Dudley Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham” is about children who die in a church bombing in Alabama in 1963. The fight against segregation between African Americans and Whites became violent and dangerous for everyone. The ballad is about a child asking their mother for permission to go “march the streets of Birmingham, to make our country free” (line 11-12). The mother asks her child not to march and to go to church where it is safe from violence. The child goes to church to sing in the choir but a bomb explodes and kills the child at church. Dudley uses the tone of the poem
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