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John and Lugenia Burns Hope papers

 Collection
Identifier: 0000-0000-0000-0045

Scope and contents

The John Hope and Lugenia Burns Hope Papers microfilm publication contains the official and personal correspondence of the couple, their official, personal, and financial , records; their articles, essays, and speeches (manuscript and printed), and several categories of miscellaneous materials. The publication comprises about 20,000 documents on 21 rolls. The Hope Collection at Morehouse College had its origins in 1968 when the editor of this publication, Dr. Alton Hornsby, Jr., investigated rumors that some old papers were stored away in the basement of one of the campus’s oldest buildings (a building, incidentally, which was built only after Morehouse President, John Hope, curries the favor of Booker T. Washington in order to receive the necessary philanthropic assistance). The editor soon found two file cabinets in the basement of the deteriorating building. They contained about 10,000 items, a large segment of the official papers of John Hope while president of Morehouse College and the Atlanta University. The papers were immediately transferred to the security of the Morehouse College Library. As news of the discovery at Morehouse spread, information reached the editor that an equal number of items, official and personal papers of both John and Lugenia Hope, were being stored in eh residence of one of Dr. Hope’s two surviving sons in Washington, D.C. Many of these items had been secured by Mrs. Hope after John Hope’s death and then passed on to the sons upon the occasion of her own death. A personal inspection of these files by the editor revealed a rich body of correspondence between the Hopes and the most of the leading personalities in the black and liberal white communities of America from the late 1890’s to about 1940. Manuscripts and organizational records of various kinds further enriched this collection. There followed a series of sensitive negotiations with the Hope family which culminated in 1974 in the gift of the papers in private hands to Morehouse College. The organization and editing of the papers and this microfilm publication were all made possible by a grant from the National Historical Publications Commission. This work began on January 1, 1975. The bulk of this collection consists of the official and personal correspondence of Dr. and Mrs. John Hope. As president of Morehouse College for twenty-five years and as president of the Atlanta University for five years, Dr. Hope conducted a great volume of correspondence with black leaders and with numerous white philanthropists and supporters of Negro civil rights. As an officer and member of various local, regional, and national church groups, fraternal organizations, civil rights groups, and professional associations, Dr. Hope also engaged in voluminous correspondence with blacks and whites of all walks of life. Mrs. Hope, although most closely associated with Atlanta’s Neighborhood Union, was also an officer and member of several charitable, feminist, and civil rights organizations. The Hopes numbered among their personal correspondents almost all of the major black educational, political and civil rights figures of the first half of this century as well as many prominent white persons. The following list illustrates the number of items relating to each of these important correspondents: Mary McLeod Bethune, 200 George Haynes, 200 J.E. Moorland, 200 Robert R. Moton, 200 Benjamin Brawley, 100 John W. Davis, 100 W.E.B. DuBois, 100 Mordecai Johnson, 100 Thomas Jesse Jones, 100 Channing Tobias, 100 W.T.B. Williams, 100 Will Alexander, 50 Samuel Howard Archer, 50 T. Edward Owens, 50 Dean Sage, 50 N.B. Young, 50 Nannie H. Burroughs, 25 Benjamin J. Davis, 25 Eugene Kinckle Jones, 25 James Weldon Johnson, 25 Emmett Scott, 25 Walter White, 25 The Hope correspondence, official and personal, and the records of the organizations with which the couple were affiliated relate directly to such topics as black education, civil rights, and social service, politics, religion, the two world wars, social activities and attitudes, the black economic picture, and the black press. As far as practicable, this publication contains the entire Hope collection, except for material of no significant research value-institutional requests for catalogs, check book covers, and readily available printed materials. In the latter case, however, some of the title or cover pages have been filmed in order to indicate the nature and range of the Hope holdings. Literary rights in this collection remain with the owner, Morehouse College.

Dates

  • Creation: 1888-1947

Access restrictions

This collection is currently available for research on microfilm. Contact archives@auctr.edu for more information.

Rights statement

All materials in this collection are either protected by copyright and/or are the property of the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Inc., and/or the copyright holder as appropriate. For more information, please contact archives@auctr.edu.

Biographical note

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.  

Extent

10 Linear feet

Language of Materials

English

Arrangement

This collection is divided into four series: 1. Correspondence, 2. Official Records, 3. Financial Records, 4. Articles, Essays, Speeches. The series have been arranged either alphabetically or chronologically.

Title
John and Lugenia Burns Hope papers, 1888-1947
Status
Under Revision
Author
Finding aid prepared by Kennedy Payne, 2019 November
Date
November 2019
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Repository Details

Part of the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Inc. Repository

Contact:

404-978-2052
404-978-2109 (Fax)