Broadside Press

The Paczki Principle

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A little girl asks permission to attend a civil rights rally in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. But her mother is worried for her, and instead sends her to church. There, along with 3 other young girls, she is killed by a bomb planted by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Dudley Randall had been writing poetry all his life. Once, at the age of 13, Randall won a poetry contest sponsored by the Detroit Free Press. The newspaper published his poem and awarded him $1. It was the most recognition he would receive for his poetry for the next 37 years. But so moved was he by the killing at the church, that Randall wrote the Ballad of Birmingham, and thus set in motion the seeds of Broadside Press.

Folk singer Jerry Lewis set the Ballad of Birmingham to music and recorded it. To mark his copyright, Randall published the poem on a "broadside," a single poem printed on a large sheet of paper.

The next year he published a small book called "Poem Counterpoem," and that was followed by the anthology "For Malcolm X," which immediately sold more than 8,000 copies. Broadside was on the map.

Randall eventually resigned his job in the Detroit Public Library system to devote full time to Broadside Press. Ten years later, working out of his house, Randall had become a major outlet for African American poetry. Sales of individual volumes exceeded the usual figures for university or trade publishers.

In 1981, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young named Dudley Randall as Detroit's first Poet Laureate. Retiring from literary life, Randall sold Broadside Press in 1985. The press still operates in Detroit.

In an obituary in the Detroit News, Randall, who died in 2000, was described as "the other Berry Gordy, the one who never left the west side of Detroit, never made millions and never became a glitter-sprinkled celebrity. Yet he, too, beamed black voices around the world."

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On "Ballad of Birmingham"