Nashville–On Tuesday, October 6, 2020, at 10:00 a.m. (CST), Fisk University will hold its 2020 Jubilee Day Convocation and pilgrimage. This year’s convocation will be streamed via YouTube and Facebook. FiskJubileeDay.org is the link in order to “attend”.
Serving as this year’s keynote speaker will be Fisk alumna Angeline Butler ‘61.
Ms. Butler is an educator, a playwright, a director in theatre, a coordinator of cultural projects and a civil rights activist, who is currently an adjunct professor in Africana Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (New York City). She is also a graduate of Columbia University and The Juilliard School.
While a student at Fisk, 1957-1961, she studied Music and led the Student Nonviolent Movement of the 1960s with Marion Barry, Jr., John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Peggy Alexander, Eleanor Jones, Curtis Murphy , Jerry Heard and Diane Nash. She is author of “Hands On the Freedom Plow: Accounts by Women of SNCC”, University of Illinois Press (2012) and (2010).
The Jubilee Day Convocation annually spotlights Fisk alumni and commemorates the historic day in 1871 when the Fisk Jubilee Singers® departed from Fisk University to perform around the United States and abroad in order to raise funds for the university. It also serves as the first public appearance of the current Fisk Jubilee Singers®. This year the university celebrates the 149th anniversary of the original troop of Fisk Jubilee Singers® that traveled the world sharing the Negro Spiritual with people of different backgrounds.
A virtual pilgrimage segment to the sites of the four original Fisk Jubilee Singers buried in Nashville will immediately follow this year’s convocation segment. Original Jubilee Singers buried in Nashville’s City Cemetery are Elle Sheppard Moore and Mabel Lewis Imes; Georgia Gordon Taylor and Minnie Tate Hall are buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
