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,