Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 4
Fisk University began as the Fisk Free Colored School, one of an archipelago of freedmen’s schools established throughout the postwar South by Northern missionaries. An outpost of the abolitionist American Missionary Association (A.M.A.), the school was named after the local Freedmen’s Bureau commander, Gen. Clinton Bowen Fisk. The general had convinced the government to give the school’s zealous and entrepreneurial founders a large complex of Union Army hospital barracks set in the midst of a squalid encampment of former slaves who had fled to Yankee-occupied Nashville in the middle of the war.
As slaves, some African-Americans had risked death to learn to read and write. With emancipation they descended on missionary schools in the hundreds of thousands, determined to learn the trick of literacy that seemed to many of them to be the key to white hegemony. “Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes,” wrote Booker T. Washington, “can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education…it was a whole race trying to go to school.”
Some radical seminarians worked among the freedmen because no congregation would have them as ministers, but most had emerged from the Civil War believing that the redemption of emancipated slaves was a holy calling. Among the most dynamic of these Northern toilers was Fisk’s treasurer, a Gettysburg veteran named George Leonard White.
To demonstrate their ability to absorb the culture of white America, they initially performed contemporary works—popular