Nashville, Tennessee · Founded 1866 · Bulldogs
“The Nashville HBCU that sang itself out of debt — and became the school that introduced the world to the spiritual.”
Behind the making of the album that won the Fisk Jubilee Singers their first Grammy in 2021 — recorded at the Ryman with Keb' Mo', CeCe Winans, and the Fairfield Four.
A live performance of the spiritual the Singers helped make world-famous, the song that silenced a hostile crowd in Ohio in 1871.
Nashville Public Television's portrait of the 150th anniversary, with director Paul Kwami on 150 years of survival: 'I believe we will survive another 150 years to come.'
The official video from the Grammy-winning 'Celebrating Fisk!' album, featuring Derek Minor and Shannon Sanders — the Singers doing modern gospel with the same precision.
Watch The Yard's celebration of the 2021 Grammy — the first in the group's 150-year history, after a 2009 nomination.
Religion News Service's interview with the late director on what spirituals are — and aren't — and why the Singers still sing a cappella.
Full meet stream from the Fisk Bulldogs' final gymnastics campaigns — the first HBCU gymnastics program, in its last season (2025–26).
CNN's feature on Naimah Muhammad and the inaugural 2022 team — 'I went from being on a team with one Black girl to a team with a bunch of girls who look like me.'
Nashville's NewsChannel 5 interviews President Agenia Clark on the $900 million 'Quantum Leap' redevelopment — arena, data center, gallery annex.
Career highlights of the 6'0" guard from his Fisk Bulldogs basketball days in Nashville.
Full-game HBCUAC matchup footage from the 2026 season.
Senior Night at Fisk — HBCUAC men's basketball, full game.
Graduated 1888; civil rights titan, NAACP co-founder, later taught at Fisk and defended its students in the 1920s revolt.
Studied at Fisk in the 1880s; pioneering anti-lynching journalist and civil rights leader.
Fisk student leader of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins; later U.S. Congressman and SNCC chairman — 'the conscience of Congress.'
Transferred to Fisk in 1959; co-architect of the Nashville sit-ins and a founding strategist of SNCC.
Poet, activist, and author of Racism 101; one of Fisk's most famous literary graduates, later returned as faculty.
Fisk graduate (1960); civil rights activist who became the longtime mayor of Washington, D.C.
Fisk alumna and later its 14th president (2004–2013); previously the U.S. Secretary of Energy under President Bill Clinton.
Historian of Reconstruction and chair of Fisk's board of trustees; invested President James Lawson in 1968.
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois; his scholarship cemented Fisk's place in the Du Bois story.
Music executive and manager who built Destiny's Child; Fisk alumnus.
Actress and comedian; Fisk alumna who has returned to campus for events including the 2025 Jubilee Heritage Award.
Legendary Alvin Ailey dancer and choreographer; Fisk alumna.
Educator and Fisk president (2001–2003); a career higher-education leader.
Anthropologist and former president of Lincoln University; Fisk alumna.
Lifelong civil-rights activist, pardoned by President Clinton; Fisk alumnus.
Bestselling novelist — the first Black author to have a book reach a million in sales; Fisk alumnus.
U.S. Congresswoman from Florida; Fisk alumna.
Federal judge and U.S. Solicitor General; Fisk alumnus.
'Father of the Blues' composer; listed among Fisk alumni by some sources, but his attendance was not verified from a primary source in this pass.
On January 9, 1866, months after the Civil War ended, the Fisk Free Colored School opened in Nashville in a former military barracks near Union Station. It was founded by John Ogden, Erastus Milo Cravath, and Edward Parmelee Smith of the American Missionary Association, one of several schools the Association started across the South for freedmen. The school was named for Clinton B. Fisk, a Union general and assistant commissioner of Tennessee's Freedmen's Bureau, who secured the site and $30,000 in government funds for the endowment. Enrollment exploded to 900 within months, with students ranging in age from 7 to 70, all recently emancipated and hungry for school.
As Tennessee passed legislation enabling free public education — creating a need for trained Black teachers — the Fisk Free Colored School was reorganized and incorporated as Fisk University in 1867 to focus on higher education. James Dallas Burrus, John Houston Burrus, Virginia E. Walker, and America W. Robinson were the first students to enroll under the university charter. The move set Fisk apart from many Black schools of the era: it committed to a liberal arts curriculum rather than vocational training, a stance that earned it an 'elitist' reputation among critics at the time. That bet on the liberal arts defined the school's identity for the next 160 years.
