in [the journal of] Social Forces. Odum was very dubious about it. I remember him saying, “You mean to tell me that Joe Stein is working amongst the negroes down in Alabama,” and all this kind of stuff. Odum was really – he was really a conservative guy in many ways. His close friendship with [H. L.] Mencken – you know Mencken could be an awful reactionary. Odum is now kind of a patron saint of the region who is looked upon as the shining – the knight in shining armor and a great liberal, but he wasn’t the liberal that Frank Porter Graham was.

When I came down here to represent the FEPC in – I guess it was December ’41 or early ’42, I stopped off in Chapel Hill to see him. I’d always been on excellent terms. I was one of his favorite students. And he was very upset about the FEPC. “You’re going to stir up Gene Talmadge and people like that.” He was worried over the reaction, not that he objected to an agency to get justice for blacks. He wanted it, but not quite that soon. [?Guy] was telling me the other day about how he used to argue with Odum that the Supreme Court was going to come out for integration, and Odum didn’t believe it. Odum wanted it, but he didn’t think there was any possibility that the Supreme Court would ever reverse itself as it did in Brown vs. the Board of Education [ ? ? ] and how surprised he was.

Rabin: What was the origin of In Egyptland?

Beecher: The origin of it was this paper, which was published in Social Forces, on the sharecroppers’ union of Alabama, volume 13, number 1, pages, I think, 129 and following, which was a sociological account of this thing. Then at – in the latter part of my New Deal era, I got back to writing poetry. I had been a poet off and on. I’d done my first poem about the steel mills and so on. Every so often I’d get back into it. When I was in the government, I was writing some long poems. [ ? ? ] were coming out. And an editor in New York who shall be nameless, but he was the editor of [ ? ? ] asked me – he had been reading some of these poems and asked me for one, and I said, I’ll see what I can do.

So I took the material of the article and turned it into a narrative poem, with changes, of course, where I simplified it, to make it dramatic. I had to imagine personalities, thoughts, desires, and all that. And I had in mind that I was writing a kind of folk epic, almost in a language [ ? ? ]. I sent this man the poem, this editor, and it came back in the next mail. He wrote me, and he said, John – or words to this effect – if I should print this poem, you and I both would be indicted and thrown in jail for attempting to overthrow the government.

All right. So I put it away in the drawer, and it was almost a generation before that poem ever came out at all. When it came out – of course by that time, people could understand it. I used to use it – I would read it in the colleges, and oftentimes I’d use it in a Sunday morning sermon in Unitarian churches where I am a kind of [?] preacher on occasions.

I read it at a black college in Alabama. A student came up afterwards and said, “That Ned Cobb in that poem. That’s my uncle.” [ ? ? ]. He said, “Yes. And when you started reading it, I knew exactly what was going to happen, because you tell it the way my uncle does.” I said, “You mean he’s still around?” “Yes, he’s in farming. After he got out of prison, he’s down in Tallapoosa County. Would you like to meet him?” I said, “You better believe I’d like to meet him.” [ ? ? ] next Sunday, came down. I met this old man, ha d a marvelous encounter with him.

A couple of years – a year or two later, I had moved back North. I was living in Massachusetts. This Radcliffe student and her Harvard boyfriend, who was teaching [?] English and a doctoral candidate under Frank [?] at Harvard, came to me to get some leads into Alabama. They were – she was doing her honor’s thesis on the sharecroppers’ union. So I gave them the Durrs and [ ? ? ]. I gave them the address of this old man, Ned Cobb.

When they came back, they were very enthusiastic. This chap, incidentally, used the book in which the poem appeared as a required text in his English sections at Harvard. I came, and I read to his sections at the end of the semester. He told me it was the only time he’s had 100% attendance all year. He put them together in an off hour, and they were so much interested in the poem.

Then he went back. He spent a year, taping this old man and his family, and this is Nate Shaw.

Rabin: [ ? ? ].

Beecher: This is where Nate Shaw came from.

Rabin: I was going to ask you to read In Egyptland.

Beecher: What?

It was a link in a chain. It’s like – to me, Cliff James and Ned Cobb and those people were like the embattled farmers at Lexington and Concord. That’s the way I saw him. Nobody – and it’s his story.

The story of my discovery of it, through this student, is in the Courier Journal review that I gave you a copy of – if I didn’t, I will – which came out before this book. I knew the book was coming out, because Ted Rosengarten had been writing me over the years. We’ve kept in touch, and [?] came to see me over the years a couple of times. All that. So it was no surprise to me. It was a surprise to me, though, when he decided to change the name, but he says the family insisted on it. But it is Ned Cobb. Ned died right after Ted finished all his taping. He told me he did a hundred hours of tape with Ned. But the family are so concerned.

Actually, even the day that I went down there with Lester, his nephew, the sheriff came to his door. The Uncle Tom spread the word to the sheriff that these white folks and people were down there talking to Ned Cobb and they came around. That’s the [?]. That’s the little chain of circumstance that led to the discovery and finally the recording in detail, in inimitable detail, of this old man’s story.

Rabin: That’s fantastic.

Beecher: It’s crazy.

Rabin: No, it’s fantastic.

Beecher: Yeah, really crazy, really. I’m so happy, though, to have been a part of this thing that – and I understand – I haven’t seen the book. I’ve been trying to get it in Durham without success. But Ted has got some very warm and appreciative remarks in the front of his introduction to his book, about my help [ ? ? ] how I did know there was such a man and where he could be found, the name and his address, you know, and so forth and so forth. And then Ted took on – took off from there. I’m happy that this turned out this way. It is a story which I thought was a classic, has become one. My poem is one version, which is an imaginative version, and Ned Cobb – Nate Shaw is another that probably has also elements of imagination in it, because I think that over the years it kind of took on some of the characteristics of the leader of the union, who actually was not Nate Shaw or Ned Cobb, but Cliff James.

