Dudley Randall

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Dudley Randall (January 14, 1914 – August 5, 2000) was an African-American poet and poetry publisher from Detroit, Michigan.

In 1965, he founded Broadside Press, which published many influential African-American writers, including Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, and others.

Randall's poetry is characterized by simplicity, realism, and what one critic has coined the "liberation aesthetic." "A Poet is not a Jukebox," "Booker T.," and W.E.B. are two of his more well-known poems. "The Pillow Profile" and "The Profile on the Pillow."

Life

Dudley Randall was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Arthur George Clyde (a Congregation Minister) and Ada Viola (Bradley) Randall (a teacher). Randall was the third of five children, including James, Arthur, Esther, and Phillip. His family immigrated to Detroit in 1920, and he married Ruby Hands in 1935, and soon after had a child, Phyllis Ada. Randall married Mildred Pinckney in 1942, but this marriage did not last. He married Vivian Spencer in 1957.

Randall began to write poetry at a young age. In 1927, his first published poem, a sonnet, appeared in the Detroit Free Press at the age of 13. On the "Young Poets Page," the sonnet received the first prize of one dollar. Randall's father brought him and his brothers to hear influential African-American writers and artists speak, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Francis White, James Weldon Johnson, and others. He worked in a Ford Motor Company foundry in Dearborn, Michigan, from 1932 to 1937 after graduating from Eastern High School in 1930. He served in the military from 1938 to 1943 and served in the Navy during World War II. When attending Wayne State University in Detroit, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1949, he was working at a post office. Randall earned his Master's degree in Library Science at the University of Michigan in 1951. He served as a librarian at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, and later at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. He returned to Detroit in 1956 to work with the Wayne County Federated Library System as the head of the reference interlibrary loan department. Randall, a reference librarian at the University of Detroit Mercy (now the University of Detroit Mercy), served as the University's Poet-in-Residence from 1969 to 1976. In his honour, the Dudley Randall Poet-in-Residence Award was established in 1971 and is now an annual event at the University as the Dudley Randall Poetry Competition.

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