In 1969, Dudley Randall published his poem “Ballad of Birmingham” in response to the historical event of the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church by white terrorists. It is a dialogue between mother and daughter during which, the daughter asks her mother for going out to join the Freedom March, and eventually, she ends up dying in an explosion of the church. The poem has become the greatest work of Randall, and it leaves the readers with a deep emotion about tragedies due to the segregation in the 1960s.
Dudley Randall was born in Washington, D.C., on January 14, 1914. His earliest recollection of composing a poem was when his mother took him to a band concert. Impressed by the big bass drums and bass horns, the four-year-old
In each stanza, the second and fourth lines rhyme, which makes the conversation between mother and daughter sound like a rhythmic song. From the first stanza, the readers can smell the irony and metaphor of the poem. The detail that the little girl wants to go to the march for freedom contains a metaphorical meaning. As a little girl, she acts like an adult who thirsts for freedom. She lives in a time period when racial discrimination is a rough problem of American society. Randall also implies that she herself is an African girl when describing her brown hands: “And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands” (line 19). In an unjust system with racism, black people are the minority and do not have equal rights as whites do. In fact, blacks do not have freedom, but the girl insists on going out for freedom. This irony conjures up the readers’ curiosity about the following stanzas of the poem. Responding to her daughter, the mother tells the girl to go to church instead, for she fears that protests and violence will harm her daughter: “No, baby, no, you may not go/ For I fear those guns will fire/ But you may go to church instead/ And sing in the children’s choir” (lines 13-16). As an adult, the mother knows severe dangers of racial hatred outside her safe home, so she tries to protect her daughter from foreseeable risks. However, ironically, she suggests her daughter going to church, which eventually becomes the girl’s funeral anyway.
There are different levels of tone of the two characters and the narrator. While the little girl presents a tone of innocence and joy, the mother’s tone shows an anxiety. Despite worries about her child’s safety, the mother dresses her daughter up neatly. With “white gloves” on her hands and “white shoes” on her feet (lines 19, 20), little girl is ready for her joyful day. Randall intentionally uses the word “white” to stress the purity and innocence of the girl who loses her life at the church – a sacred place. From the seventh stanza, the tone is immediately turned to grief and loneliness by the narrator. We can feel the formidable emotion in every verse of the last two stanzas. When hearing the explosion, without thinking a moment, the mother insanely races to the church, where she is transfixed among the "bits of glass and brick" (line 29), and where she can find only her daughter’s shoe. The last two lines switches back to quotations which create an unanswered question of a sorrowful mother: “Oh, here’s the shoe my baby wore/ But, baby, where are you?” This is a strong ending to an emotion-filled poem, and the use of question leaves the readers an unspeakable
Christopher Paul Curtis wrote The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 throughout the course of 1995. The novel follows the Watsons, a black family living in Flint, Michigan during the Civil Rights Era. In a historical context, 1963 and the early 1990s have far more in common than one would expect. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 following the church bombing in Birmingham, and yet race-based discrimination remains a problem even in our modern society via passive racism. This paper will analyze the ways in which Curtis’ The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 draws parallels between the time in which his is writing during and the time in which he is writing about. This analysis will also shed light on what can be called the “white standard,” wherein all things white are “good” or “better” and anything not-white is “bad.”
...t she has put on a new “costume” and is now a completely different person. The stockings are “night-black” representing the backyard and its negative connotation. In line twenty, the author writes that she wants to “strut down the streets with paint on [her] face,” again emphasizing Brooks’ new rebellious nature since crossing over into the backyard. The “paint” suggests that her rebellion is just and act, and as soon as she removes the paint, she can return to the front yard if she pleases. The repetition of “and” at the beginning of the last three lines illustrates Brooks’ desire to completely rebel against her mother and the front yard life since it shows how she wants to rebel in so many ways. The main theme of the poem highlights the desire people have to experience what they do not have and live life on their own terms.
Stanza two shows us how the baby is well looked after, yet is lacking the affection that small children need. The child experiences a ‘vague passing spasm of loss.’ The mother blocks out her child’s cries. There is a lack of contact and warmth between the pair.
These few lines describe the actions of a black mother under the pressure of slavery. Indeed, these lines portray Margaret Garner's breathtaking reason for her murder. According to Margaret Garner, her children deserves to have an honorable life even if this mean dying in their mother's hands.
The daughter alludes to an idea that her mother was also judged harshly and made to feel ashamed. By the daughters ability to see through her mothers flaws and recognize that she was as wounded as the child was, there is sense of freedom for both when the daughter find her true self. Line such as “your nightmare of weakness,” and I learned from you to define myself through your denials,” present the idea that the mother was never able to defeat those that held her captive or she denied her chance to break free. The daughter moments of personal epiphany is a victory with the mother because it breaks a chain of self-loathing or hatred. There is pride and love for the women they truly were and is to be celebrated for mother and daughter.
