Ballad of Birmingham (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Randall was born in Washington, D.C., on January 14, 1914. His interest in poetry began when he was just a child and he published his first poem — a sonnet for which he won the prize of a dollar — in the Detroit Free Press on its “Young Poets’ Page.” His father was a minister who took him to see such influential speakers as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, and his mother was a teacher. Randall worked for the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, from 1932 to 1937, an experience that sharpened his awareness of the feelings and lives of working people and affected his later writing. He was employed at the U.S. Post Office in Detroit while working on his bachelor’s degree in English at Wayne State University, and he served in the Army Air Corps before finishing his degree in 1949. He received a master’s degree in Library Science from the University of Michigan in 1951 and went on to work as a librarian in Detroit. His interest in Russia led him to study and become fluent in the Russian language (from which he has frequently translated the work of other writers), and he established Broadside Press in 1965. He has won a number of awards for his literary contributions and was named the first Poet Laureate of Detroit in 1981.

In 1969, Paul Breman characterized Randall as “quietly dedicated to the revolution and quietly doing something about it.” Indeed, Randall’s work as Broadside’s editor has often been cited as his most important contribution to American letters. Beginning with “Ballad of Birmingham” in 1965 and his mythic, poetic rendering of Kennedy’s assassination in “Dressed All in Pink,” Randall’s own poems constituted the first two broadsides in his Broadside Series that published almost one hundred titles by 1982. For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, coedited with Margaret G. Burroughs, appeared as the press’s first collection, and Randall went on to publish what would be the first anthology of African-American poetry published by an African-American publisher — Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets — in 1969. Under Randall’s leadership, Broadside Press first published or gained the publishing loyalty of such key African-American writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez.

Randall’s own collections of poetry include Poem Counterpoem (1966) with Margaret Danner, a collection that juxtaposed his and Danner’s thematically linked poems; Cities Burning (1968), published following the Detroit riot of 1967; Love You (1970), a collection of fourteen love poems; More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades (1971); After the Killing (1973), which considers racism and nationalism; Broadside Memories: Poets I Have Known (1975), which includes selections of Randall’s memoirs; A Litany of Friends: New and Selected Poems (1981), the collection most closely following Randall’s experience of suicidal depression: and Homage to Hoyt Fuller (1984). He has edited a number of other collections, including the 1971 Bantam anthology The Black Poets, and he has published essays and collections of nonfiction as well.