In 1870 Adam K. Spence became the school's principal and drew up plans to move the school from the cramped barracks to a larger campus in north Nashville, on the site of Fort Gillem, a former Union army base. His wife Catherine Mackie Spence traveled the country setting up mission Sunday schools that funneled endowments through the American Missionary Association. Adam Spence, a man with deep interest in religion and the arts, supported the founding of a student choir — the seed of what would become the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The hilltop campus, about two miles northwest of downtown on what is now Jefferson Street, became a permanent home in the heart of Nashville's African-American community.
Broke and facing closure, the school took a desperate gamble: treasurer and music professor George L. White assembled nine students — four men and five women, many formerly enslaved — into a choral ensemble and sent them on tour to raise money. They started out singing ballads and patriotic anthems to indifferent, sometimes hostile white audiences, until a disastrous concert at Oberlin, Ohio, where the crowd wouldn't even listen. One singer finally said, in effect, if they're not going to listen, let's sing for ourselves — and they launched into 'Steal Away.' The room went dead silent; a northern audience had never heard anything like a spiritual. They became the first group to publicly perform slave songs, singing before Ulysses S. Grant at the White House, Mark Twain, and Queen Victoria, and raised nearly $50,000 (over a million in today's dollars) — enough to build the school's first permanent building.
In 1875 the two Burrus brothers and Virginia Walker graduated from Fisk, becoming the first African-American students to graduate from a liberal arts college south of the Mason–Dixon line. That same year, co-founder Erastus Milo Cravath returned to Nashville and became the institution's first president. He oversaw an active construction program and expanded the curriculum to include liberal arts, theology, and teacher training. By the turn of the century Fisk had built several campus buildings, hired African-American faculty and staff, and was enrolling a second generation of students.
Jubilee Hall, funded entirely by the Jubilee Singers' tour, was completed in 1876 as the school's first permanent building — the first building in the United States constructed for the higher education of freedmen. The six-story L-shaped Victorian Gothic building housed a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the original Jubilee Singers, commissioned by Queen Victoria as a gift after the troupe's 1873 European tour. Nearly 150 years later, freshman women still live in Jubilee Hall, one of the campus's residence halls. It is now a National Historic Landmark.
After the University of Tennessee was designated a federal land-grant university — which legally required it to enroll all qualified citizens regardless of race — Tennessee found itself boxed in by its own 1870 constitution, which prohibited Black and white students from attending the same public school. The state's solution was to pay tuition for Black students, with state scholarships, to enroll at Fisk University instead, a contract that ran from 1881 to 1883 before moving to Knoxville College. It was a revealing episode: the state's segregation machinery needed Fisk's existence to keep its own house in order. The arrangement ended, but it showed how thoroughly Fisk had become the South's proving ground for Black higher education.
W.E.B. Du Bois graduated from Fisk in 1888, and the school never really let him go — he returned to teach there, defended its students against hostile administrators in the 1920s, and is buried, in a sense, in Fisk's institutional memory as its most famous son. His book The Souls of Black Folk credits the Jubilee Singers with raising $150,000 for the school. The campus also passed through the hands of Ida B. Wells, who studied at Fisk in the 1880s before becoming the nation's fiercest anti-lynching journalist. In those decades Fisk became what it would stay: a school that produced the people who wrote the Black freedom story.
Fisk Memorial Chapel was built in 1892 in the Victorian style, and at the time it was the largest building in the country where African Americans could gather. It became the spiritual and ceremonial heart of the campus — concerts, lectures, graduations, and, decades later, a young Martin Luther King Jr. addressing thousands. The chapel was restored and rededicated in 1992, exactly a century after it opened. When John Lewis came home to Fisk, it was the chapel walls that had formed him.
Carnegie Hall was completed in 1908 as the campus library, and it was the first major building designed by Moses McKissack III, co-founder of the first African-American-owned architecture firm in the United States. McKissack would go on to shape Black-built Nashville for decades. The building anchored the academic core of the hilltop campus. It still stands as one of the contributing buildings of the Fisk University Historic District.
Fisk established a department of social science in 1910, founded and directed by George E. Haynes. It was the first social work training center for African-American graduate students in the country, and it became a model for programs at other institutions. This was Fisk at its most intentional: not just educating students, but building the professional infrastructure for Black community life. The department produced a generation of scholars and practitioners who carried the Fisk method — research as advocacy — into the wider world.
