Nellie's Life

Four African American girls dead while in the downstairs basement of their church, in Birmingham, Alabama discussing their first day of school. 1963, the 16th Baptist church was bombed with dynamite by the Klu Kluz Klan. Birmingham was where a lot of the civil-movements went on. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was considered the movement's main organizing center. Activists, especially Black youths came there find strategies for reaching out to high-school students to get involved in the struggle for winning basic democratic rights for Black people.
The poem, “Ballad of Birmingham,” discusses a mothers fear for her young daughter to attend the Freedom March because of everything that is going on between the blacks and the whites. She believes the march would not be a safe environment. She sends her daughter off to church instead because church is considered a “Sacred Place.” But little did she know her daughter would die because of a bomb that went off inside the church. Where here little daughter was discussing school with three friends getting ready for Youth Sunday. This is where the irony of the poem comes in. Is church really a sacred place?
When this poem was written and when the bombing happened there was a lot of racial tension going on. Which is the reason the Freedom March was happening. “Ballad of Birmingham” shows that no matter where blacks go they still have reason to fear their lives, and there is always going to be racial tension even in a place considered sacred, like a church.
One thing I found very interesting was how the daughter was dressed in white. The words say, “And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, and white shoes on her feet.” The way the words are used here it sounds like the mother is trying to hide the fact that her daughter is black or trying to be less “black” by putting the white gloves on her brown hands.
The word use of the poem characterizes each individual because the words that the daughter uses are words of bravery and hope that things are going to change. She has the hope that blacks march for their freedom and overcome. But the mother’s words show how scared she is by using words such as fierce, wild, clubs, guns, and fire. She has been around a lot longer than her daughter and has had a lot more experience with trying to overcome and thinks she knows what is best for her daughter.
As the poem goes to show it seems that the mother did not know what was best for her daughter. What if the mother had let her daughter go to the March, would the innocent daughter still be dead? It is also amazing to see the mothers love for her child. She really cares for her by the words Randall used. Such as sweet, small, baby, the fear she had for her, and when she clawed through the debris looking for her daughter. The reader could just feel the love through the words expressed.
Throughout the poem there is a rhyming scheme happening every other line because it is a ballad it was written for music. But it is genius to see that Dudley Randall continued it throughout the entire poem. One other part I find interesting is that the second stanza and the second to last stanza both contain the rhyming words of wild and child but both are used at the end of the line in different sentences.
In conclusion with the racial tension happening when the bombing happened it is safe to assume that the moral of this poem is that no place is sacred for African Americans in that time. White people, in particular had a hatred for blacks and would even go to the extreme of bombing a church. A church, a place people like to consider sacred. But it is obvious that this does not stop a hater from getting their point across.

List cited:
Moorehead, Monica. “The FBI and the Birmingham Church Bombing.” 4 Little Girls. 21 July 1997. Workers World Service. 19 Oct. 2004