Ballad of birmingham

“Dudley Felker Randall was born in Washington, D.C., on 14 January 1914. He showed an early interest in poetry; when he was four he composed lyrics for “Maryland, My Maryland,” a song played at a band concert in Townson, a suburb of Baltimore”(Layman and Clark 266). “Dudley Randall was a writer, librarian, and a publisher; Dudley Randall has made significant contributions to twentieth century American literature”(Layman and Clark 266). Dudley Randall’s Ballad of Birmingham gives a poetic account of the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. The author shows how the 1960’s were like. “Randall establishes a racial progress as a kind of blossoming, as he recounts the incident based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church by white terrorists”(Layman and Clark 267). Irony plays a b

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Randall’s word usage in the mother and daughter conversation seems that the daughter was very educated on the Freedom March and why it was so important for her to go. It seems as if the mother’s ways of trying to shield her daughter from the reality and danger of the life of the 1960’s were not good enough because look what happens at the end of the poem. The mother wants the child to be in a safe place. ig part in the ballad showing the church as a war zone and the Freedom March as the safer place.

At the end, the child’s body and the mother’s immature faith in the limits of hatred and violence has been destroyed.

To read, buy, have, or give the card is to participate in the struggle she could not stay out of. As the ballad leaves the mother motionless among the “bits of glass and brick”(Roberts 344), where she can find only her little girl’s shoe but not the girl herself. In fact the church became a place of destruction and violence just like the Freedom March. ” The mother felt the child would either get hurt or maybe even killed at the march, but in reality the child chances of survival could have considered even knowing the facts now. In the poem, Randall uses two very important, but different locations to stress the two meaning of the poem. This is the reason why the mother suggests to the child to go to church and sing in the choir, figuring that the church would never be a place of danger.

In the poem the child is acting like an adult wanting to go to the Freedom March. The violence touches even this woman who would keep her family out of the danger of active political protests like the Freedom March. Randall’s broadside reminds the reader of what it stake in the struggle for civil rights no sanctuary, no respect for innocence, the potential for violent resistance not just to social change, but even to the presence, new or continued, of blacks in community with whites.

Approximate Word count = 573
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

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