Black Nashville in History & Memory

Academic Grounds, Roger Williams University, Nashville, 1899, credit: Library of Congress- https://lccn.loc.gov/2007662816

Academic class, Roger Williams University, Nashville, 1899 Courtesy Library of Congress (00651765)

Group portrait of African American men, facing front. credit: Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3c26753/

Roger Williams University began as elementary classes for African American Baptist preachers in 1864. Classes were held in the home of Daniel W. Phillips, a white minister and freedmen’s missionary from Massachusetts. By 1865 the classes had moved to the basement of the First Colored Baptist Mission. In 1866 the “Baptist College” was officially named the Nashville Normal and Theological Institute under the auspices of New York’s American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS). A year later, the school moved from to a two-story frame building at Park and Polk Streets. In 1869 Phillips and the Nashville Normal Institute’s board members tried to purchase the adjacent former Union army Fort Gillem, but Fisk University’s officials gained the property and built Jubilee Hall on the new campus site seven years later.

Lovett, B. (2018, March 01). Roger Williams University. Retrieved February 09, 2021, from https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/roger-williams-university/

credit: Brown University Libraries

Portrait of African American students, facing front. credit: Library of Congress

credit: Brown University Libraries

credit: Tennessee Virtual Archive

Mr. Colbert attended Roger Williams University in Nashville and in 1903 he followed his mentor, John Hope, to Atlanta Baptist College (renamed Morehouse College in 1913). Franklin became a lawyer and moved back to Oklahoma, opening a law office in Tulsa one month before the 1921 race riot.