Fayette Avery McKenzie served as president from 1915 to 1925, and in many ways he made modern Fisk: he won academic recognition as a standard college from the Carnegie Foundation, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, and raised a $1 million endowment to guarantee quality faculty. But his strict regime — dress codes, bans on extracurriculars, a gagged student newspaper, expelled students, fired teachers — struck students as paternalistic and racist, and W.E.B. Du Bois took their side in print. Students boycotted classes and protested on campus in 1924 and 1925; some were arrested for rioting. McKenzie bowed to the pressure and resigned. The revolt became a landmark in Black student activism, proving Fisk students would hold even their own administration to the school's ideals.
In 1930 Fisk became the first historically Black institution to gain accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, followed in 1933 by approval from the Association of American Universities — also a first for a Black school. The decade also rebuilt the campus's face: the Olmsted Brothers firm drew a Beaux-Arts master plan, Cravath Hall went up in 1930 with Aaron Douglas's sweeping murals of Black history ('the most ambitious works of his career'), and Talley Brady Hall opened in 1931 as the first modern chemistry building at a Black college. Thomas Elsa Jones, who led the school from 1926 to 1945, pushed to diversify a faculty that would soon include Harlem Renaissance figures.
In 1946 Charles S. Johnson became Fisk's sixth president and its first African-American one — a premier sociologist, editor of the Harlem Renaissance journal Opportunity, and an advisor to U.S. presidents and the United Nations. He expanded the Institute of Race Relations (founded 1942), which produced research that would later feed desegregation strategies for schools, employment, and the military. Under Johnson the campus thrived: Fisk earned the first Phi Beta Kappa charter ever granted to a predominantly Black college in 1952, hosted a Ford Foundation-funded early-college program, and became a darling of the foundation world. His close friendship with Georgia O'Keeffe led to the 1949 gift of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of modern art — Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, O'Keeffe — which made Fisk's Carl Van Vechten Gallery one of the great small museums of the South. Johnson died in 1956 at 63, and much of the momentum died with him.
In 1960 Fisk students John Lewis and Diane Nash became the public faces of the Nashville sit-ins, nonviolent protests at segregated downtown lunch counters, after training in the workshops of Reverend James Lawson. Matthew Walker Jr. had his teeth knocked out and kept sitting. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Fisk in May 1960 in support of the movement. The boycotts that followed forced downtown department stores to the table, and Nashville became the first major city in the South to desegregate its lunch counters. Lewis and Nash went on to become early leaders of the national Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. No other American campus can claim two founding architects of SNCC from the same student body.
Fisk celebrated its centennial in 1966, opening the festivities on January 9 with President Stephen J. Wright and journalist Carl T. Rowan — a victory lap for a century that had taken the school from Union Army barracks to the top tier of Black education. Two years earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken to an estimated 2,000 people packed into the campus, urging the crowd to 'make Nashville an open city.' The centennial year also captured the school's cultural weight in a lighter moment: artist Aaron Douglas, then head of the art department, was photographed teaching a figure class with a model who had once posed as a clown for Rouault and sat for Picasso and Matisse. Fisk was, in every sense, where the world came to Nashville.
On April 8, 1967, a riot broke out near the Fisk and Tennessee State campuses after Stokely Carmichael spoke at Vanderbilt University. Though framed nationally as a race riot, historians note it had classist characteristics as well. Protesters marched from Fisk to the Nashville courthouse to protest police brutality during the unrest. The episode marked the end of the sit-in era's disciplined nonviolence on Jefferson Street and the arrival of a rawer, angrier Black politics — and Fisk's students were once again at the center of it.
In 1978 the 40-acre Fisk campus — the Jubilee Hall site on the old Fort Gillem hill — was recognized as a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places. The designation covered the Victorian Gothic and Italianate/Queen Anne core: Jubilee Hall, the chapel, Cravath Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Van Vechten Gallery, the Harris Music Building, the Little Theater, and even the limestone wall built around 1873. Through a 1990s U.S. Congressional Grant the campus underwent significant restoration, and the chapel was rededicated in 1992. The Landmark status protected the physical record of what the Jubilee Singers had paid for with their voices.
In 2004 Hazel R. O'Leary — former U.S. Secretary of Energy under President Bill Clinton — became Fisk's 14th president and its second woman to lead the school. In 2008 Fisk announced it had raised $4 million in a fiscal year, ending nine years of budget deficits and qualifying for a Mellon Foundation challenge grant. But the relief was temporary: the school continued to face severe financial hardship and warned it might have to close its doors unless its finances improved. O'Leary retired in 2013, leaving a school that had stabilized its books but not its trajectory.
