Featured Organization
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The Rachel Elizabeth Barton (REB) Foundation
The REB Foundation provides services and funding for classical music education, research, performances, and artists, to benefit listeners and learners alike. Current projects include an instrument loan program, grants for education and career, and creation of a supplemental curriculum of music for strings by composers of African descent.
The Foundation is also undertaking to research, commission, and compile music and collect related information for The String Student's Library of Music by Black Composers. This supplemental curriculum will acquaint students of all races and various stages of development with the rich heritage of classical string music by composers of African descent.
ORGAN IZATION OF BLACK AMERICAN CULTURE WRITERS WORKSHOP -OBAC-WW
The OBAC Story - Part 1
One of the purposes of the Black Arts Movement was to address and combat the prejudice and negative stereotypes of minorities. The movement and its purposes would impact a nation embroiled in Civil Rights and for federal, state, and local governments it was plain civil disorder.
Often called the father of the Black Arts Movement, Imamu Amira Baraka would issue a call and his lead pushed the movement forward. Subsequently, Black organizations, theaters, repertoires, and workshops popped up across America predominantly in the black community. Art and politics was inseparable: universality was not at that time, applicable.
Founded in 1967, one such collective was the Organization of Black American Culture, (OBAC) on Chicago’s Southside, brought together by a group of intellectuals, academicians, artists, writers, editors, community volunteers, and others. It was composed of three workshops namely: the Visual (artist) Workshop, The Theater Workshop, and the Writers Workshop.
Each workshop produced work that carried national impact. For the Visual Workshop it was the Wall of Respect (Chicago’s first black Mural), created by Bill Walker and Jeff Donaldson. The theater workshop led by Ann Smith, a former Univ. of Illinois Trustee, would eventually lead to Chicago’s first black owned and operated theater: Kuumba Theater founded by Val Gray Ward.
It was the Writer’s Workshop that survived the era…for a long time
According to Mark Sarvas a blog owner, “OBAC produced the city’s greatest flowering of black literature since the Chicago Renaissance in the 1930’s, and that both movements sprang to life during the periods of social upheaval: the Depression (1929) and the Civil Rights Movement (1960’s)."
After 30 years, the OBAC Writers Workshop fell silent, and until now, so had a history that included an over the top list of black writers as members and visitors that includes: OBAC being the first black Writers Workshop to hear “Roots” by Alex Haley.
Founding member, Don L. Lee penned his now classic, Don’t Cry Scream: book of poetry and went on to become founder of Third World Press as Haki R. Madhubuti, along with Jewel Latimore now, Dr. Johari Amini-Latimore
OBAC molded other prominent writers such as Poet/Professor Carolyn Rodgers (Songs of a Blackbird), whose poem, “How I Got Over”, put other national poets on notice, to say the least of her being ahead of the times when she penned, The Last M.F. (Yes that word – that was taken to real revolutionary levels,) if today’s Spoken Word/Hip Hop verse is any consideration.
Rodgers was in good company as visitors to the workshop such as Imamu Amira Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Arna Bontemps, and Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks had on occasion dropped in.
As literary giants stopped by, newer writers were in serious development of their literary works…and would become giants too, such as the international and nationally known lyricist, Blues Poet and professor Sterling Plumpp, author of 13 books including Portable Soul, MOJO Hands Call, I Must Go, Johannesburg and Other Poems, and his latest , Velvet Be-Bop Kente Cloth.
Plumpp now retired from the Univ. of Illinois-Chicago, returned to academia at Chicago State Univ., while still writing, performing, and molding younger poets/writers.
OBAC-Writers Workshop is currently rebuilding its structural foundation to meet 21st century demands. Its mission of 40 years ago is part of the larger mission to maintain the workshop held every first and third Saturday at Chicago’s, Bessie Coleman Library on the Southside.
Part of the organization’s contemporary mission is to chronicle and archive OBAC’s past 40 years, its writers, literary works, events, personalities, and general history of and about black literature created within its walls. Another part of its mission is advocacy for black writers.
Serving as an advisor to what is an awesome undertaking is poet, playwright, and novelist Angela Jackson, who served as the writer’s workshop chairperson from 1976 to 1987. Jackson was an undergraduate student at Northwestern Univ., came to OBAC at the invitation of Hoyt W. Fuller, one of OBAC’s founding fathers.
The rest became history as she went on to garner a Conrad Kent-Rivers Award from Black World Magazine; a NEA Fellowship for Fiction; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; a Carl Sandburg 
Award for Poetry; the Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award and many others.
However, these are just a few and small few, of those persons who built what became one of the premier Black Writers workshop in America.
Today there’s a new cadre of veteran and young writers being served by new OBAC members and alumni. They come faithfully with spoken word poetry, fiction, scripts, and traditional poetry to be shared, analyzed, and critiqued.
Among those now serving OBAC Writers Workshop is Professor and Poet, Sharon Warner and author/screenwriter of , The Spook Who Sat By the Door, (book and film)Sam Greenlee*, also author of Bebop Man and Bebop Woman, a book of poetry.
Occasionally, lending time and talent is Paris Smith a Chicago fiction writer; Poet Don Ryan*, and Glenn Ford, a specialist in Spoken Word.
At the initiation of playwright and fiction writer Collette Armstead, supported by Angela Jackson (one of Armstead’s mentors ), the OBAC Writers Workshop rebuilding process (with eyes on archiving its past), began. Together they approached essayist, poet, Second City Improv Theater alumnus and comedy scriptwriter S. Brandi Barnes, to undertake the task. Ms. Barnes agreed and approached distinguished Professor Haki R. Madhubuti, and Dr. Margaret G. Burroughs to become permanent trustees and Prof. Sterling Plumpp for board membership as part of this new beginning.
Dr. Soyini Madison of Northwestern University, actress, and editor of the literary anthology The Woman That I Am, becomes an official board member Dec. 2007.
Those volunteering their time, services, guidance and resources to preserve the history of the organization are doing so gladly. It is our responsibility as African-Americans and as writers to maintain our own history as opposed to relying on other people and cultures to do so for us, and if not now: when?
Let me tell you dear reader, this task given the history and personalities, and egos of the 
organization is colossal and the cup runneth over. Look for Part 2 of the OBAC –WW saga in coming weeks, as other past founding members, organizational accomplishments, and current projects are talked about..
The OBAC web-site is currently under construction. One can contact the OBAC Writers Workshop at 312-324-0510, or by e-mailing them at: obacww@yahoo.com. One can also forward material, letters, etc., by snail mail to: P.O. Box 1667, Chicago, Il 60690.
S. Brandi Barnes
Director
Center for Black Music Research
Columbia College Chicago
The Center for Black Music Research (CBMR), a research unit of Columbia College Chicago is devoted to research, preservation, and dissemination of information about the history of black music on a global scale.
An Artist’s Grant That Even Pays for Glasses
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM
October 10, 2007
Nearly a year ago 50 people around the country each received $50,000 fellowship awards from United States Artists, a new organization that argues that individual artists are generally shortchanged when it comes to arts patronage in America.
For more than 80 percent of the fellows, the money helped jump-start a new project. But interviews with the artists and a survey by the organization show that many used at least part of the funds left after taxes (yes, the gifts are taxed as ordinary income) simply to make ends meet or to pay for long-delayed health care.
