selection. Randall’sThe Black Poets (1971) enjoyed wide distribution in an inexpensive paperback format and corrected many of the deficiencies of previous black poetry anthologies. Presenting a full range of African American poetry from folklore and spirituals to the Black Nationalist poets of the late 1960’s, the anthology offered a substantial selection from each of its contributors and stressed the continuity of a rich oral tradition while delineating various periods in the history of black American poetry. It quickly became one of the most widely read and influential anthologies of its kind.

In his critical writings, Randall came to be known as a moderating voice, maintaining respect for poets of earlier periods while accepting the new directions of black poetry since the 1960’s. One important article, “The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties” (The Black Aesthetic, 1971), clearly establishes the vital role of such poets as Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others who wrote in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. In providing an essential chapter in black literary history, Randall, here and in other essays, countered eloquently the tendency for young black poets in the 1960’s to dismiss gifted, significant writers because they seemed too accommodationist. On the other hand, Randall’s productive generosity in publishing and reviewing introduced a great variety of young black poets to literary America and provided an unparalleled availability of black poetry, in general, not only to the black community but also to the mainstream reading public.

Two additional literary forms must be mentioned in assessing Randall’s career: interviews and translations. His insights into literary history, political developments, and his own methods of composition can be found in published interviews. Although such interviews are frequently useful in understanding his own work, they are also immensely instructional in the field of African American poetry. Randall’s translations from Russian, Latin, and French are also worthy of note. He published translations from major figures influential on his own poetic sensibilities, from Alexander Pushkin to K. M. Simonov. Translating from the Latin, he has mastered the classical lyricism of Catullus. From Paul Verlaine, Randall assimilated the influence of the French Symbolists.

While he became well practiced in classical and European forms and techniques, Randall studied equally thoroughly the folk forms of the African American heritage. In these forms, he absorbed the patterns of dialect and commonsense observation that informed much of the black poetry in the 1960’s. Much of this poetry—including some of Randall’s own—he made available on tape recordings, through Broadside Press. These tape recordings highlight the performance qualities of the black oral tradition. Randall himself was known as a gifted and effective reader of his own works.

His life having stabilized in an academic setting, the tempo of Randall’s literary activities quickened during the Civil Rights movement era. In 1963, the racially motivated bombing of a church in Birmingham and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led Randall to write “Ballad of Birmingham” (1965) and “Dressed All in Pink” (1965, revised 1967). The two poems, later set to music by Jerry Moore, not only spread Randall’s reputation but also inspired him to found the Broadside Press in 1965 in order to put poetry, in the form of attractive “broadsides,” into the African American household inexpensively. This treatment of poetry as a communal rather than a business enterprise brought Randall into alliance and fellowship with Margaret Danner (founder of Boone House, a black arts center) and Hoyt Fuller (editor of Black World), as well as with the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Gwendolyn Brooks.

In less than a decade, as evident from Randall’s Broadside Memories: Poets I Have Known (1975) and Broadside Treasures (1975; an anthology edited by Brooks at Randall’s request), a community of writers had grown around the Broadside Press to fill an honor roll of African American poets now familiar to readers. In addition to the works of Danner, Brooks, and Randall, the press has featured broadsides, posters, books, and audio recordings by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Robert Hayden, Haki R. Madhubuti, Amiri Baraka, Marvin X, Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Stephany, and numerous others. Among this group, not a few younger writers have become published thanks to Randall’s generous encouragement and assistance; in return, these writers have also offered him and one another an invaluable sense of community, fellowship, and friendship at a time when a system of mutual support was essential to the survival and development of African American literature. For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (1967), an anthology that Randall coedited with Margaret Burroughs to commemorate the Black Muslim leader assassinated in 1965, could be regarded as a rally in that direction.

