WRITTEN BY
Llewellyn Smith & Andrew Ward

PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY
Llewellyn Smith

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Ann Bennett

EDITED BY
Jean Boucicaut

PRINCIPAL CINEMATOGRAPHY
Michael Chin

NARRATED BY
Dion Graham

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT
Caroline Toth

ORIGINAL SCORE BY
Tom Phillips

MUSIC SUPERVISOR
Rena Kosersky

SENIOR RESEARCHER
Meredith Woods

SENIOR CREATIVE CONSULTANT
Andrew Ward

FISK UNIVERSITY ARCHIVIST
Beth Howes

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
Sarah Shoenfeld
Lena Sheehan
Franziska Blome
Julie Rosenberg
Nzingah Clark
Margaret Kirby
Lee Shane

INTERNS
Joshua Brenner
Patrick Carey
Heather Chapman
Sara A Chaudhary
Beth Collins
Jeremy Daley
Deborah VonColln
Shannon Hodges
Andrew Rice
Emily Jansen
David Sauerwein

The 1998/99 FISK JUBILEE SINGERS 
Fred Steen, Jr.
Brandon Alexander
Demetrius A. Norman
Mandisa Hundley
Vernard Burton
Rachel C. Waiters
Chikara Collins
Danita Wilson
Ayesha Porter
Paul Kwami, Director

ADVISORS
Deacon Sam McClain
Bobby L. Lovett
Toni Anderson
Horace Clarence Boyer 
John Hope Franklin
Rainer Lotz
Reavis L. Mitchell, Jr
Katherine Preston

VOICES 
Naheem Allah
Rosalyn Coleman
Alvin Epstein
Karen Francis
Kemp Harris
Doug Griffin
Noel Johansen
Tamara Tunie
Angela Wiggins

ADDITIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY
Michael Chin
Bobby Shepard
Buddy Squires

ASSISTANT CAMERA
Jill Tufts
Jonathan Weaver

PRODUCTION DESIGNER 
Elain Hensley

SOUND RECORDIST
Glen Trew

GRIPS
Steven Gill 
Dee Nichols

GAFFER
Suzanne Carter

SECOND GAFFER
Larry Hardeker

VIDEO ENGINEER
James Royer

Mule Wrangler
Malcolm Jessup

LOCATIONS
Belle Meade Plantation, TN 
Burritt Museum & Park, AL 
Chi Phi Fraternity, Boston, MA
Susan Mitchell Hardt Residence, MA 
Colonial Theater, MA
Duke University, NC 
Fisk University, TN
Grace Episcopal Church, TN 
Great Brook Farm State Park, MA
Mount Auburn Cemetery, MA 
Massachusetts Historical Society 
Nashville Wildlife Park-Grassmere, TN 
Travellers Rest Historic House Museum, Inc., TN
Tremont Temple, MA 

PHOTO ANIMATION 
Berle Cherney,
Visual Productions

FILM PROCESSING 
Medallion PFA Film and Video

ON-LINE EDITORS
Ed Ham
Lorraine Grant

SOUND MIX
Heartpunch Studios

SOUND RECORDING
RMR STUDIOS

Archival Footage Provided By:
Blue Sky Stock Footage
John E. Allen
Library of Congress Paper and Print Collection

Archival Stills Provided By:
AKG Photo
American Antiquarian Society
Andover Theological Library, Harvard University
Archive Photo 
Boston Public Library
The Bostonian Society
Brooklyn Public Library
Chicago Historical Society
Corbis Images
Delaware Public Archives
Fisk University Archives, Nashville, Tennessee
Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee
Greg French 
Lamont Library, Harvard University 
Liaison Agency, Inc. 
Library of Congress
The Museum of The City of New York 
New Jersey Historical Society
North Wind Picture Archives, Alfred, Maine
Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio
Ohio Historical Society
Oxfordshire County Council, Central Library, Londo
n Pusey Map Collection, Harvard University
Rijks Museum, Amsterdam
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library
Shaw University Archives and Special Collections
Tennessee State Museum
Tennessee State Library and Archives
Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia
Widener Library, Harvard University
William Gladstone Collection
Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut

