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 Baptist church that Martin Luther King, Jr belonged to in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four girls were killed. Randall's poetry is characterized by simplicity and realism. 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".
Read more about Dudley Randall: Life and Work, Further Reading
Famous quotes by dudley randall:
“and men strive with each other not for power or the accumulation of paper
but in joy create for others the house, the poem, the game of
athletic beauty.
Then washed in the brightness of the vision,
I saw how in its radiance would grow and be nourished and suddenly
burst into terrible and splendid bloom
the blood-red flower of revolution.”
—Dudley Randall (b. 1914)
“Black girl black girl
lips as curved as cherries
full as grape bunches
sweet as blackberries”
—Dudley Randall (b. 1914)
“Fit gravefellows you are for Lincoln, Brown
And Douglass and Toussaint. . . all whose rapt eyes
Fashioned a new world in this wilderness.
American earth is richer for your bones;
Our hearts beat prouder for the blood we inherit.”
—Dudley Randall (b. 1914)