Fisk Memorial Chapel

When the chapel opened in 1892 it was the largest building in the country where African Americans could gather. It memorializes General Clinton B. Fisk, who helped the school secure its former army barracks site and provided 30,000 dollars in government funds for its endowment. The school had opened in 1866 as the Fisk Free Colored School to educate freedpeople. Ella Sheppard, pianist and assistant director of the Jubilee Singers, had her funeral in the chapel in 1914, more than two decades after it was built.

What the plaque says

Fisk Memorial Chapel Fisk Memorial Chapel, deigned by New York architect William Bigelow, was erected in 1892 in memory of General Clinton B. Fisk, a founder of the University. The religious and cultural center of the campus, the Chapel has welcomed foreign dignitaries, outstanding concert artists, and renowned lecturers, such as Booker T. Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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 — 1.5 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

• Charles Spurgeon Johnson / Robert E. Park — steps away
• The John Wesley Work Home — steps away
• Samuel Allen McElwee — steps away
• Fisk Jubilee Singers — steps away