Birmingham Sunday

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the KKK bombed of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Four young girls on their way to Bible study were killed.

The (white) folksinger Richard Fariña wrote a song to commemorate the tragedy, “Birmingham Sunday”:

The tune of Fariña’s song is taken from the Scottish folksong “I Loved A Lass.”

Fariña attended Cornell University, and wrote a comic novel about his time there called Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, whose title he took from a song by Furry Lewis:

(Incidentally, Furry Lewis’s song, “Turn Your Money Green,” was covered by other white folksingers.)

Richard Fariña’s “Birmingham Sunday” was made famous by his sister-in-law, Joan Baez:

Rhiannon Giddens covered it on her album Freedom Highway:

Giddens’s arrangement of the song begins with a quotation from Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 11 in A Major:

Why do you think Giddens references Mozart in her version of “Birmingham Sunday”?

Why do you think that, until Giddens, only white artists recorded the song?

Two months after the bombing, John Coltrane recorded his response to it, “Alabama.”

Nina Simone’s response to the bombing and other Southern atrocities:

Poet Dudley Randall wrote “Ballad of Birmingham” about the bombing. His poem mirrors the form of British folk ballads: a dialogue between two characters, in this case, the mother and child, followed by a narrative of the ironic events befalling the unsuspecting protagonists (the irony, in this case, because the mother believes her daughter will be safe in church).

Ballad of Birmingham

(On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)

“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”

“But, mother, I won’t be alone.
Other children will go with me,
And march the streets of Birmingham
To make our country free.”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
And sing in the children’s choir.”

She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,
And bathed rose petal sweet,
And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
And white shoes on her feet.

The mother smiled to know her child
Was in the sacred place,
But that smile was the last smile
To come upon her face.

For when she heard the explosion,
Her eyes grew wet and wild.
She raced through the streets of Birmingham
Calling for her child.

She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
Then lifted out a shoe.
“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,
But, baby, where are you?”

Listen to Dudley Randall read the poem, at 7:05:

http://www.loc.gov/item/91740723

We tend to think of the Civil Rights Movement taking place in the form of marches and protests, and being litigated in the courts. When we think of the segregation that the Movement worked to dismantle, however, we need to remember that it existed in all public and private spaces that Black people lived, worked, studied, and worshipped in.