Ballad of Birmingham (Themes)

Themes

Civil Rights

The scene Randall describes in “Ballad of Birmingham” provides the reader with a personalized view of the struggle against racism fought by the demonstrators and activists of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Relying on his readers’ awareness of the events in Birmingham, Randall dramatizes what happened there from a unique, intimate perspective in order to bring the situation into the sharpest possible focus for his reader. The mother and daughter who converse throughout the first four stanzas of the poem provide a very human, sympathetic portrait of how the struggle against racism affected real people. In fact, by downplaying the presence of race in this poem, Randall even more effectively battles against the consequence of thinking about the value of people as determined by the color of their skin. Randall never makes direct reference to the African-American identity of these speakers, and by not doing so, he highlights the unimportance of such a detail for any reader’s understanding of what this mother must have felt like when she realized her child had been killed by a bomb while at church.

The poem also illustrates the fact that it is racism — not the struggle against it — that threatens the safety of individuals in society. The mother in this poem makes an understandable mistake by judging Birmingham’s civil rights demonstrations as too dangerous for a child to participate in. Yet the central and poignant irony of Randall’s ballad is precisely this: that racism endangers the little girl’s life at least as powerfully, if not far more, than any action she may take against it. By arguing that others will be marching with her as she does in lines 9 and 10, the child expresses a central tenet of any struggle for social and political equality — namely, united we stand, but divided we fall. Randall’s ballad, then, effectively argues against passivity on the parts of those treated unjustly in our society, giving hard evidence of the danger implicit in such fear of action or in apathy. He also clarifies the way in which racism turns all of our realities inside out and upside down, so that a child could be more courageous than an adult in the struggle against this oppression, and a church could be more dangerous than a street filled with vicious dogs, violent policemen, and high-pressure fire hoses.

Victims and Victimization

Typical of the ballad form that leaves its audience to flesh out the details of its story given its heavy emphasis on character rather than development of plot, “Ballad of Birmingham” demands a reader’s knowledge of the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to fully appreciate the nuances of the story it tells. But without that knowledge, Randall’s poem tells a more simple story, if just as tragic. A woman tries to protect her daughter from a threatening world and learns that no place is necessarily safe from the violence occurring around her. At its most basic level, “Ballad of Birmingham” pulls us through the heartbreaking experience of a tragic loss and exposes us to the senselessness of such a victimization. Both the murdered child and the mother are victims, and no reader can miss the agony in the mother’s voice — in lines 31 and 32 — when she finds her

Topics for Further Study

• Write a ballad of your own about some contemporary event or story that your peers would recognize. Use the traditional ballad stanza form and make your own decorated, single sheet broadside of the piece.
• Find all of the words that are stressed in “Ballad of Birmingham” and make a list of them, keeping in mind the stress pattern of the traditional ballad stanza. Why do you think these words receive special emphasis in the poem? Are there others you were surprised to find were not accented? What part would you say meter plays in the meaning of “Ballad of Birmingham?”

daughter’s shoe and asks the most difficult question posed in the poem: “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, / but, baby, where are you?” Death has claimed her daughter and whatever myths we embrace regarding what that means, none of them, Randall seems to suggest, can finally provide real comfort in the shape of a clear meaning or significance for the brutally final form it takes here. By ending the poem in such an open fashion, though, Randall seems to present the question of how we deal with death when it comes in such a violent, raging form; how can victims like this mother respond in such a way as to give her child’s death appropriate significance? By making her child’s shoe the evidence the mother finds, Randall may be encouraging the reader to see this as an invitation for the mother to join the march her daughter now cannot and to move out of the space of passive victimization and into one of peaceful, but determined action.