Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Hope (1868–1936) was born and reared as a Negro in Augusta, Georgia, but educated at predominantly white schools in New England. The son of a wealthy white businessman and a quadroon mother, Hope could have passed for white but chose to be black because his identity was formed as a child growing up in the South. After graduating from Brown University in 1894, Hope went to work for the American Baptist Home Mission Society as a teacher at the black Roger Williams University in Nashville. In 1898, Hope moved to Atlanta Baptist (now Morehouse) College and was president of the institution from 1906 to 1936. In addition to being the nation's most prominent president of a black liberal arts college, Hope was also active and influential in the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was a close friend of W. E. B. Du Bois.

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Leroy Davis's outstanding biography focuses on the conflicting requirements of Hope's dual roles as race leader and college president. As a race leader, Hope could be outspoken and combative. Several years before Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Hope took exception to Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition address of 1895, saying, "I regard it as cowardly and dishonest for any of our colored men to tell white people or colored people that we are not struggling for equality" (p. 87). Challenging the assumption that industrial education was especially suitable for black people, Hope also anticipated Du Bois's concept of the "talented tenth," asserting in 1896 that "we ourselves will never be possessed of conscious self-respect, until we can point to men in our own ranks who are easily the equal of any race" (p. 91). Hope's speeches on the need for black higher education and full equality "epitomized radical black leadership in the South during the age of Booker T. Washington" (pp. xxiv-xxv).

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