04/01/2026
The John Hope & Aurelia E. Franklin Library at Fisk University has been awarded $299,643 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), funded by the Mellon Foundation, to launch Legacies in Focus: Digitizing the American Story through African American Visual Narratives—a two-year initiative to digitize over 11,000 photographs from our collections.
Spanning back to 1866, the project expands public access to the rich cultural, intellectual, and artistic history of African American life preserved at Fisk University.
Featuring rare early-twentieth-century images of Fisk University and Central Tennessee College (later Walden University), alongside the Fisk Jubilee Singers, historic campus spaces, and influential figures such as Charles S. Johnson, Nikki Giovanni, Josephine Baker and Arna Bontemps, the project documents over a century of Black life and culture while illuminating networks of Black education, migration, and global exchange across the African diaspora.
