Nine very courageous and gifted young Americans who in 1871, six years after the civil war, set off from Nashville, Tennessee, not to cross the Rockies or sail round the Horn, but to save a failing university that meant everything to them. They were the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University heading north on a first tour. All but two were former slaves, several were still in their teens. They had no money, no reputation, no experience performing on the road, with the ridicule and menace they faced, because of their color, were all too real in a land where, by then, everybody supposedly had equal rights.