Black Arts Poetry Film Series - Rainbow Black: The Poet Sarah Webster Fabio

A 30 minute film about Sarah Fabio a Bay Area poet, educator, and leading pioneer in the Black Studies and Black Arts movements.

Sarah defined Black poetry as “works containing themes drawn from and saturated with language, images, and rhythms of the African American experience.” In 1966, she performed at the First World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar, Senegal. Her poetry reflects the Black Arts movement with its trendy emphasis on the Black Aesthetic, yet her work is classic in its subtle blending of non-Western and Western literary metaphors.

As an educator, Sarah has been celebrated as the “Mother of Black Studies” for her pioneering work in the 1960s to establish programs at Oakland’s Merritt College, a focal point of the early Black Power movement in the San Francisco Bay Area and the University of California at Berkeley.