Birmingham is a place rich in African American history. Great people like Martin Luther King, Jr., reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and countless others came together to strengthen the Civil Rights Movement in this place. Countless numbers of African Americans died for equal rights. One such event took place at the 16th Street Baptist Church when a bomb exploded and killed four children. The poem, "Ballad of Birmigham," tells a story about a mother and her child who died in the explosion.
             The mother didn't want her child to go to Birmingham because she knew it was a dangerous place. She kept warning her child that the people there were dangerous, and carried weapons, and thus he/she shouldn't go. She advised him/her to go and sing in the church choir instead. In the sixth stanza, we see that the mother thinks her child actually did go to church, because she had a smile on her face. She believed her child was in that "sacred place," but he/she really wasn't there at all. The mother soon realizes this as she hears an explosion in Birmingham. So she goes there to look for him/her, but only finds the child's shoe. This implies that the child has died.
             The black community has come across a lot of hate and violence, especially in the south during the 1950s to the 1960s. Southerners who didn't like African Americans as well as Jews and other minorities created the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). The cruelty of this gang of people towards other was horrific. Their main goal was to rid the world of anything that wasn't what they wanted. This poem shows the intensity of those times. We as humans can try to comprehend the feelings of the mother finding out that her child is dead, thinking that he/she was in a safe sanctuary.
             The structure of this poem was done in such a way that it touches the soul of the reader. This poem portrays the innocence of the love between a mother and her child ...