Randall starts the poem ballad of birmingham with a soft sad tone . Randall wrote this poem based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church Birmingham.
This poem uses the ballad principle of the innocent questioner and the wiser respondent but it changes the entity of knowledge from fate to racial politics. The child is the conventional innocent, while the mother understands the violence of this political moment. There is a conversation between a mother and her daughter, the daughter in the poem asks permission to attend a civil rights rally, the lov…
