18 pages • 36 minutes read
Dudley RandallBallad of Birmingham
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Church
The church has a dual meaning in the poem. On the one hand, the church is a symbol for safety and caution for the mother, who doesn’t participate and doesn’t want her child to participate in social protest because she sees it as dangerous. Ironically, the church is also a symbol of social protest and danger. Historically, the church where the four little girls were killed in a bombing was the 16th Street Baptist Church, which served as a site for organizing protests and training protestors in nonviolent resistance. As such, the church made an irresistible target for white supremacist terrorists, who bombed the church to disrupt the nonviolent protests. The destruction of the church is thus a symbol of the depravity of those opposed to equality for Black Americans.
The White Shoes and Gloves
The shoes and the gloves also have multiple symbolic meanings in the poem. The mother clads her daughter in white shoes and gloves as a gesture of her love and care for the daughter. In Western culture, the color white is traditionally associated with purity or innocence. When the mother dresses her daughter in white gloves and shoes, it is a testament to her belief that she can protect her daughter from the violence of the world. At the end of the poem, both gloves and one shoe are nowhere to be found—a symbol for the absence of the daughter. The remaining shoe is a symbol for the mother’s grief and the loss of her own innocence—her belief that it is possible to be safe in a world where segregation exists.
Birmingham
As a central site of nonviolent protests to force action on segregation, Birmingham is a symbol for Black Americans’ participation in the struggle to “make [their] country free” (Line 12) from inequality. The “Freedom March” (Line 4) in Birmingham refers to actions of Black adults and children during the tumultuous year of 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists brought national and international attention to Birmingham by organizing mass protests.
