Ballad of Birmingham

Dudley Randall 1965

Published in 1965, “Ballad of Birmingham” is significant both as an example of Dudley Randall’s use of traditional poetic form to talk about political events and as the first broadside — a large, single-sheet publication — to appear in the Broadside Series from his extremely influential Broadside Press. Randall holds an important place in America’s literary history, not only as an accomplished poet, but also as an editor and promoter of African-American poetry, publishing African-American writers at a time — the early and mid-1960s — when the civil rights movement had just begun to galvanize and unite previously unrecognized artists of color.

Throughout 1963, Americans had watched as civil rights demonstrators and racist city and government officials clashed in Birmingham, Alabama. On September 15, 1963, the tragic culmination of those events occurred when a bomb ripped through the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four girls as they prepared for church. Randall personalizes this event in “Ballad of Birmingham” by recounting an imagined conversation between one of those girls and her mother. The child wants to participate in the children’s freedom marches led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., but the mother is afraid to let her daughter be part of something she views as dangerous. But, as the poem points out, in a racist society, no place — no matter how sacred — can possibly be safe; the mother tells her daughter to go to church rather than march, but in the poem, it is, ironically, the church that is the site of greatest danger for the child. The ballad form of the poem and the conversational quality of its language all make it very accessible to a range of readers — a quality Randall prizes in poetry. “Ballad of Birmingham” shows the potent voice poetry can have in the struggle for social justice and political change.