A School Opens, a Future Widens

On January 9, 1866, the Fisk School convened classes for the first time in former Union Army barracks in Nashville, Tennessee. Fisk University records that its earliest students ranged in age from seven to seventy and shared experiences of slavery and poverty.

The school had been established in 1865 by John Ogden, the Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath, and the Reverend Edward P. Smith. It was named for General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, who helped provide its first facilities. The institution was incorporated as Fisk University in 1867.

The achievement was not merely a founding announcement. It was the act of teaching and learning: students entered classrooms and began building an institution whose influence would reach scholarship, public life, science, art, and music.

Education after emancipation was both urgently desired and fiercely contested. Formerly enslaved people created schools, supported teachers, and treated literacy as a tool of family independence, citizenship, and economic mobility. Fisk’s first classrooms therefore represented more than charity. Students of different generations claimed access to knowledge that slavery had attempted to deny, and their presence helped determine what the institution would become.

Financial crisis soon threatened the young school. In 1871, a group of students organized as the Fisk Jubilee Singers began touring to raise money. Their performances introduced spirituals to many national and international audiences while challenging degrading stereotypes about Black culture and intellect. The singers’ earnings helped fund Jubilee Hall, one of the first major permanent structures built for the education of Black students in the United States.

Fisk later educated influential scholars, artists, scientists, and public servants, including W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and Nikki Giovanni. Its history also includes debates over leadership, curriculum, student protest, and the responsibilities of a Black university. January 9 honors the foundational act that made those later achievements possible: teachers met learners in repurposed barracks and began sustained institutional work. The day shows how a classroom can become infrastructure for cultural preservation, professional training, research, civic leadership, and freedom across generations.

The ages of the first students reveal the scale of the demand. Children sought beginnings that slavery had tried to prevent, while adults pursued learning after years of denied access. Sharing one institution across generations turned education into repair. Fisk’s opening demonstrates that achievement can begin quietly—with a lesson, a reader, and people deeply determined to learn.