I like the poem you chose, but you didn't say why you chose it.

  I also think you need to add information on

the author, Dudley Randall - a little of his background, who was he and why he would write such a
poem.                                                  

I found some helpful tips when writing a critical analysis on poetry:

Introduction: -

Should give Artist name and why they are important

More about the artist and his works.

Brief information about the artist life.

Subject of the poem

Reason why you chose this poem

Body of the paper:

Point-by-point subject - one chapter or paragraph for each point. (keeping a steady flow between points.)

Conclusion:

Short summary of subject

Passing reference to author

Clear and to the point.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/ballad.htm

On "Ballad of Birmingham"
 R. Baxter Miller
In 1962 Randall became interested in Boone House, a black cultural center which had been
founded by Margaret Danner in Detroit. Every Sunday Randall and Danner would read their own
work to audiences at Boone House. Over the years the two authors collected a group of poems
which became the first major publication of Broadside Press, Poem Counterpoem (1966).

Perhaps the first of its kind, the volume contains ten poems each by Danner and Randall. The
poems are alternated to form a kind of double commentary on the subjects they address in
common. Replete with allusions to social and intellectual history, the verses stress nurture and
growth. In "The Ballad of Birmingham" Randall establishes racial progress as a kind of
blossoming, as he recounts the incident, based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church by white terrorists. Eight quatrains portray one girl's life and
death. (Four girls actually died in the real bombing.) When the daughter in the poem asks
permission to attend a civil rights rally, the loving and fearful mother refuses to let her go.
Allowed to go to church instead, the daughter dies anyway. Thus, there is no sanctuary in an evil
world, Randall seems to say, and one may face horror in the street as well as in the church. After
folk singer Jerry Moore read the poem in a newspaper, he set it to music, and Randall granted
him permission to publish the tune with the lyrics.

From Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955. A
Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and Thadious M. Davis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Copyright © 1985 by
The Gale Group.

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,

    For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
    Aren't good for a little child."

The mother, however, still believes that there is a place safe from racial hatred. She suggests that
her daughter "may go to church instead, / And sing in the children's choir." But by the end, the
horror of the bombing leaves her disillusioned:

The mother smiled to know her child

    Was in a 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.

At the end, the child's body and the mother's naive faith in the limits of hatred and violence have
been destroyed as the ballad leaves the mother transfixed among the "bits of glass and brick,"
where she can find only her little girl's shoe but not the girl herself.

Randall's broadside reminds the audience of what is at stake in the struggle for civil rights--no
sanctuary, no respect for innocence, the potential for violent resistance not just to social change,
but even to the presence, new or continued, of blacks in community with whites. There is no
such thing as staying out of the struggle in order to avoid trouble. The violence touches even this
woman who would keep her family out of the danger of active political protests like the Freedom
March. To read, buy, have, or give the card is to participate in the struggle she could not stay out
of.

Eighteenth-century broadside elegies used death as a public occasion for defining the values of
the community. The dead provided a moral lesson--either an example of a good Christian death
or a warning to sinners. Such broadsides disseminated Christian teachings and situated them as
the values of the community. The practice of distributing such broadsides and, today, of sending
sympathy cards (or, in Catholic tradition, Mass cards) reinforces, as a material expression of
shared grief, commuaal bonds among the living. The group of mourners figured on the front of
"Ballad of Birmingham provides a graphic model of communal grief over that bombing and
other acts of racist terrorism. The card, then, was a site for recognizing a shared emotional and
political response, part of a shared national identity. It contributes to that African American
identity an awareness of the ubiquitous threat of racial violence. it suggests a division between
those willing to risk violent injury by challenging Jim Crow through direct action and those
unwilling to take such risks, but it shows, through the story of this church bombing, that the basis
of that division, the risk of harm, can be the same for each group. The whole community has the
same stake in social change.

