Sarah Webster Fabio

Sarah Ann Webster was born on the twentieth of January 1928 at Nashville, Tennessee, the daughter of Thomas Webster and Mamie Lockhart Webster. She was educated at the Pearl High School of Nashville and at Spelman College, completing the bachelor's at Spelman in 1946. She married the chemist Cyril Leslie Fabio Jr. the same year. The Fabio household moved to Tennessee State University, where Cyril took an academic appointment in the chemistry department, and across the next sixteen years she completed the master's at San Francisco State College in 1965 — at the age of thirty-seven — and took her first faculty appointment at the Merritt College in Oakland in 1966.

She entered Merritt at the moment of the founding of the Black Power movement on the campus. The student-led Soul Students Advisory Council at Merritt — which included among its leadership Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who would in October 1966 found the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense from the Merritt campus — petitioned the college administration for the establishment of a Black studies programme. Sarah Webster Fabio was the first faculty member to support the petition publicly and at faculty meetings; she served on the curriculum committee that designed the resulting Merritt Black Studies programme — the first such programme at any community college in the United States — and was the founding chair of the programme in 1968.

She published across the same years the volumes of poetry — Saga of the Black Man of 1968, Black Talk: Shield and Sword of 1969, A Mirror, A Soul: A Two-Part Volume of Poems of 1969, the Boss Soul recordings with the Cleveland Buchanan Jazz Quintet of 1971 — that established her as one of the principal voices of the West Coast Black Arts Movement. Her decisive contribution to the literary scholarship of the movement was the seven-book series Rainbow Signs published by the Doubleday-distributed press Random House in 1973, the first anthology series of Black Arts performance writing.

She held thereafter faculty appointments at the University of Wisconsin, at Oberlin College and at the Pacific School of Religion. She died of cancer at Oakland on the seventh of November 1979, at fifty-one.

She is honored here as a founder of Black studies.