Explore the way these poets examine racism in their culture

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Explore the ways these poets examine racism in their culture

This is an essay in which I plan to look at poetry from a different culture. The culture which I am looking at is black Americans and the three poems that I am going to compare are all from around the 1960s. The poems that I am going to compare are; the Ballad of Birmingham, Incident and the Hurricane.

        The first poem I am going to look at is the Ballad of Birmingham. It was written to acknowledge the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15 1963, where a dynamite bomb went off in a black church, killing four children. This poem is written as a conversion between a mother and a child. It talks about how the child wished to protest, ‘to make our country free’, and how the mother would not let her child as it was too dangerous and the child could end up in losing her life. Instead the mother suggests that her daughter goes to the church instead ‘and sing in the children’s choir’. The next verse describes the child getting ready for church and gives the impression that the girl is really excited about going to church. In the next verse is a sudden change of mood when it says ‘but that smile was the last smile, to come upon her face’. Then the last two verses describe the explosion and the terror that the mother faced in looking for her child.

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        The second poem that I am going to look at is Incident. It was written by Countee Cullen. This poem is a very short and simple one. In it the author tells the reader about how when he was only eight years old and was riding through Baltimore and how he saw ‘a Baltimorean, keep looking straight at me’. Cullen then describes how he smiled at this Baltimorean which, to me, implies that he was only looking to make a new friend here when he was called ‘nigger’. This shows how he was innocent to the racial discrimination that was ...

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