Fisk University

From Academic Kids

Fisk University is a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. It was established by John Ogden, Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath and Reverend Edward P. Smith and named in honor of General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen's Bureau. Fisk opened to classes on January 9, 1866. Fisk heralded its first African American president with the arrival of Charles Spurgeon Johnson in 1947. Johnson was a premier sociologist, a scholar who had been the editor of Opportunity magazine, a noted periodical of the Harlem Renaissance. Fisk University is currently under the direction of its 14th president, the Honorable Hazel O'Leary, former Secretary of Energy under President William Jefferson Clinton. She is the second female president of the university.

Fisk University features the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, originally a group of traveling students who set out from Nashville to earn enough money to save the school and raise sufficient funds to build the first permanent structure in the country soley built for the education of newly-freed slaves, the renowned and recently-restored Jubilee Hall. It is the oldest, and most distinctive, structure of Victorian architecture on the 40 acre (160,000 m²) Fisk campus.

Among many other notable firsts, Fisk University was the first historically black college or university to earn its Phi Beta Kappa Charter in 1957.

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Notable alumni

Aaron Douglas, painter, illustrator, muralist
W. E. B. Du Bois, sociologist, scholar, first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard
John Hope Franklin, historian, professor, scholar, author of landmark text, From Slavery to Freedom, graduate of the class of 1935
Nikki Giovanni, poet, author, professor, scholar
Alma Powell, wife of Gen. Colin Powell
Kym Whitley, actress, comedienne
Hortense Canady, past national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated
Alcee Hastings, U.S. Congressman
Roland Hayes, concert singer
James Weldon Johnson, author, poet and civil rights activist, author of the "Negro National Anthem", "Lift Every Voice and Sing"
Fisk Jubilee Singers, first African American performers to gain international acclaim for introducing the world to Negro Spirituals
Lewis Wade Jones, sociologist and educator
John Lewis, U.S. Congressman
Hazel O'Leary, former U.S. Secretary of Energy
Booker T. Washington, educator and founder of Tuskegee University
John Wesley Work III, professor, composer and musicologist