Ballad of Birmingham

James Sullivan

[Dudley Randall’s Detroit-based Broadside Press issued a series of African-American poetry broadsides.]

The first two in the series are poems by Randall himself: "Ballad of Birmingham" and "Dressed All in Pink." Folk singer Jerry Lewis had set them to music, and to ensure his own copyright of the texts, Randall published them as broadsides in 1965. In 1966, when he met Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, and Margaret Walker at Fisk University's first annual Writers Conference, he asked each of them for permission to print one of their already-published poems as a broadside--Hayden's "'Gabriel," Tolson's "The Sea-Turtle and the Shark," and Walker's "The Ballad of the Free" (Randall, Broadside 23). Randall also wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, asking permission to use one of her poems. She wrote back that he could pick any one he liked, and he chose "We Real Cool" (ibid. 8). And so he had his initial "Poems of the Negro Revolt" sequence. Most of the first twenty-four issues of the Broadside Series continued to be "favorite poems" that had already been published elsewhere, but in 1968, a reviewer at Small Press Review suggested that issuing previously unpublished poems might be a greater literary service, so beginning with Number 25, "Assassination" by Don L. Lee--a response to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.--he made the series mostly a forum for new work (ibid. 2-3 ).

"Ballad of Birmingham" deserves special attention as the first broadside Randall published and also because it places the series in relation to the tradition of popular broadsides up through the nineteenth century that recount sensational events in ballad form. Printed up, like them, inexpensively for sale, it uses the conventions of the traditional broadside ballad for contemporary political goals. Two broadside versions of this poem exist. For the first publication in 1965, the graphics are simple: brown ink in a tasteful typeface on tan paper, priced at thirty-five cents. But once the series was established, Randall reissued the poem in a new format and with a new price, fifty cents. Though the words do not change, the second, more visually complex version connects the whole series more directly to the older tradition of poetry broadsides, and it raises issues of audience use and the role of graphic format in producing meaning that other broadsides later in the series address more fundamentally.

The folded card carries the poem inside, arranged in a fairly standard format, title across the breadth of the sheet, subtitle underneath it in parentheses--"(On the Bombing of a Church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)"--then the poem proper in two columns occupying most of the page: all printed in black on white. But the outside (designed by Shirley Woodson, with title and illustration on front, publication information on back) is printed all black, the text and drawing appearing as negative space in this imposed black field. The white field on the inside is a given, a publishing convention. But with the outside acting as a dark border and the text itself appearing in a typeface with heavy vertical lines, it recalls the elegiac broadsides from two or three centuries earlier. The card format and the somber illustration of six figures huddled together, heads bowed, suggest a funeral.

These generic allusions in the visual format and the title indicate that, like seventeenth- and eighteenth-century elegiac broadsides, this one will use the tragic occasion to expound upon the spiritual values of the community. The tradition of basing broadside ballads on sensational disasters and crimes further determines the poem as a tragedy. In this context, the first lines already suggest the end of the story.

"Mother dear, may I go downtown

Instead of out to play,

And March the streets of Birmingham

In a Freedom March Today?"

Given the title and subtitle, as well as the funerary implications of the card's design, this character will have to end up at that church eventually, probably to die, as ballad characters so often do. This poem uses the ballad convention of the innocent questioner and the wiser respondent (the pattern of, for example, "Lord Randall" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci"), but it changes the object of knowledge from fate to racial politics. The child is the conventional innocent, while the mother understands the violence of this political moment:

"No, baby, no, you may not go,