![]() ![]() ![]() And for Walter, the war was just beginning. This paper aims at examining how Anthony Groomss novel Bombingham has contributed to representing black characters and constructing a black identity that. In the streets of Birmingham, ordinary citizens risked their lives to change America. Bombingham, the 2001 debut novel by American poet Anthony Grooms, follows Walter Burke, a nineteen-year-old African-American soldier in Vietnam. From a tortured past lingered questions of faith, and a terrible family crisis found its climax as the city did the same. As the great movement swelled around them, the Burkes faced tremendous obstacles of their own. Their paper route never took them to the white areas of town. Walter and Lamar were always aware of the terms of segregation-the horrendous rules and stifling reality. The juxtaposition is so powerful-between war-torn Vietnam and terror-filled “Bombingham”-that he is drawn back to the summer that would see his transition from childish wonder at the world to his certain knowledge of his place in it. But all he can think of is his childhood friend Lamar, the friend with whom he first experienced the fury of violence, on the streets of Birmingham, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. N his barracks, Walter Burke is trying to write a letter to the parents of a fallen soldier, an Alabama man who died in a muddy rice paddy. ![]()
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