Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources For Further Study |
Criticism
Jhan Hochman
Jhan Hochman’s articles appear in Democracy and Nature, Genre, ISLE, and Mosaic. He is the author of Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (1998), and he holds a Ph.D in English and an M.A. in Cinema Studies. In the following essay, Hochman provides the background concerning the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
On September 15, 1963, at 10:25 a.m. on a Sunday morning, an African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, blew apart. When the rubble settled, fourteen people were injured, and four girls were found dead — buried under pieces of the building. They were Denise McNair, age 11; Cynthia Wesley, 14; Carol Robertson, 14; and Addie Mae Collins, 14. The four girls killed in the blast had just, moments before, heard their teacher, Mrs. Ella C. Demand complete the Sunday-school lesson for the day, “The Love That Forgives.”
While African-American leaders in the city did not counsel forgiveness, they did plead with the black community to contain their anger. This, understandably, was only partially successful. According to a New York Times article on September 16, 1963, “hundreds” of blacks took to the streets. While the report of the aftermath is, at best, sketchy, five whites were reported injured and two black youths were dead. One of these youths, Johnny (or James) Robinson, age 16, was shot in the back by police as he ran from them. A second, Virgil Wade, age 13, was attacked and killed by a group whites while riding his bike. As three buildings burned and people fought in the streets, the police poured into the streets to contain the explosion of black rage and white hate.
The church had blown apart as a result of at least fifteen sticks of dynamite, probably lobbed into a window by a passing car. Just five days after three, all-white schools were forcibly desegregated, the church, which had been used for civil rights organizing as well as religious activities, became the site of the fourth bombing incident in less than a month, the twenty-first in eight years, and the forty-first in sixteen years. Birmingham came to be known as “Bombingham,” and a black section of the city, “Dynamite Hill.” The targets of all of the bombings were either the homes of African Americans moving into previously white neighborhoods, the homes of civil rights leaders, or African-American churches. Though white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) openly preached hate and local white officials publicly supported segregation, not one of these bombings was ever solved. Perhaps it was incredible that the explosion of September 15, 1963, marked the first time anyone had been killed in these racist bombings.
The subtitle of “Ballad of Birmingham” reads “(On the Bombing of a Church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963).” But in Dudley Randall’s anthology The Black Poets (1988), in which “Ballad of Birmingham” is included, Randall’s subtitle has been left out. Why? My hypothesis is that this poem is not simply about the bombing of September 15, 1963, but is more generally about Birmingham during the civil rights years and, specifically, about a strategy used by civil rights leaders several months prior to September 15, 1963. It is Randall’s juxtaposition of these two historically separated events — the incidents of several months prior and the September 15 bombing — that is the real creative genius of this poem.
Let us back up about five months from September 15, 1963, to April 20. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy accepted release on bail from the jail cell where King had been held after being arrested during a demonstration and where he wrote his 6,500-word “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Immediately after leaving jail, both King and Abernathy went to the nearby Gaston Motel to plan the next phase of “Project C” — their plan for desegregating Birmingham. There they met James Bevel, a veteran of the student sit-ins in Nashville. Bevel had a provocative plan: to use children in protests and demonstrations. Bevel’s argument was that while many African-American adults were reluctant to march for the very real fear of losing their jobs, children had no such fear. Furthermore, the spectacle of children being hauled off to jail would hopefully unsettle the white public. As Bevel said, “Most adults have bills to pay — house notes, rents, car notes, utility bills, but the young people ... are not hooked with all those responsibilities. A boy from high school has the same effect in terms of being in jail, in terms of putting pressure on the city, as his father, and yet there’s no economic threat to the family, because the father is still on the job.” While King was back in the clutches of the law to stand trial, civil rights leaders recruited
“Birmingham came to be known as ‘Bombingham,’ and a black section of the city, ‘Dynamite Hill.’”
