An analysis of the poem written by Dudley Randall about the bombing of a church in Birmingham – Alabama 1963
The poem ‘Ballad of Birmingham’ is set in 1963, the time of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. It is about a mother who loses her daughter to the bombing after vigorous attempts to stop her to participate in a freedom march as she was a young African-American woman who wanted to make her thoughts known to the world. The girl who was the main character in the poem was most likely Denise McNair who was only eleven at the time of her death. I believe this because of the vocabulary used to display her in the poem; for example, stanza five states the way she was dressed and this makes me believe that she was younger than a teenager which the other three girls that were killed were all fourteen. The poem was also about the joy that the mother had within her child and then lost.
I think that Dudley wrote this poem as a way of raising awareness for racism and Black activists because there is such vivid description of what happened and the unfairness of the event is displayed in a way that it pops out to the reader, so it makes sense that he was trying to deliver that image towards us. Another reason that he could’ve written is that he was black himself, and he may have wanted to show that his race was being harassed, but that idea doesn’t have any backed up reasoning, so I am going with the first idea as the more correct one.
The words which make me realise that the girl was sweet/innocent/kind were…
“To make our country free”
These words make the little girl sound innocent because she doesn’t realise the racism in their ‘country’ or divided race and she wants to do something drastic which would most likely end up very badly.
“Mother dear, may I go…”
These words make the little girl sound sweet because she is addressing her mother with kindness and respect with the words dear and may which show that the little girl either had very strict parents or was very well trained in her manners.
“I won’t be alone. Other children will be with me.”
These words make the little girls sound innocent because she is saying that she will be ‘protected’, but she doesn’t know that she could die along with the other freedom marchers and she isn’t aware of the white supremacy going on in 1963.
The effect of having two different types of the narration is that we get to see more of the mother-daughter relationship with the dialogue where the mother is trying to protect her child from harm like a good parent and the child is trying to grow up too fast and break free from her ‘barrier. We see the mother trying to protect her child when she says, ‘No, baby, no, you may not go’, and then she gives a solid reason for her protection when she says, ‘for the dogs are fierce and wild, and clubs and hoses, guns and jails aren’t good for a little child.’ The third-person side of the poem shows the effect of death on the mother after the brutal murder of her child in which her only joy was built up in which was completely blown apart in a church which is supposed to be a place of holiness and peacefulness, but was the scene of a vicious crime.
The effect of assonance on ‘Ballad of Birmingham’ is telling us that the mother’s situation is urgent and unstable. ‘No baby no’ is a good example of assonance because the no sound is very sharp and conveys a painful or hurt person which the mother is in the final stanza when she loses her child, so these words are foreshadowing the final outcome.
The effect of alliteration on ‘Ballad of Birmingham’ is telling us that the mother is worried and concerned about her child’s welfare and safety. ‘For I fear those guns will fire’ is a good example of alliteration because the for and fear words are telling the reader that the mother is scared that something bad will happen to her child and she doesn’t want that to happen because she has all her joy built up inside of her child and she doesn’t want to lose it.
The effect of metaphors on ‘Ballad of Birmingham’ is telling us that the child who died was a sweet and compassionate child by the way she dresses. ‘Bathed rose petal sweet’ is a good example of this because it gives the reader compassion and pride for the girl because it wasn’t easy for black women to ‘look nice’ in white people’s opinion, so if she smelled like rose petals, she might be drawn more to white people. This wasn’t the case because she was murdered in the church where her mother thought she would be safe. Because of bad timing, the mother in ‘Ballad of Birmingham’ is picking up the pieces.
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