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Editor's Note: Premier historian of slavery in America, John Hope Franklin recalls his years as an undergraduate student at Fisk University, the prestigious historically black educational institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
WHEN MY SIBLINGS and I were growing up, our parents had regaled us with stories about Nashville, the rivalry between Fisk and Roger Williams universities, and the subsequent decline of Roger Williams and steady rise of Fisk in importance and influence. Named for a Civil War general, Clinton B. Fisk, the university was founded in 1866 by the American Missionary Association and other advocates of education and uplift for the freedmen. It achieved no real stability until students, led by George L. White, went north and then to Europe in 1874, giving concerts under the name of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They raised sufficient funds to assure the future of the fledgling institution. It weathered the Reconstruction years, perhaps by not challenging the restoration of white rule. And while it cannot be said that Fisk was thriving in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it was surviving, thanks to support by the American Missionary Association and Northern philanthropists.
The price of stability was the university's autocratic control of the student body and its administration's careful adherence to local white demands that the institution conform to the social and political mores that had always governed the races in the South. Tellingly, its best-known alumnus, W.E.B. Du Bois of the class of 1888, had in 1925 exhorted the students to revolt against the president, Fayette Avery McKenzie, whom Du Bois described as "unfit and a detriment to the cause of higher education for our race."
When my sister Anne and I arrived in Nashville in September 1931, Fisk was enjoying a steady advance in virtually every way since McKenzie's unheralded departure in the spring of 1925. Thomas Elsa Jones, an energetic and spirited white educator who was considered "safe" in the eyes of the white citizens of Nashville, had attracted some of the leading African-American scholars to join the Fisk faculty. He had also recruited a corps of white professors, including, most important for me, Theodore S. Currier in history. Financial support for Fisk was increasing despite the Depression, and a newly constructed library and a...