John and Lugenia Burns Hope papers

John and Lugenia Burns Hope rank among the great couples-the Adamses, the Roosevelts, et al.-who have made significant contributions to American society. John Hope was unquestionably one of the nation’s most outstanding black educators and a champion of civil rights from the turn of the century until his death in 1936. The son of a white father and black mother, Hope was born into relative affluence in Augusta, Georgia, in 1868. During his youth, however, his father died, and the family fortunes declined. Nevertheless, young Hope made it to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and to Brown University for an education financed by scholarships and jobs. He began his teaching career at Roger Williams University, a black school in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1894-a year before Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise Address”, in which the famed clack educator outlined his policy of racial progress through accommodation with racial segregation. John Hope was to become one of the first black educators to take issue with Washington’s philosophy of education and race relations.

After four years at Roger Williams, Hope took a position at Atlanta Baptist College, an all-male black school which would later become the most prestigious Morehouse College. In 1906, Hope assumed the presidency of the institution, the first black person to do so. At Morehouse, he distinguished himself as one of the few Southern black college presidents to build a successful liberal arts school in the era when Washington’s agricultural-industrial views dominated the black educational scene.

By 1929, six separate black institutions of higher learning existed in the city of Atlanta. In order to achieve greater effectiveness and economy, Hope spearheaded the organization of three of these (Atlanta University, Spelman College for women, and Morehouse College for men) into a consortium whereby there would be a co-educational graduate school (Atlanta University) and an undergraduate school for each sex. The three other black schools eventually entered the arrangement, which was called the Atlanta University Center, making it the second oldest such consortium in American higher education and the largest black complex of higher education in the world. Hope himself, after serving jointly as president of Morehouse and Atlanta University, became head of the graduate school in 1932.

Like his younger contemporary, the NAACP’s Walter White, John Hope could have used his blond physical features to slip unnoticed into the more secure world of white America. Yet, also like White, he decided to cast his lot with the black race and, in fact, became a leader in the cause of civil rights. He attended the Niagara Conferences of 1905 and 1906, which W.E.B. DuBois and other “militant” blacks and called to protest segregation and discrimination and to offer an alternative to the racial leadership of Booker T. Washington. Hope was also present at some of the earliest meetings of the NAACP. He was a close friend as well as an ally of DuBois, and by the standards of his day fell into the militant camp of racial leadership. Yet he maintained close interracial ties, serving as an agent for the YMCA in Europe during the First World War and was a founder and president of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the predecessor of the Southern Regional Council.

While John Hope busied himself in educational and civil rights leadership, his wife, Lugenia Burns Hope, played a leading role in the founding and development of the Neighborhood Union, a rough mixture of Jan Addams’ Hull House, Janie Hunter’s settlement house in Cleveland, Victoria Matthews’ White Rose Mission in New York, and Janie Barret’s home for delinquent girls in Virginia. Beginning in 1908, Lugenia Hope led a group of educated, middle class black women form the college community who joined representatives of the larger black community in a program to “service the poor”. Mrs. Hope was also a leading figure in local civic education programs. She continued a very active life of civic and social participation until her own death in 1947.

Closely related material on the Hopes cane found in the Negro Collection of the Robert W. Woodruff AUC Library at Atlanta University, in the Moorland-Spingarn Collection at Howard University, and in the Lloyd O. Lewis Collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Some of these materials, courtesy of Howard University and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, have been included in this publication.

Users of this publication will also find helpful: (1) Alton Hornsby, Jr., “The Hope Papers Project: Problems and Prospects,” The Maryland Historian, VI (Spring, 1975), 51-54; (2) A Guide to the Negro Collection of the Trevor Arnett Library at Atlanta University; (3) Ridgely Torrence, The Story of John Hope (New York, 1948); (4) Rayford W. Logan and Michael Winston, eds., The Dictionary of Negro Biography (New York,1982); and (5) Jacqueline A. Rouse, “Lugenia Burns Hope,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1983.