Word: fisk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...superiority came back," he said, and he was alarmed. Jones ran into the Negro again in a German class, and discovered that the Negro knew more German than he did. "Soon we were playing handball together-and in less than a year I had accepted the presidency of Fisk University...
Shackles to Studies. Fisk began in 1866, in abandoned Union hospital barracks, and its first books were bought by selling a pile of old iron handcuffs found in the barracks. Most of the first students were freed slaves, who had to start from scratch, work up from the three Rs to college subjects (some took ten years). Eleven of the students barnstormed the U.S. and Europe as the "Fisk Jubilee Singers," in three years raised $100,000 for the University by singing spirituals...
When Jones took over in 1926, Fisk had only 531 college students, a debt of $216,000 and a ramshackle look. He begged money from whites and Negroes (the angels ranged from Lawyer Paul D. Cravath and Financier John D. Rockefeller Jr. to old washerwomen who scraped up $1 apiece). Jones's first purchase, over everybody else's objections, was an expensive power lawnmower. His explanation: "If Fisk is going to die, it will die with its face shaved...
Jones built up an interracial (50-50) faculty, soon boasted Negro names like Sociologist Charles S. Johnson, Librarian-Author Arna W. Bontemps (St. Louis Woman), the late Poet James Weldon Johnson. Northern Negroes, reversing the usual tide, began to go South to Fisk. (1946 enrollment: 1,034, with 48% from above the Mason-Dixon line. In 1926, all but 11% were Southern Negroes...
...Nashville, Tenn. last week, young black and white students of both sexes were sitting down to breakfast together in an old red-brick house near Fisk University. All morning and most of the afternoon they were swinging pickaxes on a onetime plantation at the end of 18th Avenue North, west of Hootin' Annie and Billy Goat Hills. Members of the American Friends Service Committee's first interracial work camp in the South, they were converting a little patch of former slave soil into a recreation field for local...