Archival News: News from the Black Film Center/Archive

In September 2012, the Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A) at Indiana University was awarded a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) to preserve the 1976 documentary film Rainbow Black: Poet Sarah W. Fabio. Sarah Webster Fabio (1928–1979) established herself as an influential figure in the black cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s through her contributions as a poet, performer, literary critic, and educator. Fabio’s major poetic work includes the seven-volume Rainbow Signs (1973), consisting of Black Back: Back Black; Boss Soul; Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues; Soul Ain’t, Soul Is; and Together/To the Tune of Coltrane’s “Equinox.” As an educator, Fabio has been celebrated as the Mother of Black Studies for her pioneering work in the 1960s to establish programs at the University of California at Berkeley and Oakland’s Merritt College, a focal point of the early Black Power movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, her legacy is most widely known through her Folkways Records albums, including Boss Soul and Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues, which set her poetry to the music of Don’t Fight the Feelin’, a band featuring her sons, Cyril Leslie Fabio III and Ronald Fabio, and son-in-law Wayne Wallace. Sarah’s daughter, Cheryl Fabio, produced Rainbow Black: Poet Sarah W. Fabio as her MA thesis film in communications at Stanford University. Studying under Canadian Film Board member Ron Alexander, Cheryl began shooting in 1972 and continued her work through 1976. Among the earliest footage is a 1972 studio sequence capturing the recording session for “Together/To the Tune of Coltrane’s ‘Equinox’” with the Don’t Fight the Feelin’ band and engineer Fred Cohn. Cheryl and her classmate Angie Noel shot the core of the film in 1975 over a marathon weekend session in Iowa City, during Fabio’s time there as a PhD student at the University of Iowa. Interspersed with interviews conducted by her daughter, Fabio reads selections from her poems including