John Seamon Cotter, Jr. (1895-1919), a talented playwright, journalist, and poet, was born and ‎reared in Louisville, Kentucky. The son of journalist, playwright, poet, teacher and community ‎developer Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr. ‎the younger Cotter’s education began with his sister Florence Olivia teaching him to read. Cotter ‎graduated from Louisville’s Central High School in 1911, where his father was the school principal ‎and his teacher. His mother, Maria F. Cox, was also a teacher at the school. Cotter attended Fisk ‎University in Nashville, Tennessee for two years before being stricken with tuberculosis, a disease ‎that earlier claimed the life of his sister Florence in 1914. ‎
Joseph Cotter, Jr., completed a collection of one-act plays and poetry during the last seven years of ‎his life. He also wrote one play, “On the Fields of France”, a protest play in one act which was ‎published in 1920 after his death. It followed the last hours of two American army officers, one ‎black, one white, both mortally wounded, who ultimately died hand in hand on a battlefield in ‎northern France wondering why they could not have lived in peace and friendship in the United ‎States. Cotter wrote two other plays, “The White Folks’ Nigger” and “Caroling Dusk” which were ‎never published. Cotter died of tuberculosis in Louisville in 1919 at the age of 24. ‎

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