Although the little girl doesn’t listen to the mother the first time she eventually listens in the end. For example, in stanzas 1-4, the little girl asks if she can go to the Freedom March not once, but twice even after her mother had already denied her the first time. These stanzas show how the daughter is a little disobedient at first, but then is able to respect her mother’s wishes. In stanzas 5 and 6, as the little girl is getting ready the mother is happy and smiling because she knows that her little girl is going to be safe, or so she thinks. By these stanzas the reader is able to tell how happy the mother was because she thought her daughter would be safe by listening to her and not going to the March. The last two stanzas, 7 and 8, show that the mother senses something is wrong, she runs to the church to find nothing, but her daughter’s shoe. At this moment she realizes that her baby is gone. These stanzas symbolize that even though her daughter listened to her she still wasn’t safe and is now dead. The Shoe symbolizes the loss the mother is going through and her loss of hope as well. This poem shows how elastic the bond between the daughter and her mother is because the daughter respected her mother’s wish by not going to the March and although the daughter is now dead her mother will always have her in her heart. By her having her
In the book Warriors Don't Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals, the author describes what her reactions and feelings are to the racial hatred and discrimination she and eight other African-American teenagers received in Little Rock, Arkansas during the desegregation period in 1957. She tells the story of the nine students from the time she turned sixteen years old and began keeping a diary until her final days at Central High School in Little Rock. The story begins by Melba talking about the anger, hatred, and sadness that is brought up upon her first return to Central High for a reunion with her eight other classmates. As she walks through the halls and rooms of the old school, she recalls the horrible acts of violence that were committed by the white students against her and her friends.
In this poem, there is a young woman and her loving mother discussing their heritage through their matrilineal side. The poem itself begins with what she will inherit from each family member starting with her mother. After discussing what she will inherit from each of her family members, the final lines of the poem reflect back to her mother in which she gave her advice on constantly moving and never having a home to call hers. For example, the woman describes how her father will give her “his brown eyes” (Line 7) and how her mother advised her to eat raw deer (Line 40). Perhaps the reader is suggesting that she is the only survivor of a tragedy and it is her heritage that keeps her going to keep safe. In the first two lines of the poem, she explains how the young woman will be taking the lines of her mother’s (Lines 1-2). This demonstrates further that she is physically worried about her features and emotionally worried about taking on the lineage of her heritage. Later, she remembered the years of when her mother baked the most wonderful food and did not want to forget the “smell of baking bread [that warmed] fined hairs in my nostrils” (Lines 3-4). Perhaps the young woman implies that she is restrained through her heritage to effectively move forward and become who she would like to be. When reading this poem, Native American heritage is an apparent theme through the lifestyle examples, the fact lineage is passed through woman, and problems Native Americans had faced while trying to be conquested by Americans. Overall, this poem portrays a confined, young woman trying to overcome her current obstacles in life by accepting her heritage and pursuing through her
The tragic poem, “The Ballad of Birmingham,” begins with a young child asking an imploring question to her mother, “May I go downtown instead of out to play” (Randall, 669)?
The poem also focuses on what life was like in the sixties. It tells of black freedom marches in the South how they effected one family. It told of how our peace officers reacted to marches with clubs, hoses, guns, and jail. They were fierce and wild and a black child would be no match for them. The mother refused to let her child march in the wild streets of Birmingham and sent her to the safest place that no harm would become of her daughter.
In conclusion, this poem shows the progression of desegregation throughout the south. When the poem is placed in context to the time in which it was written, it is easy to identify the injustices of African Americans. The most notable observation is when the beach is marked “colored” (Trethewey). Analyzing this poem via historical criticism allows the reader to fully understand the injustice and also experience the growth of society towards desegregation.
These constant feelings of discontent, and annoyance were seen frequently by African Americans who suffered from injustice acts from the white majority during these times. Many of the poems written during this time showed some sort of historical reference of maltreatment, or inequality. For years, African Americans were not allowed to have a voice, and if they did they wen’t unheard. However, when poems got published, the deep emotion, and rage that African Americans lived through for many years was released to the public, and shocked a majority of people when they quickly became influential to society.
The civil rights movement may have technically ended in the nineteen sixties, but America is still feeling the adverse effects of this dark time in history today. African Americans were the group of people most affected by the Civil Rights Act and continue to be today. Great pain and suffering, though, usually amounts to great literature. This period in American history was no exception. Langston Hughes was a prolific writer before, during, and after the Civil Rights Act and produced many classic poems for African American literature. Hughes uses theme, point of view, and historical context in his poems “I, Too” and “Theme for English B” to expand the views on African American culture to his audience members.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
This stanza of the poem is joyful, but the reader cannot help but feel that there is so much to be done before the injustice ends. When Angelou mentions that African Americans need to “stop impostering [their] own history”, she means that they must accept the past and learn from it, not attempt to hide it. Earlier in the poem, Angelou uses alliteration to add rhythm to the poem, pairing it with the dark subject matter she describes. The narrator takes the form of a slave hundreds of years ago and describes a scene “under a dead blue sky on a distant beach, / [in which she] was dragged by [her] braids just beyond [her family’s] reach” (“Million Man March Poem” 10-12). Angelou alternates the hard sound of “B’s” with the consonant sound of “D’s”, giving the poem a heavy rhythm. This strong, dark pulse, meant to emphasize the importance of her diction, was characteristic of African American literature during the Civil Rights Movement (“African American Literature” 1). At the Million Man