Realizing that black poets had been suffering from a long history of exclusion by white publishers, Randall ventured further to edit and publish Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets (1969). This effort to find a forum for black poets and to assert their place in American literature culminated in The Black Poets (1971), a comprehensive anthology that Randall edited for publication by Bantam Books. Reprinted many times, the anthology is still one of the best single-volume sources available to general readers and specialists alike. It also stands as a milestone in American literature, in that black poetry as a tradition is now visible and can no longer be ignored by the canon and by academia. Randall has thus played a crucial role in repositioning black poetry from the margin to the center by means of a personal press that not only grew into a community but also outgrew itself into the canon.

Although the Broadside Press and other activities absorbed most of Randall’s energies, he published six collections of his own poems. His receptiveness to different styles, forms, and expressions makes it difficult to generalize about his poetry, but his earlier work tends to use a literary language characterized by formality, craftsmanship, meditation, and suggestiveness, whereas his later work (after 1971’s More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades) contains increased colloquialism, shock effects, and experimentation. At home with many techniques but never pursuing them for their own sake, Randall intentionally eschews obscurity, reasoning that lucidity can reach a larger and more varied audience; perhaps for this reason his poetry has been widely anthologized. He has won many honors, including Wayne State University’s Tompkins Award (1962 and 1966), a Kuumba Liberation Award (1973), a Literature Award from the Michigan Foundation for the Arts (1976), and other awards from the International Black Writers’ Conferences and the Howard University Institute of Afro-American Studies (1977). He was named a distinguished alumnus by both the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. In 1978, the University of Detroit, where he served as a university librarian, poet-in-residence, and lecturer until his retirement in 1975, conferred on him the honorary degree of doctor of literature. These honors were crowned by his appointment as the first poet laureate of Detroit in 1981.

Randall has commented that he considers himself to be a writer of “poetry of the Negro.” The importance of this assessment hinges on the issue of his self-identity as a black American poet. Reflecting on his poetry in 1980, Randall identified “Zasha” as his muse (“My Muse”). Comparable to Catullus’s Lesbia, William Shakespeare’s dark lady, Dante’s Beatrice, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, Zasha is a beautiful black woman who possesses a combination of tenderness and wrath—a description that in fact applies to Randall’s poetry as a whole. Highly conscious of the special place of the black poet in America, Randall satirizes white critics who privilege their values (such as white unicorns) as universal and impose them upon black poets (“Black Poet, White Critic”). Furthermore, he chastises white poets of the Beat generation for being preposterous and admonishes them to act responsibly (“Poet”). His insistence on the black aesthetic notwithstanding, he also distances himself from what he views as the hypocrisy, pretentiousness, and treachery of certain Black Nationalists (“Nationalists”; “Informer”). It is not surprising to find him portray the ironic shame of a militant black poet who hangs himself after a white suburban woman has commented that his “scariest poems” are not bitter enough (“The Militant Black Poet”).

Randall’s use of the word “Negro” during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when such terms as “black” and “Afro-American” were gaining currency, seems to set him apart from other black writers; at the same time, however, his deeper concern for the substance of African Americans is clear in his argument that “the spirit informs the name,/ not the name the spirit.” As can be seen in “Ancestors,” in which he notes with humor his pride in having a swineherd and not a king for an ancestor, it is a humanism rooted in ethnic pride, not facile ethnocentrism, that defines his sense of identity. Free from dogmatic prescriptions from both white and black critics, Randall has made it plain, in “A Poet Is not a Jukebox,” that he cannot be told to write for the sake of political expediency or propagandist ends.

Beyond his own poetry, it is as an editor and publisher that Dudley Randall’s literary talents have been most significant. Randall’s principal literary accomplishment is the founding of Broadside Press in September, 1965. With an initial investment of twelve dollars, he began by issuing a run of one broadside (a poem printed on a single sheet). These inexpensive broadsides could be folded and carried to be read on lunch breaks, on buses, or virtually anytime, anywhere. They could also be posted just about anywhere as well; thus, Randall’s idea succeeded in bringing poetry to the ordinary citizens of the community: The venture was more educational than commercial. (This idea has since been imitated by small presses all over the country.) Within a few years, Broadside was publishing anthologies, volumes by new poets, criticism, and recordings. By example, other black writers also began to establish independent presses that specialized in reaching the black community with inexpensive editions of poetry, most notably Haki R. Madhubuti’s Third World Press. One can fairly credit Randall, then, as one of the most influential black publishers of his time: His refusal to place commercial interests ahead of literary education has helped to inform a whole generation of the richness and diversity of black poetic traditions. In doing so, he has introduced new African American writers, and he has fostered an awareness of the reciprocity between black writers in the United States and Africa.

