The Ballad Of Birmingham, By Dudley Randall

"The Ballad of Birmingham", written by Dudley Randall, is a poem that commemorates the bombing of a black church in Alabama in 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement. The poem is written in a traditional narrative style form of a ballad, though the subject matter is far from traditional. The poem tells the story of a woman who doesn't let her daughter go to play in town because she feels that it is too dangerous, but instead sends her to church where she feels that her daughter will be safe. The tragic irony of the story is that while the little girl is at church singing in the choir, the church is bombed and she is killed. The author of the poem uses different literary techniques to accentuate the ironies of the story told.