Ballad of Birmingham

Birmingham of the 1950s and 1960s was at the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Minister Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) came to Birmingham in early 1963 to organize mass protests against segregated transportation and public facilities. As King explained in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote after being arrested for protesting, he was in Birmingham to lead a nonviolent direct action that would “create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue” of segregation (King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 1963).

King proved prescient—the national coverage of local law enforcement blasting peaceful protestors with skin-lacerating fire hoses and loosing dogs on them made national and international headlines. The images on the front pages of newspapers were particularly impactful because children—some whose ages were in the single digits—were among those brutalized protestors. The Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963 saw children mobilize to become participants in their own liberation, sometimes in defiance of fearful parents like the mother in Dudley Randall’s poem. However, youth and nonviolent protest were no protection against the violence of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.