Poet, publisher, and founder of the Broadside
Press, Dudley Randall was born in Washington, D.C., in 1914. His
family moved to Detroit shortly thereafter. His first published
poem appeared in the Detroit Free
Press when he was just thirteen years old. Randall worked at
a post office while earning degrees in English and library science.
For the next five years Randall was a librarian at Morgan State and
Lincoln Universities, after which he returned to Detroit to a
position at the Wayne County Federated Library System. In 1969 he
became the librarian and poet in residence at the University of
Detroit until his retirement in 1974. Randall’s well-known poem
Ballad of Birmingham was
written in response to the 1963 church bombing where four young
black girls were killed. This became the first project of Randall’s
Broadside Press, which printed this poem to protect its rights. The
first collection of poetry printed by Broadside was Poem Counterpoem, in which ten poems
were thematically matched on facing pages. Broadside Press was
instrumental in establishing the reputations of many African
American poets and writers,
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