Charles Spurgeon Johnson / Robert E. Park

After the 1919 Chicago race riot, Johnson was the main researcher and author of The Negro in Chicago, a commission report on the causes that became a model of its kind. He founded Opportunity magazine for the National Urban League and has been called an entrepreneur of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1934 study Shadow of the Plantation, funded by a Rosenwald fellowship, examined how legal, economic and social forces held people down. At Fisk he drew faculty including Arna Bontemps and Aaron Douglas, and in 1946 he became the first Black president.

What the plaque says

Charles Spurgeon Johnson / Robert E. Park Charles Spurgeon Johnson 1893-1956 - Charles S. Joshnson joined Fisk's faculty in 1928 as professor of sociology and director of the Department of Social Sciences. In 1942, he began a series of seminars on race relations at Fisk, thereby establishing the first Race Relations Institute in the South. Johnson became Fisk University's first African American president in 1947, and he began a building program which included construction of a new social sciences building, Park Hall. After his death in 1956, it was renamed Park-Johnson Hall. Continued: Robert E. Park 1864-1944 - In 1953 Johnson named the social science building after Dr. Robert E. Park, his former professor and advisor at the University of Chicago. Johnson invited Park to teach sociology at Fisk in 1936.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — steps away
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.1 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.3 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.4 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• The John Wesley Work Home — steps away
• Fisk Memorial Chapel — steps away
• Fisk Jubilee Singers — steps away
• Jubilee Hall — steps away