H B C U
T I M E S
WE’RE DEPENDING ON GOD, AND NOT YOU
BY DR. CRYSTAL A. deGREGORY
J ust about 100 years ago, on October 6, 1871, in Nashville, Tennessee, nine students—Ella Sheppard, Issac Dickerson, Green Evans, Maggie Porter, Minnie Tate, Jennie Jackson, Benjamin Holmes, Thomas Rutling, and Eliza Walker—at the fledgling Fisk University, gathered amid a small crowd of well-wishers. The occasion was unlike any other before. The students had come to the school for an education. Now, they were preparing to leave its modest grounds to save it. Just five years earlier, in January 1866, Fisk, known to some as the Fisk Free Colored School, had been formally dedicated as the Fisk School. Although the day was replete with well-wishers, Republican Governor of Tennessee W. G. Brownlow, in his keynote, noted that without the protection of federal troops, the school would not last “a week, not a week.” It lasted and grew in service to many of the almost 11,000 freedmen — 3,500 of them younger than 15 — who called Nashville home at the time of Fisk’s founding in 1865.
There were insufficient funds for repairs. There was not even enough money for food to feed the 400 students enrolled at the school. The beef was so tough, the boys called it “Old Ben,” and declared “every time they saw the cow they felt like apologizing,” reflected student Ella Sheppard. She had arrived at Fisk in September 1868 with all of her possessions in a trunk so small, the boys teasingly called it a “pie box.” Along with several Fisk students, Sheppard spent what little free time she had rehearsing music with Fisk treasurer and music teacher, George L. White. His encouragement of the small student gatherings began in 1867. Their repertoire primarily consisted of contemporary numbers and abolitionist hymns. But, when left to their devices, the students chose to sing the songs born of the slave experience, songs now known as “Negro Spirituals.”
But by 1871, the one-story barracks of the former Union Army hospital that housed Fisk University were rotting extensively.
“We did not dream of ever using them in public,” wrote Sheppard. Only with the door shut and locked and with the
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