If one reads the poem without knowing that little girls were killed in the Birmingham Bombing because they were in the church for Sunday school, and that church was bombed, then the poem still remains moving but puzzling. The irony of the mother sending her child to church because it's safer than marching in the streets for freedom is lost without the knowledge that the child in the poem would most likely have survived if she had been in the streets rather than in the church.

Likewise, the reader needs to know that the poem's speaker is an African-American child because without that knowledge the "dogs on the street" and other violent images in the poem seem exaggerated or out of place in the America that most Americans were privileged to experience during that time period. The fact that the speaker is a black child shows why the mother is so concerned about her safety.