Ballad Of Birmingham 'And The Whipping'

In the 1960’s, the Civil Right movement was in full swing. Martin Luther King was holding rallies in Birmingham and other cities in the South. In 1963, the headlines across the nation state that six were dead in a Baptist Church in Birmingham. The “Ballad of Birmingham” is a tragic poem written in response to the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is a meeting place for Civil Rights leaders. The poem describes an African-American mother and her daughter conversing about a "Freedom March" in the streets of Birmingham. A bomb explodes before Sunday morning services and four young black girls die. The daughter is among them. Violence and racial discrimination is also portrayed in the poem, “The Whipping”. The title is not subtly hiding the plot of a mother beating her son. The poem is intense and filled with a lot of anger and emotion. The boy’s

Crickets would cry from the grass. Frogs would croak. The stars would come out. Dew would dampen the earth. Yellow squares of light would glow in the distance as kerosene lamps were lit in our homes. Comparably, in the “Ballad of Birmingham”, wildlife and vegetation imagery, such as, “Wildly he crashes through elephant ears, pleads in dusty zinnias (cite) help make the scene real and adds credence, as though the child is just part of the violently contrasting scene. Sticks pulled from the trees are used in the boy and Richard’s beatings. In “The Whipping,” an innocent boy is chased and physically beat with a stick by an overweight woman. When the abuse ends, it leaves the boy crying and the woman relieved of her painful memories, exhausted trying to recollect herself. For the boy, it is one thing to be beaten by someone you have never known or loved. It is another to have one’s ability to love so threatened by “the face that I no longer knew or loved” (cite) at such a young