Fisk University

Three American Missionary Association men, John Ogden, Erastus Milo Cravath and Edward Parmelee Smith, started the school, and General Fisk provided 30,000 dollars in government funds toward its endowment. In 1930 it became the first historically Black institution accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Students struck in 1924 and 1925 over rules on dress and student life, and the protests contributed to President Fayette McKenzie's resignation. In 1949 Georgia O'Keeffe gave Fisk 101 works from Alfred Stieglitz's collection, now shown in the Carl Van Vechten Gallery, a former gymnasium.

What the plaque says

Fisk University Fisk University, founded in 1866 by the American Missionary Association, was chartered in 1867 to provide higher education for men and women regardless of race. Named for General Clinton B. Fisk, assistant commissioner of the Freedman's Bureau for Kentucky and Tennessee, it was originally housed in army barracks. The first permanent building, Jubilee Hall, was completed in 1876, and built with funds raised in American and European concert tours by the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.2 mi
  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 — 1.2 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

• Arna Wendell Bontemps — steps away
• Hulda Margaret Lyttle — steps away
• Samuel Allen McElwee — steps away
• Ella Sheppard (Moore) — steps away