SPECIAL THANKS
Steve Bass
Beth Curley
Carol Cornsilk
Tracey McEvoy
Caroline Martin
Alice Abraham
Ronald E. Butchart
Philip Derendorf
Jenna Goodearl
Cynthia & Virgil Griffiths
Marguerite Hicks
Taylor Owens Hicks
Nathan Kennedy
Eileen Mency 
Jeff Nelson
Robert Poole
Joe Richardson
Doug Siroff
Jim Standifer
Marilyn Tomlinson
Mario Valdes
American Repertory Theatre
Boston African American National Historic Site
Boston National Historic Park
Brattle Book Shop
Cambridge Antiques Market
Center for Black Music Research
Costume Holiday House
Encore Theatrics
MIT Theater Arts Costume Shop
Performance Costume Rentals
Sadye & Company
Tennessee Repertory Theater
Trinity Repertory Theater
Huntsville Hilton
Alabama Film Office-Center for Commerce
Courtney Murphy
Nashville Mayor's Office of Film 
Kym Gerlock Jackson, Director 
Niki Arthur


FOR THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

On-Air Promotion 
Frank Capria 
James Dunford

Post Production
Maureen Barden
Raymond Powell

Field Production
Larry LeCain
Bob McCausland 
Chas Norton
Bob Thompkins

Series Designers
Alison Kennedy
Chris Pullman

Title Animation
Lizard Lounge Graphics, Inc.

Online Editor
Mark Steele

Series Theme
Charles Kuskin

Series Theme ADAPTATION
Michael Bacon

BUSINESS Manager
Christine Larson

Project Administration 
Nancy Farrell
Helen R. Russell
Andre Jones
Rebecca Suggs

Interactive Media
Rick Groleau
Danielle Dell'Olio

Publicity 
Daphne B. Noyes 
Johanna Baker

Coordinating Producer
Susan Mottau

Series Editor
Joseph Tovares

Senior Producer
Mark Samels

Executive Producer
Margaret Drain

A production of WGBH Boston For The American Experience

Produced with the assistance of Nashville Public Television 


©2000 WGBH Educational Foundation All rights reserved 

DAVID MCCULLOUGH, Series Host: Hello and welcome to The American Experience. I'm David McCullough.

Courage is a powerful, old theme in the story of America... the courage to cross great oceans for the chance of a better life... the courage to defy tyranny... or to stand up for one's convictions...

Our film is about nine very courageous and gifted young Americans who in 1871, six years after the Civil War, set off from Nashville, Tennessee, not to cross the Rockies or sail round the Horn, but to save a failing university that meant everything to them. They were the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University heading north on a first tour. All but two were former slaves, several were still in their teens. They had no money, no reputation, no experience performing on the road, and the ridicule and menace they faced, because of their color, were all too real in a land where, by then, everybody supposedly had equal rights.

Their strength was in their faith -- faith in God, faith in education, and in the transcendent spirit in the old songs they sang, "cabin songs," from slave times.

"Swing Low Sweet Chariot," "Steal Away," "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord." The Jubilee Singers were the first to perform these songs before white audiences. It was music to touch the hearts and souls of all men and women everywhere. And there would come the moment at historic Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, when suddenly the power of their message became evident as never before.

Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory by producer Llewellyn Smith and co-written by Andrew Ward.

DEACON SAM MCCLAIN: 

NARRATOR: In 1855, a Tennessee slave named Sarah Hannah Sheppard discovered that her daughter Ella had been trained to spy on her by their white mistress. Tormented, despairing, Sarah set off to drown her little girl, then herself. But providence intervened, in the form of an old slave woman.
 

