John Hope was an American educator and politicial activist. He served as the first African-descended president of both Morehouse College and of Atlanta University.
Background
John Hope was born on June 2, 1868 in Augusta, Georgia, United States. His maternal grandmother, Alethea, a freed woman of color, was the wife in all but name of a former Virginia planter named Butt; her children changed the name to Butts. Hope's mother, Mary Frances Butts, was listed in the Augusta City Directory, 1859, as the wife of George M. Newton, a well-to-do white physician and business man. After his death in 1859 she became the mate of James Hope, a native of Langholm, Scotland, and a descendant of Sir Thomas Hope, Lord Advocate of Scotland. John was their second son and fourth child. His oldest sister, Jane (Mrs. Judson W. Lyons), also became an educator, serving as dean of women at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia.
A successful business man, James Hope lived with his family in one of Augusta's better homes and entertained there prominent white male friends. The blond, blue-eyed, curly-haired, sharp-featured John might easily have lived in a white world. After his father's death in 1876, however, and after the race riot in nearby Hamburg, South Carolina, which sharpened racial friction, he gravitated toward the black world. The social visits of white relatives and friends gradually ceased, and his mother received only a small part of the sizable trust fund that James Hope had left her. Two in particular of Augusta's prominent Negro citizens guided the boy toward his life's work.
Education
Lucy Craft Laney, a remarkable educator, was one of Hope's early teachers. John Dart, a Northern Baptist minister, baptized him and encouraged him to go north for his education. With the aid of scholarships he worked his way through Worcester (Massachussets) Academy, 1886-1890, and Brown University, where he made an excellent record, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1894 as class orator. Although he enjoyed the esteem of the president, faculty, and students, he constantly sought the companionship of the black people of Providence.
Brown University conferred upon him honorary Master of Arts and Doctor of Law degrees, and Howard, Bucknell, and McMaster universities and Bates College similarly honored him.
Career
At Roger Williams University, Nashville, Tennessee, Hope taught natural sciences, Latin, and Greek, 1894-1898. He was professor of classics at Atlanta Baptist College (later Morehouse College) from 1898 to 1906 and in the latter year became its president, the first Negro president of a Baptist college.
In 1929 Morehouse and Spelman colleges (both in Atlanta, Georgia) became affiliated with Atlanta University under a plan whereby Atlanta would give up undergraduate instruction and devote itself exclusively to graduate work--the first Negro institution to do so. Hope's able administration of Morehouse made him the unanimous choice for president of the new Atlanta University. He brought to the campus and to his home eminent American and foreign lecturers. Perhaps because of the novelty of the experiment, he administered Atlanta University with a tighter rein than he had Morehouse. He rarely called faculty meetings, and he did not appoint a dean. Hope was held in some awe by faculty and students. At the time of his death he had launched as good a graduate school as was possible in a city where legal and customary segregation reduced to a minimum intellectual intercourse with even the white colleges and universities. A few months after Booker T. Washington had delivered his famous "Atlanta Compromise" address (1895), Hope publicly declared that he was going to demand complete equality for the Negro.
In 1918 and 1919 he served as a Y. M. C. A. secretary with Negro soldiers in France and returned disillusioned by their treatment and greatly troubled by race riots at home. With Will W. Alexander, a white Southerner, he helped to organize the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and was its first Negro president. Hope attended several meetings abroad of the World Committee of the Y. M. C. A.
He died in Atlanta of pneumonia and was buried on the campus of Atlanta University.
Achievements
Hope devoted his life primarily to the education of Negro youth. As a president of the Baptist College, Hope brought capable teachers to the faculty and inaugurated a department of music. A great schoolmaster and "maker of men, " he helped to develop well-known educators, professional and business men; a dozen Morehouse graduates later became college presidents. When he was a president of Atlanta University, his faculty consisted of some of the best-trained black graduates of northern universities. He courageously attended the Harpers Ferry Conference (1906), a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; he was the only college president to participate.
In 1936, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the N. A. A. C. P. John Hope College Preparatory High School and Hope-Hill Elementary School were named after him.
Works
book
book
Religion
Hope was a Baptist.
Membership
Hope was an honorary president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, a member of the advisory board of the N. A. A. C. P. , and a member of the executive committee of the National Urban League.
Personality
Somewhat shy and meditative as a boy, but prone later to flashes of anger against racial discrimination, Hope matured into a relaxed, charming, distinguished elder statesman. Abstemious, he was an epicure and a lover of music, the theatre, and classical architecture. He eschewed oratory and appeals to the emotions, seeking rather to challenge the intellect. A patrician by nature, austere and aloof, he was more at home with people of his own kind than with the less advantaged.
Connections
During the summer of 1893, while working in a Chicago hotel, Hope met Lugenia D. Burns, a social worker. They were married on December 29, 1897. She and their two children, Edward Swain and John, survived him.
