Ella Sheppard (1851-1915)

Ella Sheppard (1851-1915)

Ella Sheppard, soprano, pianist and reformer, was the matriarch of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a social reformer, confidante of Frederick Douglass, and one of the most distinguished African American women of her generation. Sheppard was born a slave in 1851 on Andrew...
Morris Brown (1770-1849)

Morris Brown (1770-1849)

Morris Brown was born in Charleston, South Carolina on February 13, 1770. His family belonged to a sizeable African American population in the city who were mostly enslaved.  Brown’s parents, however, were part the city’s tiny free black community.  In the year of...
Maggie Porter (1853-1942)

Maggie Porter (1853-1942)

Maggie Porter was born in Lebanon, Tennessee around 1853.  At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Henry Frazier, a wealthy planter from Lebanon, took refuge in Nashville with his family and house slaves, among them a Mrs. Porter, his chief domestic servant, her...
Isaac Dickerson (1852-1900)

Isaac Dickerson (1852-1900)

Fisk Jubilee Singer and preacher Isaac Dickerson was born enslaved in Wytheville, Virginia in 1852 and orphaned by the age of five. His earliest memory was his father’s sale to a slave trader in Richmond, Virginia. Young Isaac was treated kindly by his master, a...