Explication of "Ballad of Birmingham"

The speaker of this poem is an African American mother living in Birmingham Alabama during the 1960s. The occasion of this poem is a traumatic event: the bombing of a church on the day of the Freedom March. This poem is set during the Civil Rights movement, when blacks were protesting for equality and an end to segregation. The poem opens with the daughter of the speaker asks her mother if she may "march the streets of Birmingham / In a Freedom March today" (Randall 4-5). The young girl wishes to protest racial segregation of schools and other public facilities with fellow African Americans, however, her mother denies her wish saying it is too dangerous. Instead the speaker tells her daughter to attend church, because it will be safer: "The mother smiled to know her child / Was in the sacred place" (21-22). The mother does not want her daughter's life to be in danger and therefore sends her to the safest, holiest place she can think of, church. Randall foreshadows the last lines of the poem when he explains the young girl's appearance for church head to toe: "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" (17-20). Soon in the poem tragedy strikes the protective mother. When she learns of the bombing at the church: "She raced through the streets of Birmingham / Calling for her child" (27-28). The diction in the poem shows how devastated the mother is and sickened that such an awful thing could have occurred in such a holy place. She must wonder, if church is not even safe anymore where is? The ending lines of the poem are saddening and the sadness of the speaker is evident, she has now lost the one thing that she had been trying with all of her being to protect. The mother is shocked and refuses to believe that her daughter could really be gone: "'O, here's the shoe my baby wore, / But, baby, where are you?"' This si a strong line for the author to end on that sticks out in the reader's mind and shows the intense emotions of the heartbroken mother.

The poem follows a pattern of four line stanzas. Within each of the stanzas, two of the four lines rhyme. In my opinion the rhyming makes the poem seem to flow better. It seems as though the speakers intended audience are other African Americans who have also experienced tragedy during the Civil Rights movement. Another possible audience that the speaker and writer could be addressing is to those who are carrying out these horrific acts of violence towards African Americans, attempting to make them understand the loss and pain they are causing.