Ballad of Birmingham

In the book Ballad of Birmingham, the author Dudley Randall writes about a young girl's will to want to fight for something she believes in. To exercise her first Amendment, the freedom to speech and march the streets of Birmingham. Even though that the outcome doesn't look to promising. The will to stand up for something she believes even though it can be very changeling especially when that challenge can be a life and death situation. Even, when her mother talks about everything that can go wrong if she goes. The girl is not afraid and is willing to accept her fate. Can a person's will be so strong that they don't fear reprecussioned? Irony played a part also in the ballad showing the church as the warzone and the freedom march as the safer place to be.

The poem also focuses on what life was like in the sixties. It tells of black freedom marches in the South how they affected one family. It told of how our peace officers reacted to marches with clubs, hoses, guns, and jail. The mother, completely unsuspecting of any danger, has sent her child to church rather than allowing her to be in the Freedom March. The sad irony is that her daughter would have been safer having participated in the outdoor march rather than going to the site of the planning for desegregation by leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress on Racial Equality's campaign to register African Americans to vote.