Fisk University, a traditionally African-American college among Tennessee colleges, provides a rich academic experience steeped in the liberal arts tradition. Our faculty and students exhibit a passion for learning and personal growth. We are committed to ethical leadership and engagement in our local and global communities.

Barely six months after the end of the Civil War, and just two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, three men - John Ogden, the Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath, and the Reverend Edward P. Smith - established the Fisk School in Nashville, named in honor of General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen's Bureau, who provided the new institution with facilities in former Union Army barracks near the present site of Nashville's Union Station. In these facilities Fisk University convened its first classes on January 9, 1866. The first students ranged in age from seven to 70, but shared common experiences of slavery and poverty - and an extraordinary thirst for learning.

From its earliest days, Fisk University has played a leadership role in the education of African-Americans. Fisk University faculty and alumni have been among America's intellectual, artistic, and civic leaders in every generation since the school's beginnings. Among them have been such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois (Fisk University class of 1888), the great social critic and co-founder of the NAACP. Booker T. Washington - the great educator who was Du Bois' famous philosophical adversary as well as the founder of Tuskegee University - served on Fisk University's Board of Trustees, married a Fisk University alumna, and sent his own children to Fisk University.