Birmingham, 1963

Weatherford, Carole Boston. 2007. Birmingham, 1963. Honesdale, Pa: Wordsong. ISBN 978-1-59078-440-2

In free verse poems accompanied by historic photos, Carole Boston Weatherford, through the voice of a fictional child speaker, recounts the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama that claimed the lives of four young girls.  The book ends with four in memoriam poems for the four victims of the bombing.  

The poet uses a refrain of sorts "the year I turned ten" for the early poems that set the background for the events, and "the day I turned ten" to introduce the poems that describe the day of the bombing.  Names or lines from various traditional spiritual songs are interspersed throughout the poems, referencing the songs that are synonymous with the African-American community and the Civil Rights movement.  Sense imagery is used to convey the sights, sounds, and emotions as they would have appeared, sounded or felt to a child rather than an adult.  The poems are emotional in a way that will resonate with both adults and children and convey a sense of the tragedy, but despite the serious subject content are not overwhelmingly sad or manipulative.  The memorial poems about the four girls honor lives that were too brief.

Although the book has no table of contents or index, a note from the poet as well as annotations about the photographs provide a historical context for the poems.  The poems are not named individually which also makes them flow together as one long work.

Featured poem:

The day I turned ten,

I saw blood spilled on holy ground

And my daddy cry for the very first time.

What had those girls done to deserve this?

At supper, no one had much appetite.

Afterwards, Mama washed and I dried dishes

While she hummed "Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen."

Although the poems describe events that take place elsewhere, most students in Little Rock are well-versed in the history of segregation and the Civil Rights movement because of the desegregation of Central High School in 1957.  Sharing this poem could lead to a discussion of what the students already know about the history of their own city and an extension of that knowledge to the efforts and movements in other cities during that era.