From On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s. Copyright ©
1997 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Naomi Long Madgett

Poet, publisher, editor, and founder of
Broadside Press. Dudley Randall was
born 14 January 1914 in Washington,
D.C., but moved to Detroit in 1920. His
first published poem appeared in the
Detroit Free Press when he was thirteen.
His early reading included English poets
from whom he learned form. He was
later influenced by the work of Jean
Toomer and Countee Cullen.

His employment in a foundry is recalled

in "George" (Poem Counterpoem),
written after encountering a once
vigorous coworker in a hospital years
later. His military service during World War 11 is reflected in such poems as "Coral Atoll" and
"Pacific Epitapns"v (More to Remember).

Randall worked in the post office while earning degrees in English and library science (1949 and
1951). For the next five years he was librarian at Morgan State and Lincoln (Mo.) universities,
returning to Detroit in 1956 to a position in the Wayne County Federated Library System. After a
brief teaching assignment in 1969, he became librarian and poet in residence at the University of
Detroit, retiring in 1974.

His interest in Russia, apparent in his translations of poems by Aleksander Pushkin ("I Loved
You Once," After the Killing) and Konstantin Simonov ("My Native Land" and "Wait for Me" in
A Litany of Friends), was heightened by a visit to the Soviet Union in 1966. His identification
with Africa, enhanced by his association with poet Margaret Esse Danner from 1962 to 1964 and
study in Ghana in 1970, is evident in such poems as "African Suite" (After the Killing).
When "Ballad of Birmingham," written in response to the 1963 bombing of a church in which
four girls were killed, was set to music and recorded, Randall established Broadside Press in
1965, printing the poem on a single sheet to protect his rights. The first collection by the press
was Poem Counterpoem (1966) in which he and Danner each thematically matched ten poems on
facing pages. Broadside eventually published an anthology, broadsides by other poets, numerous
chapbooks, and a series of critical essays. These publications established the reputations of an
impressive number of African American poets now well known while providing a platform for
many others whose writing was more political than literary.

Following the 1967 riot in Detroit, Randall published Cities Burning (1968), a group of thirteen
poems, all but one previously uncollected. This pamphlet, like the first, contains poems selected
on the basis of theme and does not follow a chronological development in the author's work.
Fourteen love poems appeared in 1970 (Love You), followed by More to Remember (1971), fifty
poems written over a thirty-year period on a variety of subjects, and After the Killing (1973),
fifteen new poems that comment on such contemporary topics as contradictory attitudes during a
period of racial pride and nationalism.

Publication of A Litany of Friends (1981; rpt. 1983) followed several years of suicidal depression
that incapacitated Randall and put Broadside Press temporarily at risk. This period of recovery
was his most productive, comprising some of his most original--though not necessarily his best--
work. Included are eighty-four poems, thirty very recent ones and forty-six previously
uncollected.

On the basis of "Detroit Renaissance," published in Corridors magazine in 1980, the mayor of
Detroit named Randall poet laureate of that city in 1981.

A distinctive style is difficult to identify in Randall's poetry. In his early poems he was primarily
concerned with construction. Many of those in More to Remember are written in such fixed
forms as the haiku, triolet, dramatic monologue, and sonnet while others experiment with slant
rhyme, indentation, and the blues form. He later concentrated on imagery and phrasing, yet some
of his more recent work continues to suggest the styles of other poets. Although many of these
move with more freedom, originality, and depth of feeling, and encompass a wider range of
themes, others identifiable by printed date demonstrate a return to traditional form.

While Dudley Randall's reputation as a pioneer in independent African American book

publishing is secure, he is sure to be remembered for his poems as well, including "Booker T.
and W.E.B.," which succinctly summarizes philosophical differences between Booker T.
Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois in a simple dialogue; "Ballad of Birmingham," "Southern
Road," and "Souvenirs," all from Poem Counterpoem; "Roses and Revolutions," "Primitives,"
and "A Different Image" (Cities Burning); "Faces" and "Perspectives" (More to Remember);
"The Profile on the Pillow" and "Black Magic" (Love You); "Frederick Douglass and the Slave
Breaker" (After the Killing); and "A Poet Is Not a Jukebox" (A Litany of Friends).