Ella Sheppard
Song: "Swing Low Sweet Chariot"

NARRATOR: Ella would fulfill the prophecy in a way Sarah never imagined -- through Sarah’s own songs of sorrow and redemption. One day Ella would perform them in palaces, cathedrals, and concert halls with a choir of emancipated slaves. And build a great university out of the sacred songs of Jubilee.

Ella Sheppard’s father purchased her out of bondage and fled with her to Ohio, where she learned to read and write, and play the piano.

At end of the Civil War, she returned to Tennessee. Determined to become a teacher, she enrolled at a struggling school for freed blacks in Nashville, named Fisk University.

Fisk was a university in name only: a freedman's school, established in an abandoned army hospital barracks. Fisk was dedicated to training men and women like Ella to educate African Americans across the South. The school was run by the American Missionary Association, called the A.M.A. Fisk’s treasurer was a zealous missionary from New York named George Leonard White: a Union veteran of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville.

White's job was to keep Fisk afloat. But he had been a choir master and a band sergeant, and his true passion was music. Entranced by the beautiful voices of the young former slaves who studied at the school, he began to assemble the most gifted into a chorus.

Ella Sheppard

NARRATOR: In Ella Sheppard, George White recognized someone whose passion for music matched his own. White appointed Sheppard assistant choir director, making her, at age 18, the school's first black instructor. 

Together, White and Sheppard rehearsed the student chorus in popular songs of the day, and musical pageants like the "Cantata of Esther." 

But White was most entranced by the mysterious, moving songs that Ella Sheppard and the students sang for themselves. They were called cabin songs, plantation melodies, spirituals and Jubilees: folk hymns composed by slaves for worship and solace. 

HORACE BOYER, Musicologist: You start singing a song, and when you’re singing it first, according to the slaves, you’re just singing the words. But after a while, its almost like therapy. It begins to take the frown out of the face. The shoulders begin to come back to their natural position, what’s happening is you’re going through a cleansing process. These people were not readers. They were not writers. They had to sing songs with a few words, that they could learn once, carry on forever, that everybody could sing at the same time. So your going to find spirituals that will say, "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home. Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home." Just a few words which are going to be sung over and over.

NARRATOR: But education, not music, was the purpose of schools like Fisk University.

Under slavery, reading and writing had been forbidden, punishable by whipping, imprisonment or worse. With emancipation, waves of freedmen descended on any school they could find, desperate to learn how to count their new wages, write the new names they had chosen themselves, read the ballot and the Bible.

When Fisk opened its doors in January of 1866, hundreds of former slaves crowded into day school and night classes at the school's barracks.

But the school was continually on the verge of financial collapse. By 1868, it couldn’t pay its creditors, or even its teachers. One instructor apologized for asking for her back pay; but it was cold, she said, and she had no shoes. 

Tuition was twelve dollars a year at a time when farm laborers earned as little as eight dollars a month. 

As treasurer, George White put up his own savings to keep the school afloat. To collect unpaid tuitions, he wrote letter after letter to already hard-pressed parents.
 

George White

Rachel Ferguson 

NARRATOR: When students uncovered rusty chains from an abandoned slave pen, White sold the chains for scrap iron to buy Bibles and spellers. To raise more money, White led his choir to neighboring towns to sing for donations, despite the dangers.

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, Historian: There was no lacking of opposition to the establishment and maintenance of schools for the freedmen. People who had subscribed to the view that (1) blacks were inferior, they were childlike, they were irresponsible, could not believe that energy and resources should be expended on the training of people who could not absorb the training anyway. After all there's talk about their becoming voters and full citizens, especially in 1866 and 1867. And you've got to put a stop to this. 

NARRATOR: Nightriders like the Ku Klux Klan assaulted and whipped Fisk students for teaching in the countryside. A young choir member, Benjamin Holmes, was shot at in his classroom. And soprano Maggie Porter returned one New Year's to find that local whites had celebrated the holidays by burning her school to the ground.

