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“The Ballad of Birmingham”, written by Dudley Randall, is a poem that commemorates the bombing of a black church in Alabama in 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement. The poem is written in a traditional narrative style form of a ballad, though the subject matter is far from traditional. The poem tells the story of a woman who doesn’t let her daughter go to play in town because she feels that it …

…sense of innocence associated with the little girl. If this poem didn’t sound as if it were meant to be sung by children out in the yard playing games, it couldn’t have possibly done justice to the idea of absolute innocence of this young girl at church. Because the author does such a good job of portraying the purity of this little black child, it shows how evil an act this bombing was.