A Cup Comes Home: Alpha Rho Chapter Collection Acquires Historic 1922 Silver Tribute To Bro. Dr. John Hope Ahead Of Landmark December 4 Founder's Day Opening Exhibit

A 104-year-old sterling silver chalice presented to Morehouse College's first Black president and his wife by the Archons of Kappa Boulé anchors a growing Hope Family Trust collection set for its full public debut during the 120th anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.

APCAA Staff

ATLANTA, GA — Tuesday, September 15 2026 — For more than a century, a sterling silver chalice sat as a private family keepsake, a quiet witness to a marriage, a presidency, and the founding of one of Black Atlanta's most consequential institutions. Today, that cup belongs to history in a public sense as well as a personal one. The Alpha Rho Chapter Alumni Association (APCAA) has announced the historic acquisition of the 104-year-old silver tribute presented in 1922 to Bro. Dr. John Hope and his wife, Lugenia Burns Hope, by Atlanta's Kappa Boulé of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity — a piece that now anchors the fast-growing Hope Family Trust holdings within the celebrated APCAA Collection at Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.

The acquisition arrives at a pivotal moment for the association, which in July 2026 welcomed Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.'s national archives to their new institutional home at the Woodruff Library — the very repository where APCAA's own collection has resided since 2023. It also sets the stage for the fullest public presentation yet of the Hope family's story, when the APCAA Collection's Morehouse College Presidential Series makes their grand-opening on December 4, 2026 — the 120th anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha's founding.

A GIFT BETWEEN FOUNDERS

The silver chