Ballad of Birmingham

“Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall is a ballad in which a fearful Black mother and her idealistic daughter engage in dialogue over whether it will be safe for the little girl to join in the protests on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. Through his use of first-person narration, diction, imagery, and irony, Randall explores the idea that avoiding political engagement with the struggle for civil rights is no guarantee of safety from violence. These rhetorical choices offer an implicit argument to Black readers that they must reexamine their calculations about what is safe and unsafe in a world in which white supremacy poses an existential threat to Black people.

The first four stanzas are a dialogue between a Black mother and child. In the first stanza, the Black child, despite her young age, believes that she can make a difference in the world. “Mother dear” (Line 1) has the sound of childhood games such as “Mother, May I,” but the formal diction of the little girl shows how serious she is. She surrenders the right of every child—“play” (Line 2)—because she wants to be among the protestors. She sees herself as being equally capable of playing as she is of marching, and her calm, even tone shows that she has thought through what it would mean to go protest.

The second stanza is quite different in terms of diction, imagery, and tone. Where the girl uses formal address to make her request, the mother calls the child “baby” (Line 5), a choice Randall makes to represent the mother’s care for her child but also her notion that the little girl doesn’t really understand what she is asking for in going to the march. The vivid imagery in subsequent lines is ripped straight from the then-contemporary headlines and photos of police response to children protesting, but there is also something resembling a Brothers Grimm fairy tale in how the mother describes what will happen during the march: “[W]ild” dogs (Line 6) are a threat to the little girl, as are the many brutal tactics police used against protestors. The mother lovingly puts her daughter in her place by pointing out that she is a “little child” (Line 8). The mother’s fear and care for her daughter come through with Randall’s diction.

In the third stanza, the little girl counters her mother’s fearful imagery with another vision—one in which Black children are in solidarity with each other and their racial community. The daughter’s vision is more abstract—marching to “make our country free” (Line 12). In the fourth stanza, the mother rejects that notion as idealistic. She instead uses her authority as a parent to keep her child safe. She is driven by “fear” (Line 14) for her child’s safety, and church is the one space she can think of where her daughter must, after all, be safe.

In the fifth stanza, Randall calls on the ballad tradition by representing rituals that show the mother’s love and through archaic (old-fashioned) diction. The mother’s preparation of her daughter shows just how precious her child is to her. The girl’s “night-dark hair” (Line 17) and the “rose petal sweet” (Line 18) bath imply the mother, too, has her own idealistic notions of reality. Her fantasy is that her child can be made safe. The symbols of the white gloves and shoes underscore the mother’s notion that her daughter is safe and inviolate in her innocence.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker presents the mother as content, a point the speaker makes with her smile and her innocent belief that church, an important site of strength in Black communities, is a safe and “sacred place” (Line 22). The turn in the poem comes in Lines 23-24 when the speaker recasts that smile as a naïve one, the “last smile” (Line 23) the mother will ever have. With that line, the mood shifts to one of foreboding.

In the seventh stanza, Randall remixes elements from earlier stanzas to show the mother’s coming to knowledge about her own naivete. When the mother hears the explosion, she instantly suspects her daughter is in harm’s way. Once that happens, it is the mother, rather than her daughter, who is moving through “the streets of Birmingham” (Line 27). The wildness is in the mother—in “[h]er eyes wet and wild” (Line 26)—as it dawns on her that violence has come for her daughter.

In the final stanza, Randall relies on symbol and irony to communicate the ultimate message of the poem. The church, a symbol for Black safety, has been reduced to “bits of glass and brick” (Line 29). When the mother finds the shoe, it is clear that the little girl, like the church, is utterly destroyed. The shoe is still white and still whole, a testament to the little girl’s innocence, but it lacks its partner, making it a symbol of the little girl’s death and the mother’s sense of loss. The irony of the poem is that there are also two churches—the one where the mother thought her daughter was safe, and the real one blown up by white supremacists, whom Randall never names in the poem.

The final lesson of the poem is that youth, staying home, or refusing to see the world as it really is won’t keep the Black readers of the poem any more safe than they kept the girl. It is just possible, as the little girl suspected, that the safest place to be is on the streets marching. That irony encourages readers to embrace action as the appropriate response to oppression.