In an interview with Y.T. Wong in the August 2002 issue of Jacket magazine, Steven Ford Brown, editor of One More River To Cross: The Selected Poems of John Beecher, said, “John Beecher is an American hero. He challenged the system. He said, ‘Listen here America, live up to the promises you made to your people.’” John Beecher “challenged the system” indeed. After building a characterization of Beecher’s desire to get to the “damn truth” of who killed Viola Liuzzo, a woman murdered in …

“Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead.”

Langston Hughes was one of the major voices of the Harlem Renaissance. He blended the literary freedom of American writers such as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg with the rhythms of blues and jazz, and spoke honestly and profoundly about an unfamiliar America: an America of oppression, of poverty, of struggles, of racial hatred. But his writings did not only depict the hardships of African-American life, they also painted pictures of a group …