Jubilee Hall

One of the oldest buildings at Fisk University [1] is Jubilee Hall, on the north end of the campus, which is said to be the first permanent building constructed for the education of African Americans in the country. It was built with money raised by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who popularized black spirituals during a world tour from 1871 to 1874.

In 1871, Fisk University needed money. Buildings at the school established in old Union army barracks in 1866 were decaying while more and more African Americans came to seek education.

So, the school choir withdrew all the money from the University’s treasury and left on a world tour. The nine singers were Isaac Dickerson, Maggie Porter, Minnie Tate, Jennie Jackson, Benjamin Holmes, Thomas Rutling, Eliza Walker, Green Evans, and Ella Sheppard. Remembering a biblical reference to the Hebrew “year of the jubilee,” Fisk treasurer and choir manager George White gave them their name, the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

The singers struggled at first, but before long audiences were praising them. They toured first the American South, then the North, and in 1873 sailed to England for a successful British tour. Their audiences included William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Ulysses S. Grant, William Gladstone, Mark Twain, Johann Strauss, and Queen Victoria.

Songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” moved audiences to tears. The singers introduced the spiritual to mainstream white audiences and erased negative misconceptions about African Americans and African-American education.

In 1874 the singers returned to Nashville [2]. They had raised enough money to pay off Fisk’s debts and build the University’s first permanent structure, an imposing Victorian Gothic six-story building now called Jubilee Hall. It was the first permanent structure built solely for the education of African Americans in the United States.

Every October 6, the day in 1871 that the singers departed Fisk, the University recalls their struggle and their triumph with a convocation featuring the modern-day Jubilee Singers.