Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

Ballad of Birmingham

(1968)

Dudley Randall
(January 14, 1914 – August 5, 2000)

Notes

This poem was written in 1965 and published in the poetry collection Cities Burning in 1968 about the 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

3  Birmingham: a large city in the state of Alabama in the United States, a key site for civil rights movement in the mid 1900s, during which it is particularly associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and close to a hundred racial bombings of which the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church is an iconic one

• Birmingham, Alabama (official website)
• Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Stanford University (1963; text of letter followed by annotative notes)
• Kathy Lohr, "50 Years Later, King's Birmingham 'Letter' Still Resonates," NPR (2013; with audio clip, 6:07 min.)
• John Blake, "How MLK became an angry black man," CNN (2013)
• Timothy Noah, "How the New York Times Screwed Martin Luther King Jr.," New Republic (2013)
• "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963), Stanford University (context for and commentary on the letter)
• Charles Ess, "The Letter from the Birmingham Jail: Critical Thinking Notes," Drury University

25  explosion: the bombing of the 16th Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday, September 15, 1963 at 10:22 a.m.

• Claude Sitton, "Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls In Church; Riots Flare; 2 Boys Slain," The New York Times (1963)
• Richard Simon, "House votes to honor victims of 1963 Birmingham church bombing," Los Angeles Times (2013)
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Sample Student Responses to Dudley Randall's "Ballad of Birmingham" 

Response 1:

Study Question:

Reference

Randall, Dudley. "Ballad of Birmingham." Roses and Revolution: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall.  Ed. Melba Joyce Boyd. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2009. 105–6. Print.

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Last updated June 16, 2013