18 pages • 36 minutes read
Ballad of Birmingham
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Background
Historical Context: “Bombingham” and the Civil Rights Movement
Birmingham of the 1950s and 1960s was at the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Minister Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) came to Birmingham in early 1963 to organize mass protests against segregated transportation and public facilities. As King explained in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote after being arrested for protesting, he was in Birmingham to lead a nonviolent direct action that would “create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue” of segregation (King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 1963).
King proved prescient—the national coverage of local law enforcement blasting peaceful protestors with skin-lacerating fire hoses and loosing dogs on them made national and international headlines. The images on the front pages of newspapers were particularly impactful because children—some whose ages were in the single digits—were among those brutalized protestors. The Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963 saw children mobilize to become participants in their own liberation, sometimes in defiance of fearful parents like the mother in Dudley Randall’s poem. However, youth and nonviolent protest were no protection against the violence of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The city of Birmingham was known as “Bombingham” because of the frequent fire bombings of homes of Black activists and establishments that supported the movement for civil rights.
On September 15, 1963, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church while several children, including Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, were inside. The deaths of these four little girls left a community and nation stricken with grief and anger. The deaths marked a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, making it impossible to ignore the deeply unjust, segregationist policies at work in the South and other parts of the United States. A year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed the discrimination that King and the children of Birmingham had protested.
Literary Context: Black Arts
As writer and founder of the Broadside Press, Dudley Randall was a key figure of the Black Arts Movement, the literary and artistic arm of the Black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Proponents of Black Arts held that Black art should be created for and by Black people: Rather than embrace white, Western ideas about beauty and art and the judgment of white critics, Black artists and audiences should embrace a Black aesthetic in which art was valuable inasmuch as it prepared the ground for Black self-consciousness and Black liberation. “Ballad of Birmingham” shows the influence of Black Arts on Randall’s work.
The influence of the Black Arts Movement on Randall’s work is apparent in his subject matter—the violent death of a Black child and the grief of that child’s mother—which gains power from its historical allusion to the death of the four little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. That event was a key one in Black history, and Randall’s choice of the ballad—a popular, songlike form that is accessible to everyone—shows that he wanted as broad an audience as possible to remember what they felt and thought in response to the bombing.
According to proponents of the Black Arts, the world is a depraved one in which racists will stop at nothing to ensure the oppression of Black people. “Ballad of Birmingham” shows the result of that depravity. While the primary mood in the poem is one of sadness, the underside of the poem is one that would certainly move readers, and Black readers in particular, to righteous anger, a key driver of Black militance, whose proponents believed that self-sufficiency and liberation could only come from arming oneself and fighting back.
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