But the scholars are going to have some fun and after time, I think, comparing my Social Forces article with my poem, in which I made some changes [ ? ? ], and with Dale Rosen’s Radcliffe thesis, in which – she sent me the bound copy, incidentally [ ? ? ] – and Ted Rosengarten’s editing on the tapes that he got from Ned Cobb. And it will become a kind of another, I suspect, Nat Turner.

Rabin: Yes.

Beecher: That’s what it is.

Rabin: Yeah.

Beecher: That’s what I thought at the time, when I first read about it, before I had even done any research or any reading or anything. And that’s why I chose it, in 1933, when I went to Chapel Hill. In fact it was one of the reasons I went to Chapel Hill, that I wanted to make a statement.

Rabin: Is In Egypt . . .

Beecher: It’s why I left Wisconsin.

Rabin: Is In Egyptland too long to read?

Beecher: It takes half an hour.

Rabin: Oh. What’s – what about the other one?

Beecher: I’ll tell you what I will give you.

Rabin: Actually, any of your [ ? ? ].

Beecher: What I can give you, if you want, is – I forgot I had [?]- is a record with it. It’s one side of the record.

Rabin: To Live and to Die in Dixie.

Beecher: That’s – that wasn’t even – they named – the title of the book in which it appeared.

Rabin: And the [?], too.

Beecher: Yeah, and one side of this of that – is a reading – my reading of that poem. And it – I usually allot half an hour to it, after the introductory remarks.

Rabin: May I – may I bust this cover open . . .

Beecher: Yeah.

Rabin: . . . and have you sign . . .

Beecher: Yeah.

Rabin: . . . because this . . .

Beecher: And I’ll change it too, because it’s a Folk – it’s now in the – it’s a Folkways record. When it came out, it was considered to be so – it belonged to a special category of Folkways Records that they called Broadsides, because these were the radical records.

Rabin: Quote, end quote.

Beecher: But now it’s Folkways number 790 – 9770.

[This long-playing record, signed by Beecher, is in the Jack Rabin Collection. 45 seconds of silence follow, presumably while Beecher is writing his dedication to Rabin.]

There.

Rabin: Thank you very much.

And then, while we’re signing . . .

Beecher: [ ? ? ].

Rabin: We have two forms, which all oral history projects use. One is an accessions form, and that per – we ask each person who is interviewed to initial, what classification they want their interview and slides – oh, by the way, the reason for a lot of these slides – I took so many – is because we have a sound on slides system. We have this – we have the slide you slip in this canister-type thing, and you can record three minutes around it, and then it’s in a carousel, and you go to the next one.

So, we have a classification system. Number one is any scholar with – has a purpose and whatever, can get access. We’re trying to transcribe. We have volunteers doing transcribing. We don’t have any money. The second one is with express permission orally. Third classification is written permission. And fourth is sealed until a specific date. No-one can just walk off the street. It’s not a library.

Then we ask each interviewee to sign it and determine just what classification. Columbia uses the same – in fact, I attended an oral history class at the Air Force, at Maxwell Field. They got this from Columbia. They use it and Columbia uses it too, as I’ve been told Columbia does. I think it’s . . .

Beecher: I imagine two or three would be adequate. I don’t want to seal it necessarily.

Rabin: And then this second form gives us permission in any published things that we might do, to use the tapes with – under the same classification, of course – with permission, and that’s where we have the [?] restrictions down at the bottom.

Beecher: I have to be a little careful, too, because some of this material will appear in my autobiography, and maybe not exactly in the same [ ? ? ], which Macmillan is – has a contract for. And in fact they were a little upset – maybe more than a little upset, because autobiographical material appeared in the New York Times microfilming corporation microfilms.

Rabin: Of course they have the copyright. As soon as your autobiography appears, they’ll have it copyrighted. So, we ain’t about – I’ve published with Prentice-Hall, and I’ve published with a few other presses, and I know. I’ve got copyrights on about 50 different things.

Beecher: Of course the poems and everything are all copyrighted, and there’s no problem about that. But my wife is quite tender about this too. She doesn’t want me to scoop myself by passing on things that are – and of course I could be in trouble with Macmillan if they say, “You violated your contract,” or something like that.

Rabin: I’ll tell you. You could go ahead and choose alternative four, and just say, none of this should be seen until after your autobiography appears, and then of course it’s subject to copyright.

Beecher: I think we can have “permission must be obtained in writing from the interviewee.”

Rabin: Okay. You need to initial – you need to initial the [?], and if you want your heirs to also continue, you need just to initial “permission from heirs.”

Beecher: If I were gone.

Rabin: Yes sir.

Beecher: Well, then, my heir is my wife.

Rabin: Then down at the bottom you just sign under interviewee’s signature.

Beecher: Um-hmm.

Rabin: Interviewee’s signature, and the date, which is the 16th of November.

Beecher: I’m not trying to tie you up on this . . .

Rabin: No.

Beecher: . . . but I think you understand [ ? ? ].

Rabin: Absolutely. Absolutely.

And then this, I would recommend on the second form to put a restriction down, “subject to any copyright held by others.”

Beecher: Um-hmm.

Rabin: Or we could go ahead and write “Macmillan” there, and also write you.

Beecher: Yeah.

Rabin: And say, we’re planning to use part of this in some study. Please give us permission. And then, that holds.

Beecher: Now this, I don’t know quite. This bothers me a bit, because . . .

Rabin: In essence, what that does . . .

Beecher: This kind of undoes what I did there.

Rabin: The idea of course is to put also, first of all, permission should be obtained from – in writing, as a restriction, from you, from yourself, and that it’s also subject to the copyright.

[end of recording]