Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1871: Nine People Who Saved a University

Fisk University opened in eighteen sixty-six in a former Union Army barracks in Nashville. Its students were formerly enslaved people and their children, many of them arriving with no formal schooling and no money. By eighteen seventy-one, the university was nearly bankrupt. The building they used was the one the Army had left behind, and it was falling apart. There was no endowment. The treasurer, a music teacher named George L. White, proposed something that the university's board considered impractical and possibly humiliating: take a choir of student singers on the road and ask Northern audiences to fund the school.

Nine students went. They called themselves the Jubilee Singers. Their names were Ella Sheppard, Jennie Jackson, Maggie Porter, Minnie Tate, Eliza Walker, Benjamin Holmes, Thomas Rutling, Isaac Dickerson, and Greene Evans. Most of them had been enslaved, or born to people who had been enslaved, and several of them had never before been far from Tennessee.

The songs they carried with them were spirituals, the music enslaved Black communities had created over generations as coded communication, shared grief, and communal faith. These were not songs that Black communities had typically shared with white audiences. They were interior things. George White understood that sharing them involved a kind of vulnerability that the singers themselves would have to choose.

The first performances were met with polite silence. In Ohio, at a convention of Congregational ministers, the reception broke open. The audience wept. The story spread. By the time the Jubilee Singers reached New England, people were turning out in large numbers. The abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher brought them before his Brooklyn congregation. The money began to come in.

By eighteen seventy-three they had raised enough for Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building constructed in the South specifically for the higher education of Black Americans. The building still stands on the Fisk campus, a National Historic Landmark. The tour continued to Europe, where they sang for Queen Victoria and the German Emperor.

George White had taken nine young people with almost no resources and asked them to carry some of the most private music their community owned into concert halls filled with strangers. They did it. Jubilee Hall is what came back.