George Leonard White

George Leonard White is the treasurer of Fisk University, a school built to educate newly freed slaves in the years after the Civil War, and the founder and first director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Olivia meets him when a living portrait of Frederick Douglass carries her back to his time. White is determined and self-sacrificing. He poured his own savings into the struggling school and sold chains from an old slave pen for scrap to buy textbooks. After he heard students such as Ella Sheppard and Benjamin Holmes singing the spirituals their families had passed down through slavery, he became convinced a touring student choir could rescue Fisk. With Principal Spence's permission, he led the singers north through cold, hunger, and prejudice, insisting the old songs deserved to be heard.