Sarah Webster Fabio

Sarah Ann Webster was born on the twentieth of January 1928 in Nashville, Tennessee, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson Webster, a Pullman porter, and Mayme Louise Storey Webster. A precocious child, she graduated from Nashville's Pearl High School in 1943 at the age of fifteen and entered Spelman College in Atlanta before returning home to complete her studies at Fisk University, where she read poetry under Arna Bontemps and took her degree in 1946.

Marriage to Cyril Fabio and the raising of five children delayed her further study until 1963, when she enrolled at San Francisco State College. She earned her master's degree there in 1965 and joined the faculty of Merritt College in Oakland, then a crucible of Black political and cultural awakening in the West.

Teaching at Merritt from 1965 to 1968, Fabio was credited with introducing the ideas of the Black Arts Movement to Bay Area students, and she went on to help establish some of the first Black studies programs at institutions including the California College of Arts and Crafts and the University of California, Berkeley. A poet as well as an educator, she published Saga of a Black Man (1968), Black Talk: Shield and Sword (1973), and her seven-volume work Rainbow Signs (1973), and recorded her verse for Folkways Records.

After further teaching at Oberlin College and pursuing doctoral study, she died of cancer in Pinole, California, on the seventh of November 1979, at the age of fifty-one. A mother of Black studies and a voice of the Black Arts Movement, Sarah Webster Fabio is honored for words that gave a people back their own reflection.