black schoolchildren from all over the city. Before any demonstrations, the children were instructed to first see a film, The Nashville Story, about a student sit-in. On Thursday, May 2, Martin Luther King, free from jail pending appeal, addressed a gathering of the children — ranging in age from six to eighteen — at the site of the future bombing, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Then the children marched downtown in a demonstration where they sang freedom songs. By the end of the day, the police jailed more than 959 children. Despite a request to King from President Kennedy to stop using children, more than 1,000 African-American children stayed away from school the next day and gathered at the Sixteenth Street Church to march. This time, the police moved in with attack dogs, and firemen marshalled high-pressure water hoses. With German shepherds attacking and 100 pounds of water pressure per square inch being sprayed at them, children were sent running and rolling through the streets. Angered, blacks now consolidated behind King, but the next day, as James Bevel attempted to calm them, African Americans brandished guns and knives. The marches grew, and by Monday, May 6, more than 2,000 demonstrators had been jailed, either in Birmingham or at the temporary site at the Alabama state fairgrounds. On Tuesday, police again met protesters with hoses and dogs, while journalists shot it all for newspapers and television. Governor George Wallace, an ardent segregationist, called out 500 state troopers. Angry at the whole affair, Kennedy sent in Burke Marshall to try and settle the conflict. After a KKK rally denouncing the agreement between business and civil rights leaders, two bombs went off at Martin Luther King’s brother’s home and at the Gaston Motel where King was staying. Violence erupted again and thirty-five blacks and five whites were injured as police pummeled blacks with clubs and rifles. President Kennedy, on the urging of his brother Robert, readied the National Guard just outside of Birmingham and threatened to send them into the city. This and other tactics finally ended the immediate violence in the streets. But on June 11, Governor Wallace would stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama, blocking entrance to two black students who had been admitted. Stepping aside because of threats from the federalized National Guard, the university became integrated for the first time in its history. Kennedy was so angered by events in Birmingham that he sent a new Civil Rights Bill to Congress on June 19, calling for the outlawing of all public segregation, allowing the attorney general to initiate suits for school integration, and granting the right to cut off funds to any federal program violating the new laws against segregation. To urge the passing of the bill, civil rights leaders marched on Washington on August 28, 1963, a march in which more than 250,000 people heard Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The Civil Rights Bill was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964. And so the story that began with marching school children in Birmingham ended by having a major impact on the nation.
In “Ballad of Birmingham,” the little girl has a choice of either going to out to play, to a protest march, or to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for Sunday services. But unlike the little girl in the poem, none of the four girls killed in the church blast on September 15 had such a choice. No freedom march was planned for that Sunday, a day of the week more often than not reserved for recuperation and religious worship. Randall brought into proximity two sets of events separated by a space of six months into one Sunday morning to make a key point: that though the church is usually the place of community, safety, salvation, and God — and the civil rights march often a locale of danger, death, and white attackers — the African-American church had become an even more dangerous place than the freedom march. Attacked in their homes and churches, with even their children being murdered, African Americans had no place of security — nowhere they could escape the ugliness of white America. With no acceptable place to turn, it became clearer and clearer that renewed and united confrontation with whites was black America’s only hope for deliverance. To gain any salvation in the world of the living, African Americans would have to keep up the pressure on whites by letting freedom sing — not just from choirs in the church, but from congregations in the streets.
Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.
Chris Semansky
A widely published poet and fiction writer, Chris Semansky teaches literature at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. In the following essay, Semansky discusses the significance of Randall’s use of the ballad form in “Ballad of Birmingham.”
In the twentieth century, poetry has had the reputation of being difficult to read. This holds true even for those who read often and widely. Poetry has “won” this reputation because of its frequent use of obscure allusions (think of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot), its often difficult metaphors (think of Wallace Stevens), and its heightened self-reflexivity. It has not won a large audience outside of academia because readers do not see how it relates to their own lives. This has not been the case with Dudley Randall’s poetry, much of which was written in a direct, accessible style with clear references to the world outside of the poem. His “Ballad of Birmingham” is one such poem. Written to memorialize the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church that killed four young girls, Randall’s poem uses a conventional poetic form (the ballad) that incorporates dialogue, understandable historical allusions, and — though the poem tells the story of a historical event with real people — stock characters to evoke sympathy, shock, and outrage from the reader.
Because many later twentieth-century poets were interested in probing the limits of language and stretching the “readability” of their poems, the ballad — one of the most traditional and highly readable verse forms — has not been used much. Instead, poets with widely diverse styles — such as Elizabeth Bishop, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery — probed organic forms, which arose from the subject matter itself, rather than fitting their words into a prescribed format. By using the ballad form, Randall signals that he wants to reach as wide an audience as possible. Historically defined, ballads were songs passed on orally that told a story with action and dialogue, most often without reference to the narrator’s personal feelings or attitudes toward the subject matter. Using the third-person point of view is effective, because the audience is free to focus on the story itself, rather than having to think about the relationship between the speaker and the story or emotion expressed. In using the ballad to commemorate a tragic incident in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, Randall helped the story of the Birmingham bombing reach almost mythic proportions.
“This identification on the part of the reader with the characters gives the poem the kind of emotional punch Randall intended ....”
Focusing on the relationship between a mother and her child allows Randall to evoke as much horror and pathos as possible from the story. Represented as an obedient, dutiful child who not only does what her mother tells her but who also does what is morally right (desiring to take part in a freedom march), the little girl embodies the virtues and ideals of the civil rights movement. Randall’s description of her preparation for church emphasizes her innocence and vulnerability:
She has combed and brushed her night dark hair,And bathed rose petal sweet,
And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
And white shoes on her feet.
Although these lines help us visualize the girl’s appearance, we are unsure of whether the girl is dressing herself or if the mother is dressing her. If she is dressing herself, we see the image of a young child dutifully doing what she has no doubt done many times before: preparing for participation (singing in the children’s choir) in a ritual supposedly far from the ongoing demonstrations in the streets. If the mother is dressing her, we see the image of a possibly recalcitrant child being put in her place by her mother. The distinction is important, because reading it the latter way highlights the very real generational tensions inherent in the civil rights movement. Younger African Americans (and many whites) were more likely to publicly demonstrate for equal rights, while many older African Americans often chose the relative safety of social institutions such as the church to voice their grievances and pray for better days. Juxtaposing the girl’s “night dark hair” and “small brown hands” with her white gloves and shoes echoes the “black and white” issues of the civil rights movement itself.