Song: "Were You There?"

NARRATOR: One evening White and his singers found themselves stranded at a railway depot in a small town and surrounded by a jeering mob.
 

Ella Sheppard

DEACON SAM MCCLAIN: "In Times Like These."

NARRATOR: By 1871, Fisk's barracks were rotting away.

Ella Sheppard

NARRATOR: That fall George White seized on a daring plan. He proposed to take his singers on a fund raising tour of the North. White believed his young students were convincing proof of what higher education could do for the freedmen. By October, White and Ella Sheppard had assembled and rehearsed their best singers. All but two had been slaves.

Tenor Thomas Rutling, a former house slave was almost expelled from Fisk for passing notes to female students. One newspaper deemed him the best tenor in Tennessee.

Benjamin Holmes, 23, survived his semester of countryside teaching. As a slave he'd secretly taught himself to read and was now a deacon of Fisk’s chapel. Like Holmes, 18-year-old Maggie Porter had continued to teach in country schools, uncowed by threats and arson.

Twenty-one-year-old baritone Isaac Dickerson had been a Confederate colonel's valet in the war.

Soprano Jennie Jackson, age 19, was a granddaughter of President Andrew Jackson’s body servant.

Youngest of the nine singers was 14-year-old contralto, Minnie Tate, who as a free girl had been taken in by German settlers.

The parents of White's singers were afraid to let their children go. Fearing ridicule, even disgrace, his fellow teachers opposed the tour. And the American Missionary Association refused to help. 

TONI ANDERSON, Music Historian: George White wanted to target mainly white Christian audience. And generally the audiences he was going to be searching for were the same audiences the A.M.A. already appealed to support. But there's even more to it than that. Black singers did not appear on stage during this era, except in the minstrel show. And the minstrel show was a very stereotypical and derogatory image of African Americans. Good upstanding Christian people did not go to these kinds of entertainments.

NARRATOR: Many freedman schools had already been crushed by debt and violence. White was convinced that he and his singers had been chosen by God to save Fisk.

"Tis time to root, hog, or die," he wired the A.M.A. "I’m depending on God, not you." 

With the last $40 of the school's treasury in his pocket, White took his singers on the road.

Ella Sheppard

DEACON SAM MCCLAIN: Oh, if I got my ticket, can I ride? Oh, if I got my ticket, can I ride? Tell me, if I got my ticket, can I ride, Ride away to Heaven in the morning...

NARRATOR: White's plan was to lead his singers North to perform along the old Underground Railway, starting in Cincinnati and following the network of abolitionist homes and churches that had once relayed escaped slaves to Canada. For their repertoire, White chose European classical and popular songs, some composed by himself.

At their debut in Cincinnati, the audience received them warmly enough, but donated less than fifty dollars. The next day news reached the singers of the great fire in Chicago. They gave all their money to the relief fund, and left town empty handed.

Night after night, it was the same story: Crowds loved their singing, but the collection plate said it all: $50 or $60, barely enough to cover their expenses.

KATHERINE PRESTON, Music Historian: You were staying in flophouses or in boarding houses. You could get your meals there. The meals were nothing to write home about. The rooms were generally dirty. They were not well kept. The vaudevillians of this period refer to them as "don't look under the bed rooms." There was probably bugs in the beds. There were probably rats around. There were always signs in the railroad stations saying, "Nigger read and run"and sometimes there'd be below the sign scratched on, "And if you can't read, run anyway."

NARRATOR: But no one turned back. "All we wanted," recalled soprano Maggie Porter, "was for Fisk to stand."

BOYER: If the singers don't bring back some money the school is going to fold. And so that the singers were having to sing at every opportunity. Sometimes they would sing in churches. They would sing for private parties. They would sing for teas. Sometimes they would ask them to stand on a busy thoroughfare.
 

