Fisk University and the Jubilee Singers

On October sixth, eighteen seventy-one, nine young men and women walked out of Nashville carrying the entire contents of Fisk University's treasury, which amounted to almost nothing. The school was five years old, founded in the wreckage of the Civil War to give a liberal arts education to formerly enslaved people, and it was about to close. The American Missionary Association could not sustain it. Congress had cut funding. The buildings were rotting former Union Army barracks. The treasurer told the choir director, George White, that a singing tour was their last real chance.

Those nine students became the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They had planned to perform the mainstream sacred music of the day, hymns, parlor songs, but at some point on that first northern tour they began offering something different as an encore: the spirituals they had grown up with, songs forged in slavery and sung in secret. The audiences who heard them stopped cold. Mark Twain called them among the finest musical acts he had witnessed. Queen Victoria wept. By the time the singers returned to Nashville in May of eighteen seventy-four they had raised tens of thousands of dollars, enough to begin the first permanent building constructed in the American South exclusively for the education of Black students. They named it Jubilee Hall, and it still stands on campus today.

Fisk went on to become one of the most consequential institutions in the country. W.E.B. Du Bois studied here. The painter Aaron Douglas, foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, ran the art department for nearly thirty years after joining the faculty in the late nineteen thirties. The university holds one of the great collections of Alfred Stieglitz photographs, donated by Georgia O'Keeffe.

But it begins with nine students, an empty treasury, and a gamble on a song. The spirituals those young people carried north were not just music, they were history, coded in melody, kept alive through the worst years of American life. Fisk University still performs them today, the same ensemble name, a hundred and fifty years on.