What followed O'Leary was a stretch of executive churn that became a national story. H. James Williams served from February 2013 to September 2015, followed by interim president Frank Sims (2015–2017), then Kevin D. Rome Sr., named the 16th president in March 2017. Rome's tenure ended in scandal in August 2020 when the board cut ties after allegations that he drugged and threatened a man; Rome denied the accusations. Provost Vann R. Newkirk Sr. became interim president, then the 17th president in February 2021, and departed in August 2022 without the board citing a reason. Frank Sims stepped back in as acting president. Four presidents in seven years — and yet the school kept growing.
In 2018 the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools placed Fisk on probation, citing failings in financial responsibility, control of research funds, and federal and state compliance. It was the accreditation crisis the school had feared for a decade. Fisk answered with a fundraising record and rising enrollment the following year, and in 2020 the school was taken off probation with its accreditation intact. The episode forced the hard financial discipline that set up the next era: five straight years of fundraising records, three consecutive operational surpluses, and an endowment that nearly doubled.
In 2021 the Fisk Jubilee Singers won the Grammy Award for Best Roots Gospel Album for 'Celebrating Fisk! (The 150th Anniversary Album),' a 12-song collection recorded at the Ryman Auditorium with guests including Keb' Mo', Lee Ann Womack, the Fairfield Four, CeCe Winans, and Derek Minor. It was the group's first Grammy in 150 years of performing, following a 2009 nomination. Musical director Paul Kwami, who led the singers from 1994 until his death in September 2022, had already guided them to the 2008 National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush. The arc was complete: the fundraiser choir that saved the school had become an American institution.
In February 2022 Fisk announced it would launch the first intercollegiate women's gymnastics team at any HBCU, hiring Corrinne Tarver — the first Black gymnast to win an NCAA all-around title, at the University of Georgia — as head coach. The first practice went viral on TikTok, topping a million views, because the sight of 24 Black gymnasts tumbling in a Fisk gym was simply unprecedented. In 2024 Fisk's Morgan Price won the USAG national all-around title, the program's crowning moment. Financial strain, though, caught up: the university announced the program will disband after the 2025–26 season. It lasted four seasons and changed the sport's imagination forever.
On November 6, 2023, Agenia Walker Clark became Fisk's 18th president and its third woman to lead the school, arriving from 19 years as CEO of the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee. She inherited a school on the move: enrollment had climbed from 681 to over 1,050, test scores were up 15%, and partnerships with HCA Healthcare, Google, Goldman Sachs, Cravath Swaine & Moore, and even the Los Angeles Lakers were placing graduates at record starting salaries. Fisk broke ground on its first new campus buildings in three decades — including a new 300-bed, $20 million dorm — rolled out blue-and-yellow shipping-container dorm rooms as a creative stopgap for the housing crunch, restored Jubilee Hall, the Driskell home, the Boyd House and the John Work home, and opened the new Roland Parrish Career Center. The target: 1,600 students and a campus rebuilt for the next 150 years.
In May 2026 President Clark unveiled 'Quantum Leap,' a sweeping campus redevelopment proposal calling for roughly $900 million in investment across the North Nashville campus: a 100,000-square-foot data and technology center, a 120,000-square-foot sports arena, a 45,000-square-foot student center, an 80,000-square-foot annex to the Carl Van Vechten Gallery, an expansion of the John Lewis Center for Social Justice, and renovations to three residence halls. Clark presented the plan at Jubilee Hall to local officials and business leaders and submitted it to Metro Nashville for approval. It is, by a wide margin, the most ambitious building proposal in the school's 160-year history — and in HBCU history.
Fisk and TSU sit on the same historic corridor — Jefferson Street in North Nashville — and their men's basketball meetings carry the neighborhood's pride. TSU has dominated the modern series: the Tigers were 20-3 all-time against Fisk as of 2021 and rode a 12-game winning streak, with recent scores of 99-65 (2019), 96-66 (2024), and 101-50 (November 2025). But the name keeps getting used because the history runs deeper than the box scores: these are the two schools whose students marched together in the 1960s, and every meeting is a Jefferson Street referendum. Fisk also rekindled old conference rivalries when it rejoined the GCAC (now HBCUAC) in fall 2021 after a stint as an independent.
🥁 Fisk Jubilee Singers · since 1871
Fisk has no marching band and never really needed one: its musical identity is the a cappella Fisk Jubilee Singers, the oldest continuously performing vocal group in America and the ensemble that invented the concert spiritual. They won a Grammy in 2021, 150 years after they sang to save the school. Today the group is made up of current Fisk students chosen by audition, carrying a repertoire first performed by young people who had been born enslaved.
