The Price of Education
By Julianne Malveaux
I can’t explain my eclectic reading habits, or my innate curiosity about all kinds of things. The combination of the two explains, perhaps, why I snatched Andrew Ward’s book about the Fisk Jubilee Singers off a sale table at a small bookstore, and devoured it on a cross-country flight even as a pending project loomed ahead. I settled into Ward’s book with procrastination on my mind and a smile on my face, and emerged with a renewed appreciation of all the things our ancestors paid for education.
The book, first published in 2000, is entitled Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). It is a detailed history of the founding of Fisk University and the ways it was funded, including the national and international tours that the Jubilee Singers took to raise funds. These youngsters were true pioneers, suspending their own education so that they could help pay for the education of their peers. Traveling in the latter part of the 19th century, they faced discrimination, horrible conditions and worse, but they kept singing, kept fund raising, kept pushing and prevailing.