See also: A. X. Nicholas, "A Conversation with Dudley Randall," in Homage to Hoyt Fuller, ed.
Dudley Randall, 1984, pp. 266-274. R. Baxter Miller, "Dudley Randall," in DLB, vol. 41, Afro-
American Poets since 1955, eds. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 1985, pp. 265-273.
 Betty DeRamus
Midway through funeral services for Detroit poet and publisher Dudley Randall, librarian
Malaika Wangara leaped up and started singing, "He was a friend of mine." Her strong-willed
alto rose and spread its wings, filling Plymouth United Church of Christ with soaring sweetness.

Wangara was not the only person who lifted her voice during Saturday services for Dudley
Randall, founder of the nationally known, Detroit-based Broadside Press.

Poets recited Randall's poems, a musician tinkled bells and squeezed fat, wet drops of the blues
from his harmonica and Randall's Kappa Alpha Psi brothers sang their fraternity song. Speakers
talked about the man who wore a tie, built his own house from the ground up, stayed married to
Vivian Barnett Spencer for 43 years and never quit being kind.      They called him a friend, a
mentor, an inspiration, a Boy Scout troop leader, a calming influence during the 1967 riot, a
Wayne County librarian, a poet-in-residence at University of Detroit and Detroit's poet laureate.

Most of all, people remembered him as the man who built a publishing company that helped lay
the foundation for much of the success of today's African-American writers. 

"Broadside Press was bigger in terms of impact than just the specific books," said Melba Boyd, a
Broadside Press poet and head of Wayne State University's Africana Studies department.

"As an independent press that was successful but small compared to mainstream (publishers), it
opened up the literary canon, and now mainstream publishers began publishing poetry and black
writers and other minority writers. It ... changed the whole character of American literature."

Randall was the other Berry Gordy, the one who never left the west side of Detroit, never made
millions and never became a glitter-sprinkled celebrity. Yet he, too, beamed black voices around
the world, receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996 from the National Endowment for
the Arts.

His stars weren't slinky singers or coordinated crooners. Randall showcased previously
unpublished poets and national figures such as Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, LeRoi Jones,
Alice Walker and Haki Madhubuti.

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks left Harper and Row to become a Broadside
poet. And Audre Lorde's 1973 Broadside book, From a Land Where Other People Live, was
nominated for a National Book Award.

Like Berry Gordy, who boxed and worked on an assembly line before founding Motown,
Randall didn't become a legend overnight. He worked for Ford, and labored at the post office
while earning degrees in English and library science.
According to the often-told story, Gordy set up Motown with an $800 loan from his family.
Randall began his publishing career with $12.

However, Randall became a publisher by chance. In response to a 1963 church bombing in

Alabama, he wrote"The Ballad of Birmingham," and his poem was set to music and recorded by
a folk singer. To protect his rights, Randall had it printed on a single sheet, or broadside, in 1965.
That was the start of Broadside Press.

The Press grew "by hunches, intuitions, trial and error," Randall once wrote, until it had
published 90 titles of poetry and had printed 500,000 books. In his spare bedroom, Randall
licked stamps and envelopes, packed books, read manuscripts, wrote ads and planned and
designed books.

Dudley Randall, 86, died Aug. 5, but speakers at the poet's funeral -- which he planned 15 years
ago -- said his influence remains strong.

"I am the man I am today in part because of Dudley Randall," said Madhubuti, poet and founder
of Chicago's Third World Press. "I ... stayed in his house. He taught me what was possible.
(Without black poetry) I had about as much promise as a raindrop in the desert."

"He was my friend and colleague in the community of poets who flourished during the 1950s
and 1960s in Detroit," added Naomi Long Madgett, poet and founder of Lotus Press.

"Through Lotus Press I followed in his footsteps and brought out his last book (A Litany of
Friends) in 1981. The song may be ended, but the legacy lives on."

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/life.htm