Fisk University is a historically Black university in Nashville, founded in 1866 as the first American institution of higher education to explicitly offer a liberal arts education to all students regardless of race. It sits on a 40-acre campus approximately two miles northwest of downtown, on land that had been Fort Gillem, a Union Army base, at a site on Jefferson Street that was the historic center of Nashville’s African-American community.
The founding came barely six months after the end of the Civil War. The first students, ranging in age from seven to seventy, shared common experiences of slavery and poverty and what the university’s own history calls “an extraordinary thirst for learning.”
The Jubilee Singers and the Origins of Music City
What Fisk is known for above all else is the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an ensemble that changed American music history and gave Nashville its most famous nickname.
Five years after the school’s founding, it faced financial collapse. Music professor and university treasurer George L. White formed a nine-member choral ensemble of students and took them on tour to raise money, departing campus on October 6, 1871. October 6 is still observed as Jubilee Day.
The group’s early reception was rough. Audiences were hostile or indifferent. At one early concert in Cincinnati they took in $50, which they immediately donated to victims of the 1871 Chicago fire. By the time they reached Columbus, the students were physically and emotionally drained. White named them the “Jubilee Singers” as a gesture of encouragement, drawing from the Biblical reference to the Year of Jubilee in Leviticus.
The turning point came gradually. The Jubilee Singers were not performing in the minstrel style that white audiences expected from Black performers. They were singing spirituals, the sacred songs of slavery, many of which had never been performed publicly. By 1872 they had sung at the World Peace Festival in Boston and performed for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House.
In 1873, they toured Europe. Queen Victoria heard them sing “Steal Away” in a private performance. According to the account that circulated afterward, she was moved to tears and asked where the performers were from. When they told her Nashville, Tennessee, she reportedly said it must be a music city. Whether exactly those words were spoken or not, the phrase stuck. Nashville had been called Music City ever since, and the original source of that name was not country music, not the Grand Ole Opry, and not Music Row. It was a group of formerly enslaved students from Fisk.
The funds raised during the European tour built Jubilee Hall, which opened in 1876 as the first permanent building constructed for the higher education of African Americans in the United States. It is now a National Historic Landmark. A floor-to-ceiling portrait of the original Jubilee Singers, commissioned by Queen Victoria as a gift to the school, hangs in the building today.
The contemporary Fisk Jubilee Singers continue performing and have received a Grammy Award, a National Medal of Arts, and an honorific recording by the Library of Congress.
Academic and Cultural Legacy
Fisk has produced a disproportionate number of prominent alumni for an institution of its size. The list includes Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education and became the first African American Justice of the Supreme Court. John Hope Franklin, the most eminent historian of the African American experience. Nikki Giovanni, the poet. Diane Nash, who led the Nashville sit-ins that became a model for the civil rights movement. Hazel O’Leary, Secretary of Energy under President Clinton.
The Carl Van Vechten Gallery on campus holds the Stieglitz Collection, one of the most significant collections of modern art at any American university, donated by Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Fisk housed the W.E.B. Du Bois collection before it moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Du Bois himself attended Fisk and described it as a formative experience in his intellectual development.
Current Status
Fisk operates as a small liberal arts university with a student body of roughly 900 students. Financial pressures have been persistent throughout its history, as they are at many HBCUs operating without large endowments. The institution’s cultural legacy far exceeds its enrollment numbers. Its physical presence on Jefferson Street, a street that also gave rise to some of Nashville’s most important Black musical culture before the construction of I-40 bisected the neighborhood in the 1960s, remains a significant anchor of Nashville’s African American civic history.
Sources:
- Fisk University History: fisk.edu/about/history
- Fisk Jubilee Singers History: fiskjubileesingers.org/history
- Wikipedia – Fisk Jubilee Singers: en.wikipedia.org
- National Museum of African American History and Culture – Musical Life at HBCUs: nmaahc.si.edu
- Amazing America TV – How Music City Got Its Name (2025): midmichigannow.com