John Hope

Educator

• Born: June 2, 1898
• Birthplace: Augusta, Georgia
• Died: February 20, 1936
• Place of death: Atlanta, Georgia

Hope was influential in the development of higher education in the liberal arts for African Americans. He was president of Atlanta University, the nation’s first graduate school for African Americans. He also was a member of the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Early Life

John Hope enjoyed a privileged status in pre-Civil War Augusta, Georgia, as the light-skinned child of a wealthy white man and a black woman. His grandmother, a slave, was given her freedom by a white man named Butt. Together, she and Butt had seven children. One of their children, Mary Frances (Fanny), was Hope’s mother. At the age of sixteen, Fanny went to work as a housekeeper for Dr. George Newton. Soon thereafter, she gave birth to a son, Madison J. Newton. When Fanny was nineteen years old and pregnant again, George died from tetanus. Fanny gave birth to a girl named Georgia Frances Newton (Sissie). After Newton’s death, his friend James Hope, a native of Scotland, purchased a house for Fanny and her family. He and Fanny lived together openly, despite the fact that Georgia law prohibited interracial marriage. Fanny gave birth to John Hope in 1868. Hope attended a public school taught by Lucy Craft Laney (who later founded Haines Institute) and Georgia Swift, both graduates of Atlanta University.

When Hope was eight years old, his father died. Although James bequeathed his house and money to Fanny and their family, executors failed to carry out his directions. Hope was forced to quit school after the eighth grade in order to work. In addition, social conditions for the black elite disintegrated during Reconstruction, leaving the mixed-race family vulnerable. Hope saw little opportunity to become successful in segregated Georgia. When he was eighteen, however, his half brother Madison gave him one hundred dollars to continue his education. In 1886, Hope enrolled in Worcester Academy in Massachusetts at the urging of the Reverend John Dart, a Baptist minister. In 1890, at the age of twenty-two, he entered Brown University. Three years later, he met Lugenia Burns, who became a social reformer and leader in her own right. They married in December, 1897.

Life’s Work

After graduating from Brown in 1894, Hope took a position teaching natural sciences at Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee. He enrolled in summer courses in religion and later earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago. Both Roger Williams University and the Atlanta Baptist College were controlled by the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS). In 1887, Hope received a transfer to teach classics at Atlanta Baptist College, which was founded as Augusta Institute by the Reverend William Jefferson White. Augusta Institute became Atlanta Baptist College(ABC) in 1879 when it was moved to Atlanta.

In 1901, Hope’s son Edward Swain was born. His second son, John Hope, Jr., was born two years later. In 1906, Hope became the first black president of ABC. A staunch supporter of W. E. B. Du Bois’s philosophy of full racial equality and liberal education for African Americans, he allied himself with the Niagara Movement and subsequently the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At the time, he was the only college president affiliated with the latter organization. During the Atlanta Riot of 1906, in which white mobs targeted African Americans, Hope emerged as a stabilizing force. He used diplomacy to protect ABC from the violence that wreaked havoc on black neighborhoods. Although he did not agree with the racial and educational ideology of Booker T. Washington, he adopted several of Washington’s strategies, including courting white philanthropists for financial assistance. Nevertheless, the curriculum of ABC emphasized classical and liberal education. Hope attracted to the institution black intellectuals who had studied at Colgate, Harvard, Brown, and the University of Chicago.

In 1913, ABC was renamed Morehouse College in honor of Henry Lyman Morehouse, the corresponding secretary of the ABHMS. Hope received support from Wallace Buttrick, a Baptist minister who served in several capacities on the General Education Board (GEB). Through Buttrick’s influence, Morehouse received funding for faculty salaries and new buildings. The GEB and Carnegie Corporation provided the money for Sale Hall, named for George Sale, the previous president of ABC. Hope served on (and eventually chaired) the Commission on Interracial Cooperation with sociologistCharles S. Johnson and southerner Will W. Alexander. The group debated issues of migration, lynching, and persecution by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1918, Hope spent nine months in France as secretary for the Young Men’s Christian Association’s War Work Council, concentrating on improving conditions for African American soldiers serving abroad and assisting them upon their return to the United States.

During the 1920’s, Hope’s vision of a “greater Morehouse” began to come to fruition. He received $165,000 from the GEB for a science hall. An endowment funded by the GEB and the ABHMS put Morehouse on solid footing. The Atlanta School of Social Work was added in 1920 in response to Lugenia’s efforts to revive the impoverished neighborhoods that surrounded the campus. In 1929, the Atlanta University Center was born when Morehouse, Spelman College, and Atlanta University became a consortium. Atlanta University offered the first graduate school in the country for African American students, while Morehouse and Spelman remained undergraduate institutions. Hope was named president of Atlanta University and worked to bring other black institutions such as Morris Brown into the arrangement. In 1930, Hope received the Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished achievement in the field of education.

Overworked and stung by criticism that he had neglected Morehouse, Hope died of pneumonia in 1936. That year, he was posthumously awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for distinguished leadership.

Significance

Hope was an influential leader and educator in the segregated South. He emphasized classical-liberal education for African Americans rather than vocational-technical training and left his mark on Morehouse College as the institution’s first black president. He also is credited with the expansion of the institution’s curriculum, the growth of its campus, and the revitalization of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Bibliography

Davis, Leroy. A Clashing of the Soul: John Hope and the Dilemma of African American Leadership and Black Higher Education in the Early Twentieth Century. Foreword by John Hope Franklin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Biography of Hope that focuses on his dual as “militant race leader” and college administrator, and how those roles affected each other.

Hope, John, and Lugenia Burns Hope. Papers of John and Lugenia Burns Hope. Edited by Alton Hornsby, Jr. Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984. Includes articles, essays, speeches, and correspondence from 1896 to 1947. From the archives of Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Range, Willard. The Rise and Progress of Negro Colleges in Georgia, 1865-1949. 1951. Reprint. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Examines Hope’s leadership of Morehouse College and Atlanta University.

Torrence, Ridgely. The Story of John Hope. New York: Macmillan, 1948. A favorable biography of Hope that relies on interviews with family, friends, and associates.