18 pages • 36 minutes read
Ballad of Birmingham
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Themes
Responding to Racism
In “Ballad of Birmingham,” the mother’s fears are motivated by her knowledge that there are forces who believe in violent responses to nonviolent protest, and that there are forces who believe that nonviolence—no matter what—is the best response to racism. The tragic consequence of those two opposing views is that there will be casualties such as the little girl.
The mother’s firm, negative response to her child’s request to march comes out of a protective urge. Marching is no fit activity for a child, she argues, because the violence and abuse that her daughter might be subject to “[a]ren’t good for a little child” (Line 8). The mother assumes, based on past history, that even the children’s youth will be no protection against violent responses to efforts to end racist practices like segregation. For the mother, protecting her child trumps any social protest against laws rooted in racism. Her decision shows that she simply doesn’t believe in a proactive response to racism, at least not one in which her child is involved.
Ironically, the church where the mother sends her daughter—the 16th Street Baptist Church—is historically one from which protestors began their marches and a place where protestors received training in nonviolent protest. The mother’s decision to respond to racism by sending her daughter to the 16th Street Baptist Church shows either a willful failure to acknowledge the surge in activism or a misunderstanding of the pervasiveness of racist violence in her hometown, and it results in a tragic error in judgment.
Generational Conflict
“Ballad of Birmingham” has at its center the relationship between a mother and child. The two are in conflict over a fundamental question: Whose responsibility is it to engage in the project of Black liberation? The little girl takes it as self-evident that she is a historical agent who can change the United States for the better by participating in a “Freedom March” (Line 4). Her belief in her own efficacy comes in part because she knows other children will be there.
The girl in the poem was not alone in the belief that Black children could be activists—James Bevel, Martin Luther King’s peer, organized 1,000 Black school children to march in Birmingham on May 2, 1963, in a Children’s Crusade, just three months before the bombing that inspired “Ballad of Birmingham” (“The Children’s Crusade.” Smithsonian). The images of Bull Conner, the local sheriff, and his deputies blasting young people with fire hoses, menacing them with guns, and attacking them with dogs were so violent that they reinvigorated a Birmingham campaign that was by then languishing. That violence made an effective case for the need for civil rights legislation, so the child’s desire to march months later shows her canniness about the real difference child activists could make.
The mother is describing the images from the Children’s Crusade in the second and fourth stanzas of the poem, so she is well aware of what her daughter might face in the street. Not only does she not want her daughter at the marches, but she herself gives no indication that she is interested in marching. She is more concerned with what is happening in her own household. Hers is a more cautious, conservative approach to the struggle for civil rights. Despite the negative impact of segregation on children like the daughter, the mother still believes it is possible to keep her daughter safe.
The Importance of Remembering the Past
“Ballad of Birmingham” is a poem about the lessons one can learn by remembering the past. Randall’s rhetorical choices—using ballad form, relying on historical allusion, and closing out the poem with a tragic scene—are designed to encourage his audience to consider where they fit into the effort to achieve Black liberation and to move them to action.
In Western literature, the ballad is a form that writers frequently use to memorialize key historical events. The ballad is thus a form of popular history, one that is in contrast to the history that gets recounted in books. As a proponent and architect of the Black Arts Movement, Randall would have been committed to creating work that could reach a mass, Black audience, not appealing to more conservative or academic gatekeepers of United States history.
The history Randall recounts in 1965, two years after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the death of four little girls, is a key moment in the history of social protest movements in the Southern United States. By creatively imagining the conversation between the mother and daughter, Randall rehearses the conflicting aims of two generations.
As readers—especially those who are aware of contemporary history—come to the end of the poem, it is obvious that the little girl is dead. The poem lacks full closure, however, because it ends with the mother being unable to find her daughter’s body. The mother’s grief isn’t just because it is obvious that her daughter is dead. It is also because the way her daughter died—being atomized by the bomb—means that her daughter’s absence is immediate and that there will be no funeral rites around the body. That ability to mourn by lovingly committing the body to the ground is one of the important moments of grief that allows the mother (and the reader) to accept death as an ordinary part of life.
This is no ordinary death, however. Left with that grief, most readers, especially Black readers in 1965, would be moved by what Randall recounts in the ballad. Strong emotions can be mobilized to move complacent people to action. The lesson complacent Black readers learn from the mother’s grief is that complacency won’t keep children safe. It is instead up to adults like the mother and the reader to create a better future for Black children by remembering the atrocities of the past.
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