Portal:Tennessee/Selected article/6

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fisk University is a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, which opened its doors to its first classes on January 9, 1866.

Fisk is the home of the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. The Jubilee Singers started out in the 1870s as a group of traveling students who set out from Nashville to raise money for the school through their singing. After a tour of Europe in 1873 they sent enough money back to Fisk to build Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building in the country built for the education of newly-freed slaves.

Notable Fisk alumni include Marion Barry, former mayor of Washington D.C.; Cora Brown, the first African-American woman to be elected to a state senate; W.E.B. DuBois, a sociologist and scholar, who was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University; poet Nikki Giovanni; U.S. Congressman Alcee Hastings and John Lewis; concert singer Roland Hayes; and Alma Powell, wife of General Colin Powell. (Read more...)