Charles Spurgeon Johnson / Robert E. Park

Charles Spurgeon Johnson 1893-1956 - Charles S. Joshnson joined Fisk's faculty in 1928 as professor of sociology and director of the Department of Social Sciences. In 1942, he began a series of seminars on race relations at Fisk, thereby establishing the first Race Relations Institute in the South. Johnson became Fisk University's first African American president in 1947, and he began a building program which included construction of a new social sciences building, Park Hall. After his death in 1956, it was renamed Park-Johnson Hall. Continued: Robert E. Park 1864-1944 - In 1953 Johnson named the social science building after Dr. Robert E. Park, his former professor and advisor at the University of Chicago. Johnson invited Park to teach sociology at Fisk in 1936. At the building's dedication ceremony, Johnson said Dr. Park was "one of American greatest social philosophers, who was devoted to this school and to its youth as to give, not just money, but his life and unpaid services for more than seven years. His stamp is unmistakably in the social science program here..."