The Fisk Jubilee Singers
Or, The First Time Most White Americans Heard African-American Music
In 1866, Fisk University was chartered in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the first American college to make a liberal arts education available to “young men and women irrespective of color.”
“It was the period after the American Civil War, and there was such a large question about whether or not the former slaves, the African American, was educatable,” Dr. Reavis Mitchell, professor and chairman of the Fisk history department, said in an interview. “And one of the main challenges after the war was to prove in fact that the African American could meet the challenge of education.”
The need was great. Reverend Gustavus D. Pike was associated with the university since its founding. “For 4,000,000 freed people at the South,” he wrote in 1873, “as yet but one person in every 40,000 is in college; and of these, eighty percent, are in institutions which have been founded in the interests of the colored people by northern benevolence, assisted by the government through the Freedmen’s Bureau.” By 1871, benevolent donations to Fisk had dried up, and the school was nearly bankrupt.
George L. White, the school’s treasurer, music professor and a white missionary, formed a group of nine acapella vocalists, with an idea to tour the country and raise the rather extravagant…
