ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three poems about the Sixteenth Street Church bombing, each published within ten years of the tragedy, when its memory would still have been vivid in the US popular imagination. Poetry about the Sixteenth Street Church bombing in Birmingham can play a pivotal role in this change-making process. The poets-Michael Harper, Langston Hughes, and Alice Walker-are well known and widely anthologized, although readers may not be familiar with their civil rights movement poetry. Walker's final question about knowing "the arsonist" speaks to the conspiratorial nature of the act of "winking at a funeral". "The conflict that made Birmingham America's Armageddon in 1963 was the "class warfare" that had always threatened the confidence of a young nation founded on the preposterous principle of equality". The local news media cast the murdered girls as martyrs, commentary in the black Birmingham World predicting, this is an unforgettable day in our nation, in world history.
