Welcome to the campus of Fisk University, one of the oldest and most historically significant HBCUs in the United States. Fisk was founded in 1866 by the American Missionary Association on land that had been a Union Army encampment, to provide education to the formerly enslaved people of Nashville. The name honors Clinton Bowen Fisk, a Union general who supported Freedmen's Bureau educational efforts in Tennessee.
Within five years the university faced a financial crisis. The solution was one of the most consequential decisions in American musical history: the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a student choral group that toured the country and Europe performing spirituals — the sacred songs created under slavery — to raise funds for the institution. They performed for President Ulysses Grant and for Queen Victoria.
They saved Fisk. In doing so, they introduced the spiritual as a concert art form to audiences worldwide and established the choral gospel tradition that still defines African-American sacred music. Fisk alumni include W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and John Lewis.