Ballad of Birmingham Essay Example

on in society, even though some might see them as merely ‘children’ who don’t understand how their actions could impact the future.

In another part of the poem, the author uses the word church to show the importance of unity and familiarity in what has been. The mother insists that the daughter not go to the freedom marches and says, “But you may go to church instead/ And sing in the children’s choir. ” During this time, it was very common for African-Americans to be involved in the Southern Baptist Church. As segregation was abundant in America in the sixties, there were few places that blacks were truly accepted (Sullivan).

The mother’s suggestion for her daughter is a way of keeping her daughter within the limits of African-Americans at the time and not going “out of character”. A church is a place of unity through faith, a surrounding of love and peace; while the freedom marches in Birmingham aimed for the same things, it was not always met with that same love. Sending her daughter to sing in the church’s choir is a sense of security to know she will be in a safe place. The church is symbolic because it represents morality and what is good.

The mother persuaded the child to attend church instead of the rally in order to stay out of harm’s way and to be contented with their segregated way of life. By the last stanza of the poem, we learn that despite her mother’s effort to keep her safe the daughter has been harmed even by attending church. When the mother sent her daughter off to

church she believed that she would safe from riots and harm, though when she heard a bomb go off she instantly ran to the church in search of her daughter. The author describes this discovery as the mother, “clawed through bits of glass and brick, /Then lifted out a shoe. “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,/ But, baby, where are you? ’” In this line of the poem the daughter’s white shoe that was recovered from the ruble is not only a sign of lost hope, but a resemblance of the efforts African-Americans made to gain their rights. At the time of the bombing, Martin Luther King had been protesting African-American rights in order to gain freedom. He noted in his famously known, Letter from Birmingham Jail, that acts of terror against the segregated were not at all uncommon in Birmingham, and that the efforts to make change would not stop until the terror ended (Andrews).

Many blacks lost their lives over the years and tried very hard to make an impact on the ways of society, though things did not take change until many years later. Just like the mother tried so very hard to keep her child out of harms way, she could not change the way society looked at African-Americans, and as a result all that was left was a little white shoe found among the rubble. The shoe in this poem symbolizes the hopelessness of the outcome of what was left from the African-American community after all their hard efforts towards freedom.

The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was a significant event in African-American history. The

event severed as a “martyr” for the civil rights movement and was widely publicized. One of these publications was Dudley Randall’s poem, “The Ballad of Birmingham”, which was heavily laden with symbolism to stress the importance of the event. Randall used symbols to represent youth, naivety, loss of hope, violence and morality. Through the poem, Randall captures the moment by emphasizing that even in as sacred of a place as a church, political and racial matters will always interfere with progress and racial equality.