While the Watsons are a fictional family, they experience historically authentic racism such as having to strategically map out "safe" stops during their road trip, and their journey ends with with an imagined depiction of the real life 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. While young Joey's life is spared in the novel, Kenny is witness to the death of others, mirroring the loss of the actual bombing by Ku Klux Klansmen in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday, September 15, 1963, which killed four African-American girls (see photos and names above).
When it was written...The Watsons Go to Birmingham is a rare example of a book featuring African American characters and written by an African American author. The lack of diverse books in American publishing was notably highlighted in 1965, when Nancy Larrick published "The All-White World of Children's Books." She found that "only 6.7 percent of the 5,206 children's books launched from 1962 to 1964 by the 63 responding publishers included one or more African American characters, with many portrayed in biased and stereotypical ways" (Micklos, 1996, p. 61).
Although efforts were made to increase minority representation in children's books, in 1995 - the year that The Watsons Go to Birmingham was published - only "one hundred books by African American authors were published and the numbers have continued to ebb and flow, averaging about 85 books per year" (Horning, 2009, p. 13). Reading it today...
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Ballad of BirminghamCurtis was inspired to have the Watson family travel to Birmingham after his son shared the poem "Ballad of Birmingham" with him.
Dudley Randall (1914-2000) wrote "Ballad of Birmingham" in response to the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Similar to Curtis, Randall started off working at the Ford Motor Company, and interestingly remarked "that a wordless occupation, one that is rhythmical and monotonous, helps the creative process" (Dudley Randall, 2005). Of note, when Randall wrote "Ballad of Birmingham, he was working as a librarian.
After folksinger Jerry Moore set "Ballad of Birmingham" to music (song embedded above), Randall was inspired to pursue publishing so that he could copyright his work. He ended up printing "Ballad of Birmingham as an elegiac broadside card (see below), which stylistically connected it with a funerary tradition, "as a material expression of shared grief...a site for recognizing a shared emotional and political response" (Sullivan, 1997).
Going on to print the works of others, Randall and Broadside Press became known for having "provided black poets with a way to have their poems published at a time when it was very difficult for them to get their works in print" (Dudley Randall, 2005).
Remembered "as an influential anchor of the flourishing Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s" (Dudley Randall, 2005), Randall's influence continues to surface. After more than four decades, for instance, "Ballad of Birmingham" was revived in music (song embedded above) by students from Tennessee State University (Moore, 2005). His words continue to resonate.
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Images
- Banner image by O'Halloran, Thomas J., photographer - Cropped from the following source: This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.04298: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3265629
- Four girls image: https://randomlyreading.blogspot.com/2013_09_01_archive.html
- Flint River image by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.
- Charleston shooting memorial service image by Nomader - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41051271
- #BlackLivesMatter image byy The All-Nite Images - https://www.flickr.com/photos/otto-yamamoto/15305646874/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38122173
- Ballad of Birmingham broadside cover: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/ballad.htm