Jim Crow Sociology by Earl Wright

Jim Crow Sociology by Earl Wright

Author:Earl Wright [Wright, Earl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781947602571
Google: 83c9wQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Cincinnati Press
Published: 2020-01-15T05:25:21+00:00


Fisk University

Fisk University was established in Nashville, Tennessee in 1866. Nashville was thought to be an appropriate location for the American Missionary Association-backed school because it is centrally located in the corridor between northern and southern regions known during the Civil War as border states. The city was thought to be ideal because some believed it was more tolerant of northern sensibilities and carpetbaggers than towns located deeper in the South. The city’s seemingly open embrace of its northern brethren was why the school’s founders openly proclaimed “Nashville was ‘a nostril’ through which the state had ‘long breathed the Northern air of free institutions’.”2

Knowledgeable concerning Nashville’s relative openness to interracial cooperation, but fully aware of their location Up South, Fisk’s leaders worked feverishly to establish positive relationships with the city’s White community. This was a primary objective upon the school’s establishment because Fisk’s founders were well aware of the anger and resentment of some Whites toward the promotion of education for Black Americans who, after graduation, would dare believe themselves equal to or better than Whites, if they already had not prior to earning their degree. The racial climate of the Reconstruction Era in America was so vile, even in Nashville, that it was not beyond reason that a White southerner so offended by the idea that a Black person would overtly assert their human equality would extend some sort of violence, and possibly death, upon the person(s) by whom he believed he was offended. In an effort to minimize the possibility of race-based violence at his newly established institution and against the students being educated there when they ventured beyond campus:

[Fisk University] President Cravath and his associates moved among Southern leaders who entertained convictions different from their own, winning the respect and confidence of many without compromising their own belief in the fundamental equality of individuals before both God and man.3

Among audiences not keen on providing resources or opportunities for Black Americans to practice or gain agency over their lives, Fisk’s founders allayed many of the more extreme and exaggerated concerns of their new neighbors. Nevertheless, the Ku Klux Klan, established two years prior to the school in a small town located only a short distance from Nashville, occasionally held marches near Fisk. For the most part, the efforts of the school’s founders to establish a barrier between its students and dangerous White citizens was successful.

One must be mindful that many HBCUs established during this period, while tagged with the name “college” or “university,” offered curriculums ranging from elementary school to college. To many Black Nashville residents, Fisk represented their first opportunity to become formally educated. The establishment of a tuition-free school to educate Blacks one year removed from passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery was significant, since no such institution existed in Nashville prior to Fisk. That Nashville, with the state’s largest Black American population at the time, did not have a system of free public education for its brown-skinned citizens may not have been a matter of concern for city leaders prior to the establishment of Fisk.



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