Dudley Randall was an American poet and publisher. Randall was named the first poet laureate of Detroit in 1981. He founded and served as general editor for Broadside Press, which initially published his own writings and later those of such writers as Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni. During his lifetime, Randall published several poetry collections, including A Litany of Friends: New and Selected Poems and More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades.
Background
Dudley Randall was born on January 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C., the United States, to Arthur Randall II, a minister, and Ada Randall, a schoolteacher. Randall’s parents were both educated. His father was active in politics and often took Randall and his brothers to hear prominent black speakers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and James Weldon Johnson, leaders of the fledgling organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
His grandparents, Arthur and Missouri Randall were rare black farm owners. His grandmother was a founding member of the first black church in Macon, Georgia. His family moved to Detroit in 1920, where his father worked for Ford Motor Company.
Randall grew up among books, economic hardship (the depression) and the influence of Detroit’s unofficial Jim Crow segregation and racial hostility.
Education
A bright student, Randall graduated from Detroit’s Eastern High School early in 1930, then worked in a blast furnace unit at Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge foundry and as a Postal Service clerk and letter carrier. He served as a supply sergeant in the South Pacific in World War II before receiving a bachelor of arts degree in English from Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and a master’s in library science from the University of Michigan in 1951.
For the next twenty-five years, Randall would work as a librarian, first at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, then at Morgan State College (now University) in Baltimore, Maryland, and finally in 1956 in the Wayne County Federated Library System in his hometown of Detroit, where he moved from assistant branch librarian to branch librarian to head of the reference-interloan department.
In 1962 Randall became interested in Boone House, a black-oriented cultural center located in Detroit that offered poetry readings, art exhibits, jazz sessions, and other cultural activities. It was at a party at Boone House that Randall met Hoyt Fuller, editor of the periodical Black World and an important intellectual figure, and poet Margaret Danner. Every Sunday, Danner, and Randall read their poetry to audiences at Boone House. The two poets later collaborated on the Broadside Press's first book publication, Poem Counterpoem, which was published in 1966.
In 1963, a year of heightened civil rights activism, two startling events helped set in motion the forces that would convince Randall to start the Broadside Press. First was the September 1963 bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, that resulted in the deaths of four black children. In response to that tragic event, Randall wrote "The Ballad of Birmingham," a touching poem that takes the form of a conversation between a young black girl and her mother. Ironically, the child asks her mother for permission to go to a civil rights demonstration, but the mother makes her go to church, where she will supposedly be safe but is killed instead.
The second significant event of 1963 that Randall poeticized was the assassination of President Kennedy. "Dressed All in Pink" captures the tragedy of Kennedy's untimely death and the failed promise of Camelot in the image of Mrs. Kennedy's bloodstained dress turning from pink to dark red. Jerry Moore, a New York folksinger, had set both poems to music. In order to protect his copyright interest in the poems, Randall decided to publish them as broadsides, or single sheets, and copyright them.
In 1969 Randall edited and published a second anthology, Black Poetry. The idea for the book originated at the University of Michigan's Department of English, where both Randall and Robert Hayden were teaching. Randall's first major collection of poetry, More to Remember, was published in 1971 by Haki R. Madhubuti's Chicago-based Third World Press. It contained poems Randall had written during the past four decades, starting in the 1930s.
More to Remember followed two smaller chapbooks of Randall's poetry. Cities Burning, published by Broadside Press in 1968, contained poems that reflected the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s as well as poems Randall had written many years previously. Love You, published in 1970, revealed more of Randall's lyrical poetry and contained the notable verses, "The Profile on the Pillow" and "Sanctuary." Randall's other chapbook, After the Killing, was published in 1973 by Third World Press and would be his last book of verse until the 1981 collection, A Litany of Friends.
By the time Broadside Press was sold in 1977 to the Alexander Crummell Memorial Center, a church in Detroit, it was $30,000 in debt and a financial strain for Randall and his wife, Vivian. He regained ownership in the early 1980s, but in 1985 he sold the press again, this time to Hilda Vest, a poet, and her husband, Don, a businessman and activist.
In 2015, Broadside Press merged with Lotus Press, operated by Detroit poet Naomi Long Madgett. It exists today under the name Broadside Lotus Press.
Randall’s entire career was dedicated to poetry and poets. Through the Broadside Press, he provided black poets with a way to have their poems published at a time when it was very difficult for them to get their works in print. In addition, he edited anthologies of black poetry and was an accomplished poet in his own right. During his tenure at the press, Randall published more than 90 broadsides and 55 books, as well as a series of sound recordings.
By 1975, the press had published approximately ninety titles of poetry, and there were 500,000 books in print. The Broadside roster included noted poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Naomi Madgett, Robert Hayden, Etheridge Knight, Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, and introduced hundreds of new voices.
The Dudley Randall Poetry Prize was established in Randall’s honor in 1971 and is awarded each year to a University of Detroit student. In 1981, Randall was named poet laureate of Detroit by the current mayor Coleman A. Young.
In addition to this widespread recognition, his work has been widely anthologized, translated into several languages, included in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry, as well as the Norton Introduction to American Literature.
Randall was raised in a strict Christian home. His family attended Plymouth Congregationalist Church, where he was a Boy Scout, but he never was to be religious in his adult life.
Politics
As a child, Randall belonged to the Young Democrats.
Views
In the 1960s, Randall became involved in the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of African-American literature, theater, music, and other arts. Part of the movement's doctrine was a belief in the necessity of militant armed self-defense and the beauty and goodness of Blackness.
Quotations:
"Black authors could not be published by white publications, white magazines or by white publishers. We had to do it ourselves."
"My strongest motivations have been to get good black poets published, to produce beautiful books, help create and define the soul of black folk, and to know the joy of discovering new poets."
Personality
Randall’s development as a scholar and an intellectual constituted him as a quintessential Renaissance man, having translated poetry in Latin, French, and Russian. His travels throughout Europe, Russia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands infused an internationalist perspective, a cosmic balance and a political resolve that resisted any form of creative repression. Randall was fluent in Russian and later translated many Russian poems into English. Randall experimented with a variety of styles in his own poetry. His poetry is characterized by its simplicity and realism.
Before the publication of his book, Litany of Friends in 1981, Dudley Randall suffered deep suicidal depression, during which he created some of his most original poetry.
Interests
Russian literature and language
Politicians
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Writers
Aleksander Pushkin, Konstantin Simonov, Margaret Esse Danner, Malcolm X
Artists
Margaret Burroughs
Sport & Clubs
baseball
Music & Bands
blues
Connections
Randall was married three times over the course of his 86 years of life. He had one daughter, Phyllis Randall Sherron, by his first wife, Ruby Hudson. After Ruby, he married Mildred Pinckney on December 20, 1942, but their marriage was dissolved.
On May 4, 1957, Dudley Randall was united in marriage to Vivian Barnett Spencer, his wife of forty-three years.
Father:
Arthur Randall II
Mother:
Ada Viola Randall
Randall's earliest recollection of composing a poem was when his mother took him to a band concert. Impressed by the big bass drums and bass horns, the four-year-old came home and wrote a poem to the tune of "Maryland, My Maryland."
