Ballad of Birmingham

Dudley Randall’s poem “Ballad of Birmingham” refers to the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama in nineteen sixty-three. His poem illustrates what it was like during the sixties; all the turmoil and destruction there was. Randall takes a real life, devastating situation that occurred on the day of this terrible explosion, and turns it into a beautifully written poem that expresses just how awful it was during the Civil Rights Movement. He describes a circumstance in which a little girl asks her mother to participate in a freedom march going on in town. Her mother tells her she is not permitted to go because it is too dangerous. After much nagging, the mother gives her permission to go to the church, thinking it would be the safest place in town for her daughter. Shortly after the little girl leaves, she hears the bomb, immediately she panics because she knows her daughter must have been killed in the explosion. Upon her arrival to the church, she is left to find only one shoe of her daughter. This poem has eight, four line stanzas. Its meter is iambic pentameter. Randall’s rhyme scheme in this poem consists of the last word in the second and fourth line, in each stanza, rhyming with each other. For example, “…Instead of out to play… In a Freedom March today?” or “…For the dogs and fierce and wild… Aren’t good for a little child” Randall’s use of imagery allows the reader to truly understand some of the pain that colored people were put through during the civil rights movement. For example, he writes “No, baby, no you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren’t good for a little child” In this stanza he mentions briefly the dangers of marching. And although it isn’t much, it still creates and image of officers setting dogs loose to tear apart colored marchers, officers beating and or shooting them, as well as spraying them with high power water hoses. Another prime example of imagery in this poem is “For