The mother in Randall’s poem is both the mother of one of the four girls killed in the bombing and a universal mother figure who desires to shield her child from potential danger. Using these characters — who were directly involved in the bombing — rather than, say, an eyewitness to the carnage, allows Randall to extract as much emotional capital as possible from his readers. Because we can visualize what the little girl looked like, we are all the more shocked in the final stanza, when we discover the daughter has been buried in the rubble of the bomb. We can see the mother holding up her daughter’s little white shoe and crying out for her, just as we’ve seen mothers and fathers and children digging in the rubble of an explosion or natural catastrophe crying out for their loved ones in numerous television news reports. This familiar, late-twentieth-century image doesn’t diminish the impact of the tragedy; it heightens it, as it personalizes what has become a more-or-less generic image of horror and loss in our time. Such stock personalization also functions to sentimentalize the image. Sentimentalism isn’t necessarily a pejorative term, but one defined by history. Eighteenth-century novels of sensibility, for example, relied on sentimental plots and descriptions to elicit strong emotional responses from their readers. What were considered humane and original representations two hundred years ago, however, are now often laughed at by experienced readers. But Randall’s use of sentimentalism and his poem aren’t aimed at an elite readership of literature but, instead, are geared to the general public — many of whom don’t read poetry or fiction regularly, so they wouldn’t see the poem as using overtly manipulative rhetorical devices.
The imagined dialogue between the mother and the daughter also serves to sentimentalize the story and to underscore the ironically tragic fate of the daughter. The daughter asks her mother if she can take part in a freedom march instead of going out to play. Freedom marches, though intended to be peaceful protests for African Americans in the 1960s, often turned violent, as local police — ignoring the very civil rights the marchers were fighting for — used force to break up the demonstrations. By voicing her desire to march instead of play, the daughter appears as a martyr figure in the very first stanza of the poem. Randall emphasizes the irony of the mother’s refusal to allow her daughter to march by having the mother spell out her reasons:
“No, baby, you may not go,For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jail
Aren’t good for a little child.”
Attack dogs, truncheons, and rubber hoses were tools police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor’s men routinely employed to disperse demonstrators and break the will of the marchers. The mother, by understating (vastly, almost comically) the obvious in saying that these things aren’t “good for a little child,” foreshadows the irony of what will later befall her child in the assumed safety of the church (the “sacred place”). This imagined conversation captures the precise tone a mother would use in explaining a complicated subject to her child and, hence, allows us, as readers, to identify both with the mother’s concern and the daughter’s desire. This identification on the part of the reader with the characters gives the poem the kind of emotional punch Randall intended, as we are all the more shocked when we discover the little girl has been killed in a bomb blast at her church. Rather than telling us directly that the girl has been killed, Randall lets us infer from the final image what occurred.
Randall initially published “Ballad of Birmingham” a few years after the bombing as a broadside ballad. Broadside ballads deal with current events and tell stories that are often polemical or didactic in nature; they take a position and have an explicit point to make. “Ballad of Birmingham” remains a successful example of such a ballad, because it fuses the universal and the particular, and it takes a stand against racial injustice — a stand as valid today as it was more than thirty years ago when it was written.
Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.
What Do I Read Next?
- Randall’s first book publication from Broadside Press was the collection of poems he coedited with Margaret G. Burroughs commemorating the life and work of assassinated African-American activist Malcolm X called For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (1969). Learn more about Malcolm X from Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).
- Other poets have also written poems about the Birmingham church bombing. Raymond Patterson’s “Birmingham nineteen sixty three” appears in Celebrations: A New Anthology of Black American Poetry (1977) and Langston Hughes’s “Four Little Girls” can be found in the collection he edited with Arna Bontemps, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970 (revised edition, 1970).
- Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks was one of Randall’s Broadside poets and someone he esteemed highly for her ability to deeply connect and communicate with others. She published her autobiography, Report from Part One (1972), with Broadside, and her Selected Poems (1982) provides a good overview of the progression of her writing over several decades.
- Randall wrote a dialogue in poetic form in which African-American leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois express their views on racial development and progress in America; you can find it reprinted in Richard Barksdale and Kenneth Kinnamon’s Black Writers of America (1972). Find out more about Washington’s ideas in his autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901) and more about Du Bois’s ideas in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
- The civil rights movement has been the topic of numerous novels as well as poems. Alabama writer Vicki Covington’s The Last Hotel for Women (1996) tells the story of Dinah Fraley and the struggles that occur in her household when she takes an injured freedom rider into her care, against the wishes of the belligerent “Bull” Connor who was once in love with Dinah’s mother.
