Gould Beech, one of the last of America's Populists, died Sunday, Nov. 5 in a Daphne, Ala. hospital of complications from Parkinson's disease. Beech and his wife Mary Foster Beech, who also died this year on July 10, were among a small group of liberal whites who fought against racial discrimination in the South in the 1930s and '40s. In 1986, the Alabama Senate passed a resolution honoring Beech. In those days, race was the end all be all. You couldn't talk about the real issues of poverty and disease and what to do about education.
People can talk about something else other than stirring up racial antagonism.
That was not the case in 1947, when Gov. Folsom appointed Beech to the Auburn University board of trustees. Protests against his appointment from the old Farm Bureau were so vehement that the state Legislature refused to confirm him. Beech was born in Graceville, Fla., but grew up mostly in Foley and Montgomery. His mother died when he was five, so he was raised by female relatives and his father, a conductor for the railroad who was an outspoken critic of the Ku Klux Klan. Beech graduated from Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery in 1930, then enrolled at the University of Alabama, where he met Mary Foster in a chemistry class and got into journalism.