A studio portrait of Dudley Randall, whose Broadside Press helped amplify the voices of prominent black poets. Credit Yancy Hughes/Job Trotter Foto, via Bentley Historical Library/University of Michigan.
Randall started the publishing house, which was based in Detroit, with his librarian’s paycheck, and it swiftly became a success, producing dozens of broadsides — a printing style in which just one side of the paper is used — as part of the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of African-American literature, theater, music and other arts.
“Black authors could not be published by white publications, white magazines or by white publishers,” Randall said in a 1973 interview with Speakeasy Culture, a literary publication out of Central Michigan University. “We had to do it ourselves.”
(Morgan Jerkins, “Overlooked No More: Dudley Randall, Whose Broadside Press Gave a Voice to Black Poets,” NYTimes, 2-13-19)
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