Fisk University is known as one of the most historically significant Black universities in the United States, founded in Nashville, Tennessee, in January 1866 to educate newly freed enslaved people. It built its reputation through the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a celebrated tradition of producing influential thinkers and leaders, and a liberal arts curriculum that has fed students into top graduate and professional programs for more than 150 years.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers
No discussion of Fisk is complete without the Jubilee Singers, the choral ensemble that literally saved the university from closing. Just five years after the school opened, it was running out of money. In 1871, a music professor assembled nine students into a touring choir to raise funds. The group introduced audiences around the country to “slave songs,” religious music created by enslaved Black Americans that is now recognized as the American Negro spiritual tradition. The Singers didn’t just perform; they preserved an entire musical genre that might otherwise have been lost.
The ensemble’s reach grew quickly. In 1872 they performed at the World Peace Festival in Boston and later sang for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House. By 1873 they were touring Europe, and the money they raised funded Jubilee Hall, Fisk’s first permanent building. The Jubilee Singers received the National Medal of Arts in 2008 and continue performing today, carrying forward a tradition that is more than 150 years old.
A Pipeline of Influential Alumni
Fisk has produced an outsized number of leaders relative to its small enrollment. W.E.B. Du Bois, the social critic and co-founder of the NAACP, graduated from Fisk in 1888. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the journalist whose investigative reporting on lynching changed American public discourse, also attended. John Lewis, the civil rights activist who became a longtime U.S. Representative from Georgia, is among the university’s best-known modern graduates.
The alumni list spans nearly every field. Nikki Giovanni, the award-winning poet, studied at Fisk. David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is an alumnus. In the sciences, Elmer Samuel Imes (class of 1903) conducted pioneering work in high-resolution infrared spectroscopy that provided early verification of quantum theory and opened up the study of molecular structure. Saint Elmo Brady was one of the first African Americans to achieve eminence in chemistry. John Hope Franklin became widely regarded as the most eminent historian of the African American experience. Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who became Fisk’s first Black president, helped establish the modern field of sociology and founded the Race Relations Institute in 1945, which influenced federal policy on segregation in the military, labor markets, and schools.
Academics and Graduate Partnerships
Fisk is a private liberal arts university with strong programs in biology, physics, psychology, English, and business. What sets it apart academically is a network of combined-degree partnerships with larger research universities. Students can enter a BS/MD track with Meharry Medical College, a dual science-engineering program with Vanderbilt, a BS-MBA pathway also with Vanderbilt, and a bridge program with the University of Illinois. The Fisk-Vanderbilt MA/PhD program in the sciences is particularly notable for helping students from underrepresented backgrounds move into doctoral research.
These partnerships give students at a small school access to resources and graduate pipelines typically associated with much larger institutions. For a university with an undergraduate enrollment in the low thousands, the breadth of these pathways is unusual.
Role in the Civil Rights Movement
Fisk students were active participants in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, joining sit-ins, marches, and voter registration drives across the South. The university served as an intellectual hub where ideas about racial justice were studied, debated, and acted on. Charles Spurgeon Johnson’s Race Relations Institute, housed at Fisk, directly shaped how the federal government approached desegregation. The combination of academic scholarship and student activism made Fisk a center of gravity in the broader movement, not just a campus where protests happened.
The Alfred Stieglitz Art Collection
Fisk holds a co-ownership stake in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, one of the most important collections of early modern American and European art in the country. The collection, now co-owned with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, includes works by artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, and others from the circle of the legendary photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. O’Keeffe personally donated the collection to Fisk in 1949. The works are displayed at the Fisk University Galleries on campus, making Fisk one of very few small universities in the country with an art collection of this caliber.
Why Fisk Still Matters
Fisk occupies a unique position among historically Black colleges and universities. Its founding mission, educating people who had been legally barred from literacy just months earlier, gave it a sense of purpose that shaped everything from its curriculum to its cultural output. The Jubilee Singers created a model for institutional fundraising through the arts. Its alumni helped build the NAACP, reshape federal civil rights policy, and advance quantum physics. For a school that nearly went bankrupt in its first decade, the legacy is remarkable.