The city of Birmingham was not the original destination for the Watsons. Christopher Paul Curtis got the idea for the book from a trip he had taken with his own family several years earlier.
His wife’s sister had moved to Florida and they decided to drive there from Flint, Michigan to pay her a visit. He and his wife had very different plans on how to get there. His wife had a plan for every step of the way while he wanted to drive there nonstop. To keep himself awake on the long drive, Christopher started composing a story about a family taking a similar trip. This family would turn into “The Watsons” and their destination would be Florida.
As he started to put the story on paper, he couldn’t come up with anything after getting the family to Florida so he put it aside. One day his son brought home a poem by Dudley Randall called “Ballad of Birmingham,” about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. As soon as he heard the poem, he knew that’s where the Watsons would be headed!
Click on the link below to read the poem.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175900
