Fisk University opened its doors on January 9, 1866, making it the oldest institution of higher education in Nashville and one of the oldest HBCUs in the country. Its first students ranged in age from seven to seventy. What they shared was a recent experience of slavery and, as Fisk’s founders described it, an extraordinary thirst for learning.
The Founding
The school was established by John Ogden, Erastus Milo Cravath, and Edward Parmelee Smith, all affiliated with the American Missionary Association, a Northern abolitionist organization. The location was former Union Army barracks near what is now Nashville’s Union Station, in downtown Nashville, a fitting irony: a city that had been a Confederate state capital and a major slave-trading hub was now hosting a school built specifically to educate the people it had enslaved.
The school was named in honor of General Clinton B. Fisk, head of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, who helped make the opening possible by providing the barracks space. The American Missionary Association’s stated ambition was to build something that would measure itself not by “the standard of Negro education,” but by American education at its best. That aspiration was genuine and also complicated, as the school would spend its early decades navigating the tension between Northern white philanthropists who controlled its funding and the Black community it served.
Within four months of opening, Fisk had enrolled 900 students. It incorporated as a university in 1867.
The Jubilee Singers Save the School
By 1871, Fisk was in financial crisis. The original downtown barracks had deteriorated. The school needed a new campus and had no money to build one. School treasurer and choir director George L. White proposed a radical solution: take the student choir on the road to raise funds.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers left Nashville in October 1871 with almost nothing, literally taking all the institution’s available cash with them. White named the group the Jubilee Singers in honor of the year of jubilee referenced in the biblical book of Leviticus, a year of liberation.
What happened next was one of the more remarkable fundraising stories in American institutional history. The Jubilee Singers toured the United States and then Europe, performing for Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, and Queen Victoria. They introduced audiences to spirituals: songs composed in slavery that most white Americans had never heard performed. They played packed concert halls in Boston, New York, and London. They raised enough money over seven years to fund a new campus and the construction of Jubilee Hall, which opened in 1876, two miles northwest of downtown on the former site of Fort Gillem. The fundraising total has been estimated at roughly $1 million in current dollars.
The 40-acre campus was built on land that had been a Union fort. Jubilee Hall was the first permanent building in the United States constructed specifically to provide higher education for African Americans. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978.
Academic Legacy
Fisk’s intellectual output outpaces its small enrollment at every point in its history. The roster of alumni reads like a map of 20th century Black American intellectual and public life: W.E.B. Du Bois (class of 1888), who went on to earn a doctorate at Harvard and co-found the NAACP; John Hope Franklin, who became the most eminent historian of the African American experience; poet Nikki Giovanni; Hazel O’Leary, who served as Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton and later became Fisk’s 14th president; civil rights leader Diane Nash, who studied at Fisk and went on to organize the Nashville sit-in movement. Booker T. Washington, while not a Fisk alumnus, sent all his children to Fisk for their educations and served on its board of trustees.
In 1930, Fisk became the first HBCU to receive accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. It was also the first Black institution placed on the approved lists of the Association of American Universities.
Governance Struggles and Survival
Fisk’s history includes periodic institutional crises, most of them rooted in the same underlying tension: who controls a Black university. In 1924, W.E.B. Du Bois returned to give a commencement address in which he openly challenged the autocratic practices of university president Fayette McKenzie. Students boycotted classes that fall, then went on strike the following spring. McKenzie called in Nashville police, who sent nearly 80 officers to the campus. McKenzie ultimately resigned in April 1925.
More recently, Fisk faced serious financial difficulties in the early 2000s that threatened its accreditation. In 2012, it entered a controversial partnership with Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, offering a 50-percent share of its Stieglitz Collection, which includes works by Georgia O’Keeffe, in exchange for $30 million to stabilize finances. The arrangement was challenged in court. By 2008, the university had ended nine consecutive years of budget deficits and began a period of stabilization under O’Leary’s leadership.
Fisk Today
Fisk’s current enrollment is approximately 800 students on a 40-acre National Historic Landmark campus on Jefferson Street in North Nashville. It offers undergraduate and graduate programs in liberal arts, natural sciences, social sciences, and business, with a joint MBA program through Vanderbilt. The Fisk Jubilee Singers continue to perform and tour, still singing spirituals, still raising the profile of an institution that has survived through a combination of academic ambition and musical genius for more than 150 years.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Fisk University” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Fisk University: “History” (fisk.edu)
- PBS American Experience: “Fisk University” (pbs.org)
- TCLF: “Fisk University” (tclf.org)
- African American Registry: “Fisk University Begins Classes” (aaregistry.org)
- Black America Web: “Little Known Black History Fact: Fisk University” (blackamericaweb.com)
- UNCF: “Fisk University” (uncf.org)
- Britannica: “Fisk University” (britannica.com)