Randall’s own poetry, however, has not been without acclaim in its own right. While the critical reception in reviews has been laudatory, however, thorough critical appraisal has been oddly sparse, at best. Despite the lack of proper critical assessment, Randall remains a significant member of the “post-renaissance” generation that followed the Harlem Renaissance. Along with Hayden and Brooks, he has assimilated into his poetry the variety of techniques and experimentation offered by modernism without extensive imitation of any of the modernists. Despite his lack of wide publication until the early 1960’s, Randall has pursued poetry consistently with an openness to sources the world over as well as with a persistent study of the literary heritage of blacks. Fusing the eloquence and power of the classical lyric with the terseness and common sense of the oral tradition, yet remaining in the context of modernism, Randall’s voice concentrates on the integrity of craft, music, and delight in his poetry. His rhythm is graceful without becoming strained, his tone compassionate without becoming sentimental. Randall’s images are precise without becoming obscure and his diction is relevant without becoming contrived. His themes are universal without becoming clichéd. Even without widespread critical evaluation, Randall’s work has not gone unnoticed. In 1962, he received the Tompkins Award from Wayne State University for both poetry and fiction, and in 1966, he received the same award for poetry. In recognition of his contributions to black literature, he received the Kuumba Liberation Award in 1973. He was awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships in 1981 and 1986, and was named the first poet laureate of the city of Detroit in 1981. In 1996, Randall received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

As a poet, Randall is particularly known for his treatment of cultural and political issues such as African American heritage, racial conflicts, the civil rights struggle, urban realities in America, and life in the modern age. Many of these concerns are already evident in early poems such as 1948’s “Roses and Revolutions.” During a meditation, the prophetic persona in this poem enters into two apocalyptic visions of the entire continent. The first concerns the reality of urban America in the modern era, a world of darkness where millions of people suffering from pain, alienation, violence, racism, and other social ills regret life and cry for death. In the second vision, he sees an enlightened world in which “the bombs and missiles lie at the bottom of the ocean/ like the bones dinosaurs buried under the shale of eras/ 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.” The poem concludes with a radiant explosion that embodies at once the terror of the atomic bomb and the splendor of the French Revolution. Reminiscent of the visions of heaven and hell portrayed by Dante and William Blake, the poem established Randall’s reputation as a poet.

Other examples representative of Randall’s commitment to the cause of African Americans include “Frederick Douglass and the Slave Breaker” and “Booker T. and W. E. B.,” which encapsulate for the general reader the fundamental issues involved in the struggle of African Americans for freedom, identity, and democracy. In connection with the struggle is a group of poems in which the development of ethnic consciousness recurs as a motif. In “A Different Image,” he calls for the reanimation of “the mask,” the shattering of “the icons of slavery and fear,” and the affirmation of the “classic bronze of Benin.” In “The Southern Road,” which describes the return of a Northern black to the South in search of his roots, Randall poignantly insists on the remembrance of a painful legacy. Comparing the South to a scar left on his father’s flesh, he recognizes the South as the source of his grief but at the same time declares his duty to love and visit it (see also “Legacy: The South”). This historical sense of ethnicity is further exemplified in “Memorial Wreath,” in which Randall pays tribute to the black soldiers who served in the Union Army during the Civil War and asserts that “American earth is richer for your bones;/ Our hearts beat prouder for the blood we inherit.”

Randall’s affirmation of ethnicity often entails the rejection of the exclusive practices of the dominant culture—hence his character Sam’s denunciation of “the magic melting pot,” out of which he has been thrown a thousand times (“The Melting Pot”). Nevertheless, Randall’s poetry is notable for its relevance beyond the African American community. His testimony to the turmoils of the civil rights era in “Ballad of Birmingham” and “Dressed All in Pink,” for example, exploit the ironic and suggestive naïveté characteristic of the ballad form to give memorable poetic expression to the feelings of an entire nation.