Treasurer and music professor who founded the troupe and led the tours that raised the money to build Jubilee Hall; insisted on adding spirituals to the repertoire after indifferent audiences ignored the ballads.
Choir director and ethnomusicologist who, with his father John Work II, arranged and preserved the spirituals that became the ensemble's core repertoire; a Fisk faculty giant in Black music scholarship.
Led the Singers for 28 years — through the 2008 National Medal of Arts, the 2021 Grammy for 'Celebrating Fisk!,' and induction into the Grammy, Gospel Music, and American Classical Music halls of fame. Died September 10, 2022.
Fisk's Greek history runs a century deep — the Alpha Beta chapter of Delta Sigma Theta (1926) is among the sorority's oldest, and AKA's Pi chapter arrived on campus in 1927 per a Tennessee Historical Commission marker. Alpha Phi Alpha, Omega Psi Phi and Phi Beta Sigma presence could not be verified to chapter level from sources opened.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Six-story Victorian Gothic hall built entirely from Jubilee Singers tour funds — the first building in America constructed for the higher education of freedmen, now a National Historic Landmark and still a freshman women's dorm.
Built in 1888 as the school's gymnasium in a neo-Romanesque former church style; later converted into the Carl Van Vechten Gallery, home of the Stieglitz Collection of modern art donated by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949.
Victorian-style chapel, at the time the largest building in the country for African Americans to gather; restored and rededicated in 1992, and still the stage for concerts, lectures, and graduations.
Built as the campus library and the first major building by Moses McKissack III, co-founder of the first African-American-owned architecture firm in the United States.
Eight-story former library named for the first president, designed by Henry Hibbs and carrying Aaron Douglas's murals of Black history — described as the most ambitious works of his career. Now houses administrative offices.
The first modern chemistry building at a historically Black college, named for chemists Thomas E. Talley and St. Elmo Brady.
Fisk Memorial Chapel restored and rededicated in 1992 as part of a broader campus restoration funded by a U.S. Congressional Grant through the 1990s, following the 1978 National Historic Landmark designation.
Historic Jubilee Hall underwent major renovation as part of the Vann Newkirk-era campus overhaul, alongside restoration of the Driskell home, the Boyd House, and the John Work home, and upgrades to the chapel and Henderson A. Johnson Gymnasium.
New career center built to anchor the school's corporate partnership push — HCA Healthcare, Cravath Swaine & Moore, Google, Goldman Sachs, and the Los Angeles Lakers — which drove record graduate placement and starting salaries.
Facing a housing crunch as enrollment passed 1,050, Fisk installed eye-catching blue-and-yellow shipping-container-style dorm rooms with kitchenettes and private bathrooms for fall 2023, while planning a traditional new 300-bed, $20 million dorm — the first in three decades.
Fisk announced construction of two new buildings by fall 2024 and began design work to convert Burress Hall into an incubation and innovation center in partnership with the city, plus a new athletic field.
President Agenia Clark unveiled a plan calling for roughly $900 million across the North Nashville campus: a 100,000-square-foot data and technology center, a 120,000-square-foot sports arena, a 45,000-square-foot student center, an 80,000-square-foot Van Vechten Gallery annex, expansion of the John Lewis Center for Social Justice, and renovations to three residence halls — submitted to Metro Nashville for approval.
Fisk runs lean: about 70 full-time faculty for roughly 1,050 students (fall 2022). Its intellectual bench is historically deep — W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Aaron Douglas, John Hope Franklin, Percy Lavon Julian, Robert Hayden, James Weldon Johnson, and Nikki Giovanni have all taught here. Athletic leadership has turned over with the presidency; Larry Glover served as athletic director during the 2021 GCAC return.
Former Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee CEO; driving the Quantum Leap plan and record corporate partnerships since November 2023.
First Black gymnast to win an NCAA all-around title (Georgia, 1989); hired to lead the first HBCU gymnastics program, which her teams made nationally famous before its 2026 disbanding.
Drove the creative housing strategy — shipping-container dorms and the new traditional dorm — during the enrollment surge.
Fisk feels like a small liberal-arts college with a very large shadow. The campus sits on its historic hill two miles northwest of downtown, on Jefferson Street — the spine of Black Nashville — with TSU and Meharry as neighbors, so the whole corridor functions as one extended HBCU neighborhood. About two-thirds of the undergraduates are women, the student body hovers around a thousand, and everybody knows everybody. The tension on campus is productive: a 160-year-old landmark trying to grow to 1,600 students and build a billion-dollar future without losing the intimacy that made Du Bois, Lewis, and Nash.