Hope, John

Impact on the world

Became the first African American president of Atlanta Baptist College, renamed Morehouse College in 1913, in 1906, then in 1929 became the first African American president of Atlanta University, the first graduate school for Black students in the country, where he developed graduate programs and built an academic consortium with Morehouse and Spelman that remains the basis of today's Atlanta University Center; he co-founded the Niagara Movement alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, the direct forerunner of the NAACP, and publicly challenged Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach by insisting that vocational skill alone would prove worthless without full social and political equality.

Life & background

Born in Augusta, Georgia in 1868 to a white father and a free-born Black mother in a relationship Georgia law prohibited as marriage, Hope was taught as a child by Lucy Craft Laney, the pioneering educator who would later found the Haines Institute, before economic hardship following his father's death nearly ended his schooling at the eighth grade; a local minister's encouragement redirected him toward Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and then Brown University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1894. After several years teaching science at Nashville's Roger Williams University, he joined Atlanta Baptist College as a professor of classics in 1898, and in 1906 was unanimously selected as its first Black president, a milestone Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Black History Month and later a colleague of Hope's, described by calling him simply a maker of men. Hope publicly broke with Booker T. Washington's accommodationist philosophy, joining Du Bois and others at a 1905 rally on the site of John Brown's martyrdom to help found the Niagara Movement, a precursor to the NAACP, becoming, according to one biographer, the only president of a Southern Black college willing to publicly align himself with such an openly defiant racial stand at a time when doing so carried genuine professional and physical risk; between 1910 and 1915, roughly 427 Black Americans were lynched nationwide. He nonetheless turned to Washington for help securing major philanthropic gifts from John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board and Andrew Carnegie to expand the renamed Morehouse College, oversaw its growth under the new slogan 'a Morehouse man cannot fail,' and served as a YMCA secretary for Black soldiers in France during World War I, returning disillusioned by their continued mistreatment. In 1929, when Morehouse and Spelman affiliated with Atlanta University to take over undergraduate teaching, Hope was chosen as the university's first Black president, a role he held focusing on graduate education until his death in 1936; he received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal that same year, and a Liberty ship was named in his honor during World War II.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; New Georgia Encyclopedia; BlackPast.org; EBSCO Research Starters; Tennessee Encyclopedia; Encyclopedia.com