Fisk University history

In 1867 the Fisk Free Colored School was reorganized and incorporated as Fisk University to focus on higher education.

In 1870 Adam K. Spence became the school's principal.

With the school facing financial distress, the choir went on tour to raise funds in 1871, led by professor and university treasurer George L. White.

Groundbreaking ceremonies were held July 1, 1873, for the erection of Jubilee Hall, now a historic landmark.

Fisk graduated its first four college students in 1875, awarding them the B.A. degree for successfully completing courses in such liberal arts subjects as classical and foreign languages, mathematics, natural sciences, philosophy, history, and political science.

Among the students who came from the North to study at Fisk was W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the university's most famous alumni, who received his B.A. in 1888.

Spence continued at Fisk as professor of Greek until 1900.

The school established a department of social science in 1910, founded and directed by George E. Haynes.

Evelyn Granville, née Evelyn Boyd, (born May 1, 1924, Washington, D.C., United States), American mathematician who was one of the first African American women to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics.

McKenzie resigned on April 16, 1925.

In 1930, Fisk became the first historically black college to gain accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

Thomas Elsa Jones became the university's fourth president in 1925. It was also the first such institution approved by the Association of American Universities in 1933.

His was one of the earliest applications of high resolution infrared spectroscopy and provided the first detailed spectra of molecules, which led to the study of molecular structure through infrared spectroscopy: he chaired the Fisk Physics Department until his death in 1941.

In 1942, Doctor Charles S. Johnson created the Race Relations Institute at Fisk.

In 1946, Charles S. Johnson became the university's sixth president and first African-American president.

In 1947 Johnson became Fisk's first black president, replacing Jones, who had resigned to become president of his alma mater, Earlham College.

In 1949, Fisk received the Stieglitz Collection of modern art from photographer and arts patron Alfred Stieglitz.

In 1952, Fisk was the first predominantly black college to earn a Phi Beta Kappa charter.

Organized as the Delta of Tennessee Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society that December, the chapter inducted its first student members on April 4, 1953.

In 1957 she joined IBM’s Vanguard Computing Center in Washington, D.C., where she wrote computer programs that tracked orbits for the uncrewed Vanguard satellite and the crewed Mercury spacecraft.

In 1960, Fisk students joined other black leaders in the Nashville sit-ins, nonviolent protests against segregation at lunch counters in the city during the civil rights movement.

In 1962 she joined the aerospace firm North American Aviation, where she worked on celestial mechanics and trajectory calculations for the Apollo project.

Enrollment reached 1,559 in 1972, the largest in the university's history.

The United States Department of the Interior designated Jubilee Hall as a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

When a cold homecoming day on November 12, 1983, found dormitories without heat, it became public that the Nashville Gas Company had discontinued service in April because of an overdue bill of $157,000.

Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University Press, 1989.

In 2004 former United States Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary was named president of the university, the fifth president in less than ten years.

On June 25, 2008, Fisk announced that it had successfully raised $4 million during the fiscal year ending June 30.