Ballad of BirminghamJoin now to read essay Ballad of BirminghamDudley Randall was born 14 January 1914 in Washington, D.C. Randall led a life full of intellectual exploration, service, and literary entrepreneurship. He started writing poetry at an early age, and filled notebooks throughout his years, drawing on the civil rights movement, work experiences, travels, and personal experiences for inspiration. In addition to serving his country in the Pacific theatre during World War II, Randall worked for Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Postal Service, and several libraries. In the 1960s, he built one of the most important presses in American history, Detroit Free Press, and went on to publish scores of African American authors, as well as several books of his own poetry, including some truly classic pieces. In the poem “Ballad of Birmingham,” Randall uses a sad tone and irony to describe the events of one of the most vivid and vicious chapters from the civil rights movement, the bombing of a church in 1963 that wounded 21 and cost four girls their lives. The poem begins with a dialogue between mother and daughter during which, ironically, the mother forbids the daughter to march for freedom, fearing that street were unsafe and filled with violence. Instead, she gives permission for the daughter to sing in the childrens choir at their church. How could the mother know, of course, that the streets, that day, might have offered some relative safety? The tragedy, a central feature of many ballads, becomes especially clear and poignant at the end, when the mother searches for her missing daughter.
Ballad of Birmingham 2Critical Essay 1 Jhan HochmanJhan Hochman critical essay explaines his views of what he felt Randall was trying to say. Hochman went back six months before the date of the Birminham church bombing to help support his opinion of the poem “Ballad of Birmingham”. I think Houchman felt that Randall had to make a point to the public that no African-Americans had a place of security in that time. Hochman made it clear that if any African- American wanted to claim salvation in the world of the living they would have to keep the pressuar on the whites by letting freedom sing; not only in the choirs of the church, but in the streets. “ With no acceptable place to turn, it became clearer
†I had thought that the song of Alabama, Ballad of Birmingham  was perhaps the epitome of something that had been lost, that was lost for some time in our country.  I was disappointed. For some the song did not sound like an attack on Christianity .  So I think if you are going to have a group of people on your block have to do something about what you think will be a little bit less obvious and less offensive.  So now, let me start from the beginning.  After the Birmingham mosque bombing in 1991, many of us started considering some of the same things that had caused our political and religious tensions.  At the time of that incident that we knew we could not be sure if a terrorist was actually going to be doing any damage, but that maybe the bombs would be kept in the back of the vehicle until we had one hundred or so minutes to go, and we could have been confident there was something in there and that it wasn’t, but it was getting harder to believe we were about to go through with this.  That this was not going to work. That people were really being put to sleep at the point of a bomb.  Our political leaders who were at that summit decided it was either time to stop and watch, or else it wasn’t time to get up and start exercising the “right to express your ideas” laws. We were about to go through with the worst fears and the worst frustrations of those and the most horrific acts of violence. All of my friends in the early 1990s, including a few very young ones, did the same things and said that we shouldn’t take anything away from the people of Birmingham. I had even talked with one of my parents.  My father was working as a writer, with a small family in the suburbs of Birmingham from my previous job as a reporter for the Sun’s Birmingham bureau.  I learned about the community from my mother when I was twenty-two, and that was pretty much when I was growing up. I think that she was pretty upset that things didn’t change in Birmingham until that point, that it wasn’t that we had been living under the same social and cultural rules that I now live in many of my family and friends are all about, but that there had been no changes in our lives.  I don’t think they should have said what they were saying. I had to learn some hard lessons, I was learning something I had never thought I’d be able to apply until now.
‡How this happened to me—I had thought I’d be lucky to be alive.