Dudley Randall was born in Washington, DC in 1914. His family moved to Detroit, Michigan when he was three years old. With the exception of years spent in the Army and a few teaching jobs, Randall would live the rest of his life in Detroit. Following WWII, Randall began work as a librarian. A lifelong writer of poetry, he began to receive national notice for his writing, namely the poem “Booker T. and W.E.B.” and, later, “Ballad of Birmingham,“ an account of the Birmingham church bombing of 1963.
In 1965, Randall founded Broadside Press. When the folksinger, Jerry Moore, set “Ballad of Birmingham” to music—with Randall’s permission—Randall devised a plan to secure the copyright for the poem. He used $12 to print 500 copies of “Ballad of Birmingham” as a broadside. From this start, Broadside Press would grow into a vital part of the larger Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70, adding it’s voice to a group of artists and writers focused on Black liberation and the development of an aesthetic created for and by African Americans.
“Broadside Press is, in embryo, one of the institutions that black people are creating by trial and error and out of necessity in our reaching for self-determination and independence.”
