The origins of Fisk University may be traced to the days immediately following the abolition of slavery in the United States. Historians have richly documented the zeal with which the freed slaves of those days took to the books which had been forbidden them in their time of bondage. Learning was to be the bridge that would carry them from emancipation onward to real freedom and dignity.

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 convened its first classes on January 9, 1866. The first students ranged in age from seven to seventy, but shared common experiences of slavery and poverty--and an extraordinary thirst for learning.

The work of Fisk's founders was sponsored by the American Missionary Association--later part of the United Church of Christ, with which Fisk retains an affiliation today. Ogden, Cravath, and Smith, along with others in their movement, shared a dream of an educational institution that would be open to all, regardless of race, and that would measure itself by "the highest standards, not of Negro education, but of American education at its best." Their dream was incorporated as Fisk University on August 22, 1867.