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,