Birmingham, 1963 by Carole Boston Weatherford

Bibliography
Weatherford, Carole Boston. 2007. Birmingham, 1963. Honesdale, Pa.: Wordsong. ISBN 1590784405

Plot Summary

This is a free verse fictional account of the events that happened in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.  Told through the eyes of a soon to be ten year old girl whose family was involved in the civil rights movement, we hear her version of the events that led up to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.  Beginning with a student protest that led Birmingham police to unleash dogs and fire hoses on the children, to the march on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous speech and finally to the fateful day where her church was bombed and four young girls lost their lives.  Readers are brought back to a time in history where equality was just a dream.  

Critical Analysis

This free verse poem uses long couplets to create a somber and serious flow when reading silently or aloud.  There is no use of rhyme in this book because it would take away from the meaning and subject matter of the book.  Metaphors can be seen throughout the poem with specific examples being "Mama, Daddy, and I stood at Lincoln's feet/While King's dream woke the nation from a long night of wrongs." and "Someone tucked a bundle of dynamite/Under the church steps, then lit the fuse of hate.". This book also uses sensory words that help the reader to imagine what is happening as they are reading.  Examples of this are "snarling dogs", a "soft kiss", and "clammy palms".  

The author of this book did a great job capturing the emotion of such a tumultuous time in history.  Sorrow and hope are both seen in the same poem as the little girl talks about being sprayed with a fire hose on one page and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on another page.  The narrator makes readers feel what she went through on the day of the bombing and ended the poem with a powerful statement about how she wished she was still nine years old and that that day had never happened.  

The pictures in the book pair perfectly with the poem.  Each picture is a real life still of the events that happened in Birmingham so that the reader has an actually picture of what the narrator is talking about.  The pictures are very powerful and include pictures of the church before and after the bombing as well as pictures of the four girls who died.  

Review Excerpts   

• Library Media Collection, starred review- "This is a book that should be in every library collection."
• Kirkus Reviews-"It's a gorgeous memorial to the four killed on that horrible day"

Connections

*The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis ISBN 9780440228004

*Depending on the age of the reader, view parts or all of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute interactive online gallery at http://rg.bcri.org/gallery/