John Hope

John Hope was born on the second of June 1868 at Augusta, Georgia, the son of James Hope — a wealthy white Scottish-born planter and merchant — and Mary Frances Butts, a free Black laundress whose parents had purchased her own freedom in the late 1850s. James Hope and Mary Butts lived together as common-law partners until his death in 1876 — the State of Georgia did not permit interracial marriage. He left his estate to his common-law family, but his estate was in 1876 entirely diverted to white relatives in the courts under the Georgia statute prohibiting Black inheritance from white parents. The family was effectively impoverished.

He worked through his teens at the segregated Augusta restaurants and attended the McKinley Negro Academy of Augusta. He completed Worcester Academy in Massachusetts in 1890 and Brown University in 1894 — the third African American to graduate from Brown. He took the master's at Brown in 1897.

He joined the faculty of the Roger Williams University at Nashville in 1894 — the institution he chose because of its Atlanta Baptist Theological Seminary association — and from 1898 the Atlanta Baptist College, the institution that would in 1913 be renamed Morehouse College. He was elected the sixth president of the institution in 1906 — at thirty-seven the first African American to hold the presidency of any Atlanta historically Black college. He served as president of Morehouse for the following twenty-one years and from 1929 as president of Atlanta University.

His decisive institutional achievement was the Atlanta University System consortium — the cooperative graduate-level affiliation between Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University that he negotiated across the years 1929 to 1932. The arrangement — modelled on the Oxford-and-Cambridge college system he had studied during his master's residencies — gave the affiliated colleges access to graduate-level instruction without the financial burden of duplicating it.

He was a founding member of the Niagara Movement under W. E. B. Du Bois (placed in this archive) in 1905 — the only black college president to publicly affiliate with the Movement against Booker T. Washington (placed in this archive) — and a founding signatory of the 1909 call for the NAACP. He served as president of the Atlanta NAACP branch from 1917 to 1923.

He died at Atlanta on the twentieth of February 1936, at sixty-seven. The Atlanta University System he built remains the principal Black higher-education consortium in the United States.

He is honored here as the architect of the Atlanta University System.