The Dissemination of the African American Spiritual in America and Europe: University Singing Movement 1

Six years after Slave Songs in the United States, another critical collection appeared, The Jubilee Singers and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars. This collection by Reverend Gustavus D. Pike of the American Missionary Association SIDE NOTEThe American Missionary Association not only charted Fisk University but within three years had also chartered seven other institutions of higher learning, including "Berea College, in Kentucky; Atlanta University, in Georgia; Hampton Institute, in Virginia; Talladega College, in Alabama; Tougaloo University, in Mississippi; Straight University, now known as Dillard in Louisiana…and Howard University" (Sullivan, n.d.). These institutions, now classified as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), recognized the artistic value of the spirituals that African Americans had been singing and were instrumental in the genre's preservation., which gives the story about Fisk University (Pike 1974). In 1875, Pike narrated the first adventures of the singers in England in The Singing Campaign for Ten Thousand Pounds. This book contained seventy-one spirituals (Pike 1875). By the 1880s, the Reverend J.B.T. Marsh was writing The Story of the Jubilee Singers. Marsh's edition of 1880 contains 127 spirituals (Marsh 1969).