It is significant that Randall’s poetry has assumed an increasingly nonsectarian character. He is, of course, mortified by the death of black leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. (“Blood Precious Blood”), and disgusted with traitors to the Civil Rights movement (“Informer”; “F.B.I. Memo”). He is also, however, impatient with the arrogance of activists who attach too much importance to themselves (“Seeds of the Revolution”), with hypocrites who abuse the cause of Black Nationalism (“Nationalist”; “Words Words Words”), with black males who pretend to be virile by claiming that “white boys are all faggots” (“Tell It Like It Is”), and with those possessed by bloodthirstiness (“Put Your Muzzle Where Your Mouth Is”). In “Abu,” he vilifies a “stone black revolutionary” for his terrorist threats to bomb the city hall and assassinate a rich white liberal who “gave only half/ a million/ to N.A.A.C.P.” As a staunch critic of extremities, Randall is at his best when he confronts his readers’ consciences with the consequences of acts of violence, as in “Primitives,” in which he laments humanity’s failure to exorcise the demonic horror of “hate deified,/ fears and/ guilt conquering,/ turning cities to/ gas, powder and a/ little rubble.” Judging by his later poems (for example “Beasts,” which identifies bloodthirsty human beings with beasts, and “After the Killing,” which mocks the will to kill as the governing principle of humanity), it is apparent that Randall has never slackened his appeal to the nation as a whole to live and let live, to be civilized, and above all to be human. His satire of U.S. war efforts in Vietnam (“Straight Talk from a Patriot”; “Daily News Report”) is but an enlargement of this appeal. It is in this ultimate appeal to humanity that Randall has been recognized as a rare humanist.

Randall’s humanistic bent is also evident in his treatment of the underclass of American society. In his snapshots of characters ranging from criminals (“The Line-Up”) and prisoners (“Jailhouse Blues”) to ghetto girls (“Ghetto Girls”) and prostitutes (“The Aged Whore”), Randall invariably underscores the predicaments of people who are being dehumanized. Paradigmatically, he would highlight the injury the modern age has done to humanity (see “Old Witherington,” a poem about an aging and forgotten man making a spectacle of his drunkenness while brandishing a knife at teasing children); at the same time, however, he also restores his characters’ dignity by identifying himself with them (in “Bag Woman,” the poet surprises readers with the claim, “Sister . . . But I know that I am you”) or by reassuring them of his recognition of their irreducible significance (in “George,” the poet encourages an ailing coworker by using the same words the latter had used to encourage him when he was an apprentice). By thus immortalizing personages from among the underprivileged in spite of their otherwise fated commonality, Randall is virtually insisting on the necessity of including the human factor in the definition of modernity itself.

Randall’s humanistic temper, in fact, permeates his poetry as a whole. Because of this temper, his satires are typically aimed at those who scandalize mankind (such as the philanthropist in “Interview”) and those who abuse the meaning of life (such as the intellectual in “The Trouble with Intellectuals”). Such a temper, which can be found in Randall’s poems ranging from the private to the public, is concomitant with the tragic nature of life in the modern world: In a love poem such as “The Profile on the Pillow,” the lovers’ consummation of love is overshadowed by the prospect of their being consumed in a holocaust, whereas in a war poem such as “Lost in the Mails,” a letter full of misspelled words written by the mother of a soldier evokes all at once the double tragedy of the living and the dead.

As a poet, critic, editor, and publisher, Randall serves as an important link both between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement and between African American and mainstream culture. In developing the African American tradition and nurturing its community of writers while at the same time fostering an independent and open mind of his own, he has enlarged the expressive capabilities, heightened the intellectual interests, and deepened the emotional contents of black literature. Above all, informed by a humanism rooted in his ethnicity and humanity, Randall’s own poetry is an important statement of ethics and aesthetics.