Analysis Of Ballad Of Birmingham By Dudley Randall

Imagine a time in American history brimming with violence and hatred between races. Some might think of the nineteenth century, and the years leading up to the civil war, however there is another time period that can be addressed. This is the time period in the 1950s and 1960s, when the African American Civil Rights Movement was at its most powerful. These years were filled with racial contempt and bloodshed, and these were also the years in which Dudley Randall published one of his most famous works, “Ballad of Birmingham.” Written in 1969, “Ballad of Birmingham” is written about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that took place in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, which took the lives of four African American girls. In this poem, Randall

Willoughby Anderson. This article describes the events of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing from another perspective, and talks about the conviction of two of the bombers which took place in 2001 and 2002, nearly 40 years after the incident originally occurred. In the second part of the article that begins on page 478, Anderson begins to write about the bombing. He explains what happened, and included information about other African American children killed in the violence caused by the outrage at this attack. He writes that “The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing capped a year of escalating white resistance to desegregation” (Anderson 478-479), which is another source that expresses just how dangerous the context “Ballad of Birmingham” is placed in. Anderson later goes on to write that the bombing was one of the first attacks that white newspapers and the mainstream media actually reported on. “Other key locations of the movement, such as activists’ homes and other churches, had been bombed, but most of those bombings were never reported by the white-owned newspapers” (Anderson 480), which revealed that a large amount of the racial conflict happening in Birmingham during this time was unknown by the majority of the public outside of Birmingham. After

Jolley writes about her experience using the novel To Kill a Mockingbird to teach students about history and to look at the world from different perspectives. To do this, the author looks at many different pieces of literature that she believed could teach students to look at the world from another’s perspective using the history of the United States. Jolley then states that “Any study of To Kill a Mockingbird should encompass a study of the Civil Rights Movement” (37), and begins to write about different works that helped to do that. Among other works she writes about “Ballad of Birmingham,” and how it “provides rich lessons in irony, imagery, the power of poetry, and the history of our country” (38), through its telling of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Her writing teaches the reader just how important the event “Ballad of Birmingham” is written about really is, while also speaking about the importance of teaching students about history such as