“Dissatisfaction with possession and achievement is one of the requisites to further achievement.”

John Hope, 1868 - 1936, born in Augusta, Georgia, was an African-American educator and political activist.

Hope graduated from Worcester Academy in 1890, then matriculated to Brown University. After he graduated from Brown in 1894, he taught at Roger Williams University. In 1898, he left Roger Williams to become Professor of Classics at Atlanta Baptist College, and in 1906 he was appointed the first black president of the renamed Morehouse College. He became the president of Atlanta University and helped to found the Niagara Movement. Hope served as a YMCA secretary with black soldiers in France from 1918 until 1919 and organized the Commission on Interracial Cooperation of which he became the first president. In 1932, Hope received an LL.D. from Bates College. Hope believed there was a need for social and political equality and argued that technical skill would prove worthless without it. He advocated the W.E.B. Dubois liberal-arts education for blacks at a time when Booker T. Washington's philosophy of vocation training was more popular. Hope organized the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and later became its first president. After Morehouse and Spelman College, he became affiliated with Atlanta University, and in 1929 Hope was unanimously chosen to be president of the institution. He held this position until his death in 1936.