Dudley Randall (January 14, 1914 – August 5, 2000) was an African-American poet and poetry publisher from Detroit, Michigan. He founded a pioneering publishing company called Broadside Press in 1965, which published many leading African-American writers, among them Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, and others.
Randall's most famous poem is "The Ballad of Birmingham," written in response to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four girls were killed. Randall's poetry is characterized by simplicity, realism, and what one critic has called the "liberation aesthetic." Other well-known poems of his include "A Poet is not a Jukebox", "Booker T. and W.E.B.", and "The Profile on the Pillow".
Life
Dudley Randall was born on January 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C., the son of Arthur George Clyde (a Congregational Minister) and Ada Viola (Bradley) Randall (a teacher). Randall was the third of five children, including James, Arthur, Esther, and Phillip. His family moved to Detroit in 1920, and he married his first wife Ruby Hands in 1935, and soon after had a daughter, Phyllis Ada. This marriage dissolved, and Randall married Mildred Pinckney in 1942, but this marriage did not last either. In 1957, he married Vivian Spencer.
Randall developed an interest in poetry at a young age. In 1927, at the age of 13, his first published poem, a sonnet, appeared in the Detroit Free Press. The sonnet won the first prize of one dollar on the "Young Poets Page." Early inspiration stemmed from Randall's father taking him and his brothers to hear prominent African-American writers and artists speak, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Francis White, James Weldon Johnson, and others. After graduating from Eastern High School in 1930, he worked in a foundry of the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, from 1932 to 1937. He also worked as a clerk at a post office in Detroit from 1938 to 1943 and served in the military during World War II. He was working at a post office while attending Wayne State University in Detroit, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1949. Randall then completed his master's degree in Library Science at the University of Michigan in 1951. He worked as a librarian at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, and later at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1956, he returned to Detroit to work at the Wayne County Federated Library System as head of the reference interlibrary loan department. From 1969 to 1976 Randall was a reference librarian at the University of Detroit (now the University of Detroit Mercy), and served also as the University's Poet-in-Residence. In his honor, the Dudley Randall Poet-in-Residence Award was established in 1971 and is still an annual event at the University as the Dudley Randall Poetry Contest.
Work
In 1966, Broadside Press published Poem Counterpoem, authored by Randall with Margaret Danner, founder of Boone House, a black cultural center in Detroit where they both read their work. In the words of R. Baxter Miller, "Perhaps the first of its kind, the volume contains ten poems each by Danner and Randall. The poems are alternated to form a kind of double commentary on the subjects they address in common. Replete with allusions to social and intellectual history, the verses stress nurture and growth. In "The Ballad of Birmingham" Randall establishes racial progress as a kind of blossoming, as he recounts the incident." Randall's next publication was Cities Burning (1968), a group of thirteen poems, in response to a riot in Detroit. Another fourteen poems appeared in Love You (1970), followed by More to Remember (1971) and After the Killing (1973).
Naomi Long Madgett writes: "His interest in Russia, apparent in his translations of poems by Aleksander Pushkin ("I Loved You Once", in After the Killing) and Konstantin Simonov ("My Native Land" and "Wait for Me" in A Litany of Friends), was heightened by a visit to the Soviet Union in 1966. His identification with Africa, enhanced by his association with poet Margaret Esse Danner from 1962 to 1964 and study in Ghana in 1970, is evident in such poems as "African Suite" (After the Killing)."
Randall received many awards throughout his career, including:
1962 and 1966: the Wayne State Tompkins Award for poetry and for poetry and fiction 1973: Kuumba Liberation Award 1975: Plaque as Distinguished Alumnus from the University of Michigan 1977: International Black Writers' Conference Award 1981: Creative Artist Award in Literature, Michigan Council for the Arts