Ella Sheppard

NARRATOR: The grueling logistics of the failing tour were George White's burden.

ANDERSON: Many times he would have to leave Ella Sheppard with the students, with the rest of the singers to get ready for the next concert, while he went ahead to the next city. There he would have to secure a hall, talk with all of the ministers in the area to try to drum up support, build an audience, advertise he would have to leave the students at the station because no hotel would take them in, and go up and down the streets, knocking on doors to try to find Christian people who would house the singers overnight.
 

Benjamin Holmes

Song: "You may bury me in the East...I'll hear the trumpet sound."

NARRATOR: Week after week, performing with little rest, White and the singers endured rheumatism, coughing fits, bronchitis,. Their clothes ran to rags. Sickly Ella Sheppard begged White to send her home. But White refused. He had begun to experiment with the singers’ repertoire, and now needed Sheppard more than ever. 

ANDERSON: Initially they would have maybe seventeen numbers that were quote white man's music, and they would include some spirituals often as encores. But when they saw how those spirituals were received, they began to include more and more spirituals. They arranged them while they are on tour. And that responsibility fell to Ella Sheppard. So here's Ella Sheppard, drilling the singers, arranging new melodies, teaching them, practicing the spirituals, all during the time they're concertizing, night after night after night. It's incredible. 
 

Ella Sheppard

NARRATOR: On the 16th of November, the weary singers arrived at Oberlin College in Ohio, to sing before a national convention of influential ministers. This time, they reached past cantatas and ballads, back to the secret music they'd sung behind closed doors: the sacred songs of their mothers and fathers.

Fisk Jubilee Singers’ rendition of "Steal Away."

BOYER: They started singing " Steal Away." And all of a sudden there was no talking. And then they said that you could hear soft weeping and the faces of the people reddened. And I'm sure that the Jubilee singers were joining them in tears, because sometimes when you think about what you are singing, particularly if you believe it, you can't help but be moved.

NARRATOR: After their small triumph at Oberlin, word spread from congregation to congregation. Letters and telegrams flew ahead of them, urging other small town churches to open their doors. 

Yet the singers still needed a name. After a night of prayer, George White had an inspiration. "Children," he told the troop, " it shall be -- Jubilee Singers."

ANDERSON: The name was taken from Chapter 25 of Leviticus, from the Bible, after the Jewish year of Jubilee. The Jewish Year of the Jubilee occurred every fiftieth year, and in the year of Jubilee were provisions for debt relief, provisions for redemption of property and for emancipation of slavery. 

NARRATOR: That winter White rushed to add more spirituals to the repertoire. Jennie Jackson brought him "I’ll Hear the Trumpet Sound." Ella Sheppard taught White her mother’s favorite lullaby, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot."

When the Fisk students reached New York in December, it was make or break. Three days before Christmas, Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America, had invited them to sing at his weekly prayer meeting.

Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn included some of America’s richest and most influential families. If the singers failed here, they wouldn't even have enough money to get back to Nashville.

Song: "Rockin' Jerusalem?" 
 

Reading: Henry Ward Beecher was on his feet, and with his hands in his pockets he brought out five dollars and told everybody to follow suit. That was our start. Every church wanted the Jubilee Singers to sing for them ...from that time on..."Maggie Porter

NARRATOR: Even the American Missionary Association dropped its opposition and scrambled to get on board. It would now take five of their agents, full-time, to accomplish what White and Sheppard had been doing on their own.

Touring Connecticut they brought in a phenomenal $1200 a week. In New Haven and Hartford hundreds of new fans were turned away.

"I don’t know when anything has so moved me," wrote Mark Twain, " as did the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee Singers." 

In Washington they delighted President Ulysses S. Grant and a concert hall filled with congressmen and diplomats.

"If the Great Book were destroyed today," wrote one reviewer, "it could be re-created out of the fabric of these very songs."
 

