The Safety of African Americans During The Civil Rights Movement:.
There are many literary works that address the violence associated with the civil rights movement. These works, though written for different reasons, essentially serve the same purpose. Two such works are a poem "Ballad of Birmingham" by Dudley Randall and an essay by Martin Luther King, Jr. entitled "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Though these pieces of literature were written for different reasons and have many differences, they both in their own way bring attention to and shine light on how unsafe African Americans were during the Civil Rights Movement in America.
Dudley Randall's 1969 poem, "Ballad of Birmingham", was written to commemorate the 1963 death of four young girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. In " Ballad of Birmingham", Randall illustrates the terrible state of society during the Civil Rights Movement. Randall uses many different techniques, such as plot, setting, language, point of view, characters and theme, to show the reader that during this time period African Americans were not safe, no matter how innocent and in the most sacred of places. .
Randall uses language to make the death of the young girl at the end of the poem more tragic. He does this by making each character seem innocent. The two speakers, the mother and the daughter, are referred to as "baby" (Line 5 and 13) and "dear" (Line 1), respectively. These words make the reader feel compassion for these two characters. There is more of an effect on the reader in the daughter's case than in the case of the mother because the daughter is repeatedly referred to as "baby". When the reader sees the word "baby" they think of innocence, the daughter is referred to as "baby" only when the mother is speaking. Any other time in the story the daughter is referred to as "she" or "child". When the narrator is speaking as in lines 17 and 21 he does not use the endearing term to refer to the little girl.
