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 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four girls were killed. Randall's poetry is characterized by simplicity, realism, and what one critic has called the "liberation aesthetic." 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". Life Dudley Randall was born on January 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C., the son of Arthur George Clyde (a Congregational Minister) and Ada Viola (Bradley) Randall (a teacher). Randall was the third of five children, including James, Arthur, Esther, and Phillip. His family moved to Detroit in 1920, and he married his first wife Ruby Hands in 1935, and soon after had a daughter, Phyllis Ada. This marriage dissolved, and Randall married Mildred Pinckney in 1942, but this marriage did not last either. In 1957, he married Vivian Spencer. Randall developed an interest in poetry at a young age. In 1927, at the age of 13, his first published poem, a sonnet, appeared in the Detroit Free Press. The sonnet won the first prize of one dollar on the "Young Poets Page." Early inspiration stemmed from Randall's father taking him and his brothers to hear prominent African-American writers and artists speak, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Francis White, James Weldon Johnson, and others. After graduating from Eastern High School in 1930, he worked in a foundry of the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, from 1932 to 1937. He also worked as a clerk at a post office in Detroit from 1938 to 1943 and served in the military during World War II. He was working at a post office while attending Wayne State University in Detroit, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1949. Randall then completed his master's degree in Library Science at the University of Michigan in 1951. He worked as a librarian at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, and later at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. In