Song: "Great Camp Meeting in the Promised Land" 

NARRATOR: Now when the Jubilees encountered Northern racism, protests often followed. When the singers were later refused accommodations on Pullman cars, George Pullman integrated the cars himself, and they stayed integrated for another quarter century. 

When a New Jersey hotel manager threw them out after realizing they were not "black-face" minstrels, leading citizens took them in. And an embarrassed Board of Education opened its schools to black children, for the first time. 

"These singers," wrote one newspaper, "are doing a great work for humanity. They are, by their sweet songs, molding and manufacturing public sentiment. "
 

Ella Sheppard

NARRATOR: They returned to a school under siege. In Nashville as in many Southern cities, Northern troops stood guard against vigilantes. The new university President, Erastus Milo Cravath, was determined to oppose white hostility by making Fisk a Southern showcase. 

He set out to build Jubilee Hall, a grand edifice to capture the imagination of donors, and frustrate the torches of the Ku Klux Klan. 

REAVIS L. MITCHELL, Historian: By 1873-74 in the South there was a series of fires, and many of those places identified as schools for the former slaves come under the torch. But Jubilee Hall will stand as a mighty structure with walls more than 12 inches thick, of stone and brick. It would be adorned by a bell tower, which can also serve as a watchtower. 

NARRATOR: Building Jubilee Hall was going to take a lot more money. After less than two weeks’ rest, Sheppard and White reorganized the Jubilee Singers and took them back on the road. Now they were paid professionals, supporting a large entourage of managers, matrons, tutors and advance men. 

Song: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Glory, glory, hallelujah, Glory, Glory hallelujah, Glory, Glory, hallelujah, His truth is marching on. 

NARRATOR: In June of 1873, at Boston's World's Peace Jubilee, the Singers were called on to make themselves heard over a one-thousand-piece orchestra, a chorus of ten thousand, and a battery of cannons in a colossal performance of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Georgia Gordon

Franklin: They were representing a new freedman, a new kind of black person. The dignity, the carriage, the voice, and the articulateness of these young people surprised large numbers of northerners

NARRATOR: Not every Northerner was won over. "The New York World" called them "trained monkeys" who sang "with a wild darkey air." "The Newark Evening Courier" listed them as if they were items from a slave dealer’s catalogue. In Baltimore, a ticket seller refused to sell the singers admission to their own concert. 

And there was more. Other black schools began their own choirs. Hucksters passed themselves off as the original Jubilee Singers. All this further popularized the spirituals, but cut into the Jubilees’ receipts. The singers were forced to seek out new fields for harvest -- thousands of miles from home.

In April 1873, they set sail for the British Isles.

Only one day after their London debut, the singers were astonished to find themselves performing before none other than Queen Victoria herself.

Maggie Porter

NARRATOR: "They are real Negroes," wrote the Queen in her journal that night-- "come from America & have been slaves. They sing extremely well together." The Queen’s pleasure opened every door. Prime Minister Gladstone, The Prince of Wales, dukes, duchesses and earls were transfixed by their songs. And the singers were quickly embraced by evangelicals crusading to save British souls.

At Reverend Charles Spurgeon’s vast Tabernacle, they sang to a congregation of 6,000.

Across England, Scotland and Ireland, they were a phenomenon. Books and newspapers chronicled their rise from slavery. At concert after concert their portraits and songbooks sold out to British fans. 

Thomas Rutling and Isaac Dickerson left behind a string of broken hearts. 

  MITCHELL: These young people are perfect Victorians. They are dressed in Victorian elegance. They deport themselves in a very Victorian manner. Remember, the world was not accustomed to looking at black Victorians. This may be the inspiration as much as the songs and the music, for Queen Victoria to allow her portrait painter to paint a beautiful Victorian portrait of these young Jubilee Singers NARRATOR: The British were fascinated by their color. They said Mabel Lewis and Georgia Gordon could pass as English belles, and Minnie Tate as coming from the south of France. Dark-complexioned Jennie Jackson was most sought out of all.
 

