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James Sullivan

[Dudley Randall's Detroit-based Broadside Press issued a series of African-American poetry broadsides.]

The first two in the series are poems by Randall himself: "Ballad of Birmingham" and "Dressed All in Pink." Folk singer Jerry Lewis had set them to music, and to ensure his own copyright of the texts, Randall published them as broadsides in 1965. In 1966, when he met Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, and Margaret Walker at Fisk University's first annual Writers Conference, he asked each of them for permission to print one of their already-published poems as a broadside--Hayden's "'Gabriel," Tolson's "The Sea-Turtle and the Shark," and Walker's "The Ballad of the Free" (Randall, Broadside 23). Randall also wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, asking permission to use one of her poems. She wrote back that he could pick any one he liked, and he chose "We Real Cool" (ibid. 8). And so he had his initial "Poems of the Negro Revolt" sequence. Most of the first twenty-four issues of......

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Approximate Word Count: 1196
Approximate Pages: 5 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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