Fisk University and Jubilee Hall

Fisk Free Colored School opened on January 9, 1866, in former Union army hospital barracks, backed by the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen's Bureau. Enrollment went from two hundred in February to nine hundred by May as formerly enslaved Nashvillians of every age came to learn their letters. It became Fisk University the next year, named for General Clinton B. Fisk, who helped secure the barracks.

By 1871 the roofs leaked and the school faced closure, so the treasurer George White took a student choir on tour. The nine Jubilee Singers, among them Ella Sheppard, Maggie Porter, Thomas Rutling and Isaac Dickerson, sang the spirituals then called slave songs, and White named them for the Biblical year of jubilee. After a tour of Britain that included a performance for Queen Victoria, they came home in 1874 with nearly fifty thousand dollars. It built Jubilee Hall, a six-story Victorian Gothic building dedicated in 1876 and made a National Historic Landmark in 1974. It is still a residence hall, so this is a building to see from the quad.

Inside the campus galleries, Aaron Douglas's 1930 murals in Cravath Hall show enslaved Africans, the spirituals and the migration north, and can be viewed on weekdays. The Van Vechten Gallery began as the 1888 gymnasium that W. E. B. Du Bois, then a senior, helped raise money to build. Diane Nash of Fisk was among the students who launched Nashville's sit-ins in February 1960.