6 Fisk University alumni you should know about
Dozens of former Fisk University students have gone on to establish a national profile after their time in Nashville. They include authors, civil rights activists and members of Congress. Here are six of the school’s noted alumni you should know about.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Founder of the NAACP
W.E.B. DuBois, who graduated from Fisk in 1888, is one of the university's most famous former students. He was one of the founders of the NAACP. For decades, he served as the director of publicity and research, a member of the board of directors and editor of the Crisis, the organization's monthly magazine, according to the NAACP website.
He was one of the most prominent voices of the early civil rights movement, writing books and advocating for black people across the globe into the early 1960s.
Nikki Giovanni
Celebrated poet
As a student at Fisk, Nikki Giovanni was editor of the campus literary magazine and took part in the Fisk Writers Workshop, according to a biography kept by the Poetry Foundation. In the years since she graduated in 1968, her searing poetry grew out of her reaction to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy.
Her work propelled her onto the New York Times and Los Angeles Times best-seller lists.
Giovanni has received several NAACP Image Awards, was the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry. She has taught at Rutgers University, Ohio State University and Virginia Tech.
Judith Jamison
Renowned dancer
Judith Jamison became an international force in the dance world soon after coming to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1965, according to her biography on the theater's website. During the 1970s and 1980s, she danced with ballet companies across the world and starred on Broadway. She returned to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1989 as artistic director, staying in that role for 21 years.
Jamison has received an Emmy Award, the Kennedy Center Honor and the National Medal of Arts. She also was listed in Time magazine's list of the world’s most influential people in 2009 and was inducted into the National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame.
Matthew Knowles
Music mogul
Yep, Beyoncé’s dad graduated from Fisk before helping to catapult his oldest daughter to superstardom, first as part of Destiny’s Child and then as a solo act. Matthew Knowles previously served on Fisk’s board of trustees.
Knowles earned a double major in economics and business administration at Fisk, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Fisk in 2008. In previous statements, Knowles has said his dreams of forming a girl group and going into music management began at Fisk’s radio station, WFSK 88.1 FM.
"I remember being at Fisk's radio station with a fraternity brother, David Lombard, and all we did was dream," Knowles said in 2011. "David went on to put together a group called En Vogue, and I put together a group called Destiny's Child, and it was because of a dream right here at Fisk University."
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U.S. Rep. John Lewis
Congressman
One of the most recognizable faces of the civil rights movement, John Lewis helped to shape many of its most iconic moments.
Lewis was part of a coalition of Fisk students who helped to organize sit-ins at Nashville's segregated lunch counters in 1960. He went on to participate in the Freedom Rides, and, at 23, he led and spoke at the March on Washington in 1963.
Lewis later led hundreds of protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965. The march was shattered by violence when state troopers started attacking the peaceful marchers. Lewis' congressional biography said he was arrested more than 40 times and suffered serious injuries while participating in nonviolent protests throughout the era.
He has represented the Atlanta area in Congress since 1986.
Diane Nash
Civil rights leader
After arriving at Fisk in 1959, Diane Nash was incensed by racism that sat out in the open in Nashville, where whites ate lunch at department store counters while blacks ate sitting on the curbs outside.
So she trained to participate in the nonviolent sit-ins. Before long, Nash was elected chairwoman of the Nashville movement, and she became a mainstay in many civil rights era protests.
John Seigenthaler, the former editor and publisher at The Tennessean who died in 2014, once recalled in an interview a conversation he had with Nash while he was serving as an assistant to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He had tried to warn her it was too dangerous for the Nashville students to participate in the Freedom Rides. Riders had been beaten by Ku Klux Klan members while trying to integrate bus lines in the South.
"I'm saying, 'You're going to get somebody killed.' She says, 'You don't understand' — and she's right, I didn't understand — 'You don't understand, we signed our wills last night.' "