Marsh, J. B. T. The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs . Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co, 1880. [format: book], [genre: history; travelogue]. Permission: Northern Illinois University
Persistent link to this document: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/file.php?file=Jubilee.html

FISK UNIVERSITY is emphatically a Missionary Institution. The people in whose interest it has been founded were, sixteen years ago, slaves. The most of the students are dependent upon themselves, and must earn their own support while securing their education. The colleges of no section of our country rely upon their students, even though wealthy, for the salaries of professors. Colleges and Theological Seminaries must be endowed, or raise the larger part of their annual expenses by constant appeals to the liberality of their friends.

The current expenses of Fisk University have, thus far, been principally met by the American Missionary Association, but with the hope that the success of its work would create for it friends who would gladly endow it. The institution is most favorably located with respect to healthfulness of climate, accessibility, and surrounding influences. Nashville is very properly called the Athens of the South because of the number and importance of its educational establishments.

Fisk University has a successful history of fifteen years of work and growth. It has its beautiful site of twenty-five acres and Jubilee Hall; Livingstone Missionary Hall is being erected, and now it needs adequate endowment. We present, to all who have money and wish to use it in the interest of humanity, this opportunity of investing money in a permanent form, to do a noble work in behalf of Christian education for the centuries to come. We invite all who desire to help Fisk University to come, if possible, and see its work for themselves.

The magnitude of the interests centred in such an institution cannot be overestimated in their relations to the welfare of our own country. To the millions of recently emancipated colored people of the South must be given a Christian education, or the nation must suffer far more in the future than in the past from the curse of slavery.

E. M. CRAVATH,
President.
NASHVILLE, Tenn., October, 1880.

Letter from Clinton B. Fisk.

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