Mabel Lewis

NARRATOR: Mabel Lewis enjoyed teasing her fans.

Mabel Lewis

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1874, the Jubilee Singers returned home in triumph with another $50,000 for the construction of Jubilee Hall. "No one can estimate the vast amount of prejudice which has perished under the spell of their marvelous music," declared the Board of Trustees. "Wherever they have gone they have proclaimed to the hearts of men the brotherhood of the race." DEACON SAM MCCLAIN sings: In times like these, yes Oh, in times like these. In times like these I need the Lord to help me. When I’m burdened down,

NARRATOR: But success in England had come at a price. Worn down by a relentless schedule, an advance man suffered a nervous breakdown. DEACON SAM MCCLAIN continues: When I’m burdened down, When I’m burdened down, When I’m burdened down. Oh, I need the Lord to help me.

NARRATOR: Typhoid fever carried away George White’s wife. White himself nearly died of a pulmonary hemorrhage. 

Contralto Minnie Tate had sung her voice to shreds. And the nagging cough Benjamin Holmes had urged friends not to worry about turned out to be tuberculosis. Throughout Tennessee and the rest of the South the hopes of African Americans were being dashed. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress to enforce the rights of emancipated slaves, had been abolished. Federal troops that had once protected African Americans were gone. Many black schools shut down. 

Former Confederates took over legislatures and began to replace laws protecting black rights with new segregation codes. 

And despite all the singers had sacrificed, Jubilee Hall was still only a hole in the ground. Fisk’s President Cravath knew this was because the A.M.A. had been borrowing heavily from the Jubilee Hall fund to stave off its own bankruptcy. 

Cravath was anxious to get the singers back on the road not just to build up Fisk and Jubilee Hall but to rescue the overextended A.M.A. 

Reminding them of their evangelical mission, Cravath prevailed on the exhausted Jubilees to embark on yet a third tour. 

In January 1875, George White and Ella Sheppard organized a new troupe of singers. Ella and Thomas Rutling, Maggie Porter and Jennie Jackson were the only original Jubilees left.

Among the newcomers was America Robinson, a Fisk student engaged to a classmate, James Burrus.

America Robinson
NARRATOR: After long tours of America and Britain, the Jubilees traveled to Switzerland and Holland to test the universality of their music.

Arriving in Amsterdam in the winter of 1877, the singers were mobbed by adoring fans.

Ella Sheppard

NARRATOR: They performed for the Queen of the Netherlands and raised another $10,000. But the non-stop schedule was wearing out George White and the singers.

Boyer: The voice is the one thing we can’t camouflage. We can’t put makeup on the voice and have it come out a different way. So if you have a cold, if you’re tired, if you’re hungry, all of these things come out in the voice.

PRESTON: So you have not only the physicality of singing and the—the—the problems of dealing with—with working on stage, but you have on top of all that the whole issue of the pressure that these kids are under to prove a point.

The point is that African Americans are educable people, that they are people who can gain from a college education. Many people didn’t believe that.

NARRATOR: That summer White asked Cravath to come help manage the troupe. He got more than he bargained for. Cravath had no musical training. But he had big plans starting with an ambitious tour of Germany, birthplace of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. White was against it. "...I know what is necessary to win musical success in Germany," White argued, "but I see no chance at all to accomplish it." But in the end, the Jubiläums-Sanger were a popular and critical sensation.

"The Berliner Musik Zeitung"

NARRATOR: Even when the Germans did not understand the words they cried and smiled at the same places as English audiences had. At Potsdam, they sang for Kaiser Wilhelm the First. As the Jubilees sang, Crown Princess Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria of England, burst into tears.
 

Ella Sheppard

NARRATOR: "These songs, as you sing them, go to the heart," explained the Crown Prince. "They go through and through one."

