The Black Scholars Index

John Hope: First African-American President of Morehouse College

Posted on 30. Jun, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Faculty, HBCU Presidents, I'm a Full Professor!, Scholarly Celebrations

To kick off our Celebration of HBCU Presidents, we celebrate John Hope!

John Hope

103 years ago today (June 30, 1906), John Hope became the first Black president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. John Hope was an important African American educator and race leader of the early twentieth century. Twenty-three years later, in 1929, Hope went on to become the first African American president of Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). Under his leadership, Atlanta University became the first college in the nation to focus exclusively on graduate education for African American students. As a race leader, Hope was steadfast in his support of public education, adequate housing, health care, job opportunities, and recreational facilities for blacks in Atlanta and across the nation. He also supported full civil rights in the South during an era when African Americans were expected to accommodate a system of inequality.

To accomplish his goals, Hope embraced several civil rights organizations, including W. E. B. DuBois’s Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the southern-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation. He was also very active in such social service organizations as the National Urban League, the “Colored Men’s Department” of the YMCA, and the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. Hope was very well known among both blacks and whites in the early twentieth century. Buck Franklin, the father of the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin, was so impressed with Hope’s social and educational leadership that he named his son after Hope.

John Hope’s early life contributes much to an understanding not only of racial identity but also of class, color, and caste among African Americans, especially in the South. Born of a biracial union in Augusta on June 2, 1868, he belonged to a small black elite whose history predated the end of slavery. His father, Scottish-born James Hope, immigrated to New York City early in the nineteenth century and eventually moved to Augusta, where he became a prominent businessman. His mother, Mary Frances Butts, was a free African American woman born in Hancock County, Georgia. Although Georgia law prohibited interracial marriages, Hope’s parents lived openly as husband and wife until his father’s death in 1876.

Hope’s education prepared him for his life’s work. Though he quit school after the eighth grade to help his struggling family survive, he decided five years later to complete his education and attended a preparatory school in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1886. He went on to earn a B.A. degree in 1894 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Hope eventually decided to become a professional educator, teaching first at Roger Williams University, a small black liberal-arts school on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1897 Hope married Lugenia Burns, who would also become a prominent race leader and social activist. They moved in 1898 to Atlanta, where he took a teaching position at Atlanta Baptist College, which became Morehouse College in 1913. It was in Atlanta that Hope first met and befriended prominent black leaders and educators like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Suggested Reading:

Leroy Davis, A Clashing of the Soul: John Hope and the Dilemma of African American Leadership and Black Higher Education in the Early Twentieth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

Information taken from The Georgiaencyclopia.

More Related posts:

1. [HBCU Presidents] Horace Mann Bond: 1st Black President of Fort Valley State College & Lincoln University
2. Louis W. Sullivan, M.D.: Founding Dean and 1st President of Morehouse School of Medicine
3. [HBCU Presidents] Dr. Robert M. Franklin, Jr. – Morehouse College
4. [ HBCU_Presidents ] Dr. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson: Howard's 1st Black President
5. [ HBCU_Presidents ] Booker T. Washington, 1st President of Tuskegee

Tags: 1926, African-American, Albert A. Jones, Brown University, BSI, Clark Atlanta University, Clark University, Dr. Martin Luther King, HBCU Presidents, Head of the UCLA Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program, John Hope, Morehouse College, NAACP, National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, National Urban League, Shaker Heights High School, Tesimonials, texture, Unfinished Business: Closing the Achievement in Our Schools, Walter Sammons