Irony In The Ballad Of Birmingham

The irony in “Ballad of Birmingham” is what gives the poem its unique feel and the power that it had during the Civil Rights movement. As stated in Susan Jolley’s “Integrating Poetry and To Kill a Mockingbird” this poem “teaches irony, imagery, the power of poetry, and the history of our country.” (Jolley) This means that this poem is a generational poem and still holds power to this day because of its literary devices such as irony. In this poem Randall incorporates situational irony by giving details about the mother sending the daughter to a supposedly safe place which was the church. He then made the people reading feel the pain of the mother by killing the daughter in the church when instead she could have been at the freedom march. Dudley …show more content…
In “Dudley Randall: A Humanist’s View” it is made clear that Randall loves every person that he meets. It even states that Randall said, “Forget about yourself. You obliterate your ego and your personality and you go out to the other person and the other person’s mind. Forget about yourself.” (Melhem) So to Randall the tragedy of an event such as four children being killed in a church bombing would bring great grief to him, so he used this grief to channel what he was feeling at the time and put these feelings onto paper which is why he put in the literary devices such as irony. The irony in this poem opened people's eyes because it was so strong and emotional that it catches the reader's attention. Another attention grabbing and literary device that Randall used was imagery. Although imagery was not as much of an emotional device as the irony was in …show more content…
During this time period African Americans were subject to racism and inequality. This is demonstrated in “Ballad of Birmingham” because even though the church was supposed to be a safe place and a sanctuary for people to get away from racism, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing proved otherwise. This is where the irony came into the story, and proved that at this time the African American community was not going to get away from the racism and hatred unless they stood up for themselves and fought for what was right. So authors like Dudley Randall wrote poems such as “Ballad of Birmingham” in order to fight for the equality of black citizens. In “Making Civil Rights Harder: Literature, Memory, and the Black Freedom Struggle” Metress brings up a quote from Dr. King after the bombing of Birmingham. Metress stated that “Instead of Waterloo, King sees Bunker Hill. Although the enemy won the hill, King asserts, “the colonists won their self-respect and the profound respect of their enemy . . . The vanquished won the war on that hill. The victors lost it.”(114)” (Metress) Here Metress is trying to say that the social environment that the African American community was in turned around at this point because although the group that attacked the church got what they wanted the whole world saw that the racism and