In later years many of the singers would remember these concerts as the crowning triumph of their careers. But this was soon overshadowed by news from home. With conditions worsening in the Tennessee countryside, hundreds of African Americans were fleeing to the cities for refuge, cramming into slums. Epidemics were rampant.

Tuberculosis claimed three Fisk students, among them the Jubilees’ old friend and colleague, Benjamin Holmes. "We were all quite prepared for his death," wrote America Robinson, "but we all felt it deeply. Everybody loved Mr. Holmes.

They traveled from Berlin to Magdeburg, Magdeburg to Leipzig -- on and on through Germany. An astonishing 68 concerts in 41 towns, in ninety-eight days -- not including impromptu performances in churches, trains, and private homes. Many nights only six out of eleven were well enough to perform. Ella Sheppard collapsed and was sent to Holland to recuperate. Then Julia Jackson suffered a stroke.
 

America Robinson

NARRATOR: A new baritone named Frederick Loudin blamed Cravath.

Frederick Loudin

NARRATOR: These were no longer the wide-eyed teenagers who had set out six years before. Most were now well into their twenties. Almost every one of them had been offered opportunities to study at British universities, perform for rival groups or even strike out on their own. And they knew their own worth. More and more they demanded a a say in how the troupe would be managed.

ANDERSON: George White was used to running the group and giving clear directions, and mandating how things were going to go. But as the membership and the group evolved and became a professional organization, the individual members had ideas equally about how things should go. And they often clashed with George White.

NARRATOR: After a six-week recovery from near-fatal pneumonia, Ella Sheppard rejoined the singers in Germany to find chaos. George White, worn out from illness, railed at the singers he still called his "children," and submitted his resignation. To Sheppard’s horror, Cravath accepted it. He was already planning tours of Australia, South America and the American West. To keep the troupe alive, Cravath asked Sheppard to take over from White. 

After prayer, Ella agreed on the sole condition that she and the exhausted Jubilees return to Nashville at the end of their current engagements. There would be no new bookings. Cravath called her a deserter. 
 

NARRATOR: Ella stood her ground. She directed the troupe for the three contentious months it took to finish their engagements. Even Cravath could see that it was time. Rivalries among the singers had become open. Morale was low, nerves were frayed. After almost seven years of touring, [singing night after night,] the Jubilee Singers had had enough. 

Song: "Steal Away." 

NARRATOR: At long last, the singers started for home. As their ship approached American waters, they sang together one last time.

Ella Sheppard

Franklin: The contrast between the world that the Jubilee Singers left and the world to which they will return is considerable. 

They had been wined and dined and lionized and praised all over the North and all over Europe. and had seen how a human being could live. Bad for them to come back to a world that has deteriorated even since they left. (12:33) 

NARRATOR: Some never did come back. Thomas Rutling and Isaac Dickerson refused to set foot in America, and eventually died in England.

The years of touring reduced George White to an invalid. Like Benjamin Holmes, he died of consumption. At his memorial service in 1895, a few of the Jubilees returned to sing his favorite spiritual, "Steal Away."

The singers who returned to Nashville were honored by Fisk for raising over one hundred and sixty-thousand dollars to complete Jubilee Hall, and save their school. 

But as emissaries of the freedmen, their contributions extended far beyond Fisk University. They had introduced the world to the sacred hymns of their ancestors.

Song: "Ain't Got Time To Die"

NARRATOR: Ella Sheppard eventually returned to Fisk to be the teacher that she had wanted to become when she first arrived in 1868.

By the time of her death at the age of 63, she had become one of the most respected women of her day: a confidante of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

And Sarah Hannah Sheppard, the mother who had once tried to drown Ella and herself rather than live in bondage, lived out her life in her daughter’s house, witness to the fulfillment of a prophecy made back in the days of their bondage, under the clouds of the Lord.

CAPTION: The Fisk Jubilee Singers still continue the concert tradition of the Negro spiritual.