X-Nico

7 unusual facts about Fisk University


Charles Fairchild

In the early 1870s, He toured Europe as manager for the original Jubilee singers of Fisk University.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

The operating agreement required Fisk to set aside $3.9 million of the $30 million sale proceeds to be used to establish a fund for the care and maintenance of the collection at the Carl Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk.

In 2006, Fisk University agreed to sell a 50% stake in a 101 piece Stieglitz collection to Crystal Bridges for $30 million.

A few months later on 2 August, The Davidson County Chancery Court approval a Final Agreed Order that establish joint ownership between Fisk and Crystal Bridges through the newly established Stieglitz Art Collection, LLC.

In October 2010, a judge ruled that a 50% stake in the collection could be sold to Crystal Bridges if modifications to the contract were made so that Fisk University could not lose its interest in the collection, nor could the joint venture holding ownership of the collection between Fisk University and Crystal Bridges be based in Delaware (or outside Tennessee Courts).

Margaret Murray Washington

Determined to further her teaching career, at the age of nineteen, Murray enrolled in Fisk University, where she completed the college preparatory course in five years and college in four.

Samuel A. McElwee

He studied Latin, German, and mathematics with a Vanderbilt student whose recommendation got him a Peabody Scholarship to Fisk University.


John Fox Slater

The fund has been of great value in aiding industrial schools in the South, its largest beneficiaries being the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute of Hampton, Virginia, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of Tuskegee, Alabama, Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, Claflin University in Orangeburg, SC, and Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Lewis Wade Jones

A member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, he received his A.B. degree from Fisk University in 1931, and followed it with postgraduate study as a Social Science Research Council Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1931-1932.

Sidney Stripling

At the request of Alan Lomax, in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, John Wesley Work III of Fisk University recorded ten of Stripling's songs at the Fort Valley State College Folk Festival in Fort Valley, Georgia in March 1941.

Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant

She attended Fisk University and is a graduate of SUNY at Buffalo.

West End Church of Christ Silver Point

In his book The Souls of Black Folk, author W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the primitive conditions of a black schoolhouse at nearby Alexandria, where he taught class while a student at Fisk University in the 1880s.


see also