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curtains drawn did the singers “sit upon the floor (there were but few chairs),” practicing “softly, learning from each other the songs of our fathers.” Partly inspired by the applause his small company received in nearby towns as well as by the emptiness of the Fisk treasury, White proposed that he take a company of students north to raise money. However, Fisk’s all-white board and many of the school’s all-white faculty remained unconvinced. When the board refused to help fund the effort, White replied to his dissenters: “Tis time to hog, rot or die: I’m depending on God, not you.” So on that fateful day, October 6, 1871, the tears of their loved ones echoed the students, parents, and teachers’ shared fears about the journey. Most of the troupe’s nine original members had been born into slavery. The memory of slavery’s brutality and the surety of race hatred, violence, and injustice must have weighed heavily upon them. Despite their fears and a general lack of optimism toward the trip, the band of singers was soon named “Jubilee Singers,” because of the biblical reference to the Jewish year of Jubilee in the Book of Leviticus (25:8-17). Blacks had long identified with the scripture’s promise of freedom. As enslaved people, they had figuratively included “jubilee” in their prayers to represent their hope for emancipation. The name’s musical euphony was surpassed only by its symbolic fittingness.
As the school’s greatest hope, the original Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled across the nation over the next several years. They endured harsh weather conditions as well as countless acts of racial discrimination under frequent threats of mob violence. They owned little tangibly, most, no more than the clothes on their backs and inadequate shoes on their feet yet remained undeterred by the physical stress imposed by harshly cold and damp conditions as well as constant travel. With their unwavering will, the Jubilees never failed to astound their listeners even amid the most challenging of circumstances. Early on, while stranded between trains in a small town, the Jubilees were cornered by a mob of whites at a local hotel. With White standing between them and the mob, they followed his direction to sing and pray. Recalling the incident, Sheppard wrote, “One by one the riotous crowd left off their jeering and swearing and slunk back, until only one leader stood near Mr. White, and he finally took off his hat.” Arrival at a hotel did not guarantee safety either. On one occasion in Chillicothe, Ohio, the troupe was denied lodging twice. Even then, they were only admitted on the condition they did not eat at the regular meal times with other guests and not sleep in the guest rooms, but in the landlord’s backroom instead. Similarly, the troupe was immediately ordered off the hotel property in Newark, New Jersey after the proprietor returned to find that the clerk had registered “not ‘cork’ minstrels” but real
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