Milwaukee Author-Athlete Jake Beason Brought Fame and Glory to Lincoln High

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Photo via Milwaukee Community Journal

Jake Patton Beason

Jake Patton Beason

When the late Jake Patton Beason was 18, he was an acclaimed winner. A high school athletic phenom, he was Wisconsin state shot-put champion and an all-city basketball and football player at Lincoln High, twice kicking mammoth 60-yard field goals.

When he passed away in 2001 at 72, after 24 years as a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, the racially polarized city where he gained his greatest glory lost one of its best, brightest and least appreciated. That’s because Beason was big and Black and pulled no punches.

Despite a master’s degree in Black Studies, in the 1980s Beason was forced to end his career as a substitute teacher in the Milwaukee public school system. This means he was on day-to-day call to fill-in for regular teachers who were ill. A tall order, indeed, for a man with such a dramatic physical handicap. He was a paraplegic.

In 1989, Beason, who considered himself an unaffiliated Black nationalist, chronicled his thoughts on American life from his unabashedly Afrocentric point of view in a remarkable book of essays called Why We Lose. It was illustrated by graphic artist and local activist George F. Sanders, who also wrote an introduction of the author.

Sharp, Startling

“Why We Lose” contains a number of sharp, even startling observations about the Black experience. But they were in character for Beason, who always gloried in taking no prisoners.

Of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Beason wrote: “There is no question of Dr. King’s love and commitment to Black people, but I feel we must have courage to say his philosophy of nonviolence and integration was in error ... It is suicidal to be nonviolent with a people who are violent. Morality cannot be used on a people who lack morals.

“The movement King led succeeded in breaking down many of the segregated barriers. We can now eat, sleep and vote where we previously could not. But what good is it to go to the Hyatt Regency if you are poor and unemployed ...”

In addition to Dr. King, Beason commented on well-known Black names such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and relative unknowns such as T. Albert Marryshow, a West Indian journalist and legislator in Grenada, and Dr. Chancellor Williams, a historian-author, to whom the book is dedicated. 

Cultural Survival

Subtitled An Anthology for Black People’s Cultural Survival, its short, punchy essays are mostly Beason’s. But he includes several by the likes of W.E.B. DuBois’ “What Did it Mean to be a Slave” and a narrative on slavery by Frederick Douglass. 

There also is “Reflections on the Jonestown Massacre” by Kathryn Ogletree, of Miami, calling Jim Jones-Guyana tragedy mass murder and not suicide; “Racism and the Class Struggle” by James Boggs, of Detroit, examines the “Black revolt in the U.S.A” and “Throw Down Time” by Larry D. Coleman, of Kansas City calls upon Black people to harness their resources and move from consumer to producer.

Beason, a native of Arkansas, told me his views on race were nurtured in long talks with Dr. Williams. He said he wrote Why We Lose out of commitment to African people to help “to understand what happened to us so we can begin to win.”

Beason’s racial rationale was shaped by his experiences: Ignored for an athletic scholarship by the University of Wisconsin despite a brilliant high school career and B average; playing one season with the famed Harlem Globetrotters; becoming a paraplegic after being shot in the spine during the Korean War; forced into self-employment despite two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s; hired as a Milwaukee school teacher in 1967 but fired for teaching Black unity, which wasn’t part of the curriculum. 

Make it Relevant

Sanders said Beason was merely trying to make education relevant for Black children in a predominantly Black school system. Beason later was reinstated and then “excessed” into roving substitute status, his handicap notwithstanding.

Beason’s special view of America shines through in his essays. For example: “It is one of the tragedies of our time that men like my father, who could be found in communities throughout this country, never reached their full potential because of racial discrimination. This has been a crime against our race that has yet to be paid for.

“I propose field trips to the rural South. Let our children pick or chop cotton, sleep in slave cabins still there, get close to old people and hear how it really was. They will be less violent and anti-social if we return elders to their homes instead of nursing homes.”

In 1994-95, when I co-hosted “The Carter-McGee Report” on Milwaukee’s WNOV-AM, Beason was a daily caller and his comments always elevated and illuminated any discussion. Irascible and acerbic, he made sure we stayed on point and fully documented his views. Milwaukee could ill afford to lose a Black man of Beason’s stature, but few realized this. He did it his way and I still miss him—even from New York, 875 miles away.