Germinating a Black Intelligentsia

Abstract

As John Hope’s above remark conveys, it took 64 years after the Civil War for blacks in Atlanta to reach this milestone in higher education. Newspapers and magazine articles reported news of the affiliation nationally and internationally. The coverage not only explained the affiliation and John Hope as its leader, but also explained the affiliation’s effect on black higher education, the nation, and even race relations.² H. S. Murphy editorialized in The Independent:

There is that in him which reminds us of the scholars of the older days; the men who dignified and even mystified their learning in such a manner that their students felt that when they crossed the threshold of that teacher’s sanctorum, they were treading on holy ground.

John Hope’s respect for sound scholarship and its outer accompaniments with out laying undue stress on empty honor or appearance has raised him high in the estimation of these who enjoy a democracy of brotherhood.

The consolidation of Morehouse and Spelman Colleges with Atlanta University means more people, more business for our merchants, more traffic for the railroads and street cars, and more work for labor. It means that the money now being spent in the North for professional, university, and higher technical education by the Negro will be spent at the home in the graduate department of the big university system.³

Happily the time is far passed since the Negro has been considered a people who had best be left ignorant, to be used as truck horses or as machines made to do only the work. Virtually at the end of the “War Between the States” there was no slavery; the Negro was free and had the rights of a free man. But in reality emancipation was a slow process—struggle which was long and hard; one which is still going on. Now the long sought for goal of true emancipation seems to be in sight. The whole country is interested in the education of the Negro and the period of illiteracy seems to be swiftly passing.

—John Hope¹