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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1170-1171



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In Memoriam
Dudley Felker Randall
(1914-2000)


With the publication as a broadside of his widely known poem "Ballad of Birmingham"--written on the deaths of four little girls in the racist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963--Randall serendipitously launched the history-making Broadside Press.

The early Broadside Press publications included works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Naomi Long Madgett, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Margaret Danner, Etheridge Knight, Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni and Alvin Aubert. Appearing at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a number of these poets were foremost among African-American writers who joined in the formation of a new direction, a "second Black Renaissance," for African-American literature. Their dynamic creations testified to Dudley Randall's crucial role not only in the evolution of African-American poetry but in the civil rights cause as well.

Under Randall's energetic leadership, Broadside Press had become by 1970 the most successful independent poetry press in the nation, its publications affecting the range and complexity not only of African-American poetry, but of American poetry in general. By 1975 Broadside's list contained some 90 titles of poetry, with 500,000 books in print.

During this time Randall assisted the late Hoyt W. Fuller, his undergraduate classmate from Wayne State University in Detroit, in providing a forum for established and emergent voices in the influential Johnson Publications periodical he edited in Chicago: Negro Digest, renamed Black World. In addition to publishing Randall's own poetry and essays in it, Fuller consulted Randall on editorial matters that shaped the development of this important monthly journal of literature and sociopolitical commentary as a singular venue for African-American writers at a time when publication opportunities for them were extremely limited. [End Page 1170]

Randall's awards for his poetry and publishing achievements include Wayne State University's Thompkins Award for Poetry and Fiction in 1962 and 1966, the Michigan Council for the Arts Individual Artists Award in 1981, and the National Endowment for the Arts Life Achievement Award in 1986. Also in 1986, Randall was appointed poet laureate of Detroit by the late mayor Coleman A. Young, and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Wayne State University. The following year he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Michigan.

In 1996, Melba Boyd's documentary film The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press premiered at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, and in 1997 the Chrysler Corporation Fund endowed a scholarship in Randall's name in the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University.

Randall's collections of poetry include Poem Counterpoem (with Margaret Danner, 1966), Cities Burning (1968), Love You (1970), More to Remember (1971), After the Killing (1973), and A Litany of Friends (1981, 1983). He also edited several anthologies, including Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (with Margaret Burroughs), The Black Poets and For Hoyt, a tribute to Hoyt Fuller.

Dudley Randall was born January 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C. He spent the greater part of his life in Detroit, Michigan. After working at Ford Motor Company and serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Randall worked as a postal employee while earning degrees in English and Library Science from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, respectively. He served as a librarian at Morgan State University and Missouri's Lincoln University before returning to Detroit to a librarianship in the Wayne County Federated Library System, afterward at the University of Detroit where he was also poet-in-residence until his retirement in 1976.

All remembrances of Dudley Randall attest to his indomitable strength of character. His was a soft-spoken, gentle and sensitive, but no less impelling presence whose every action exemplified integrity, dedication, industry, and an abiding respect for scholarly endeavor.

He is survived by Vivian, his unwaveringly devoted wife of 43 years; his daughter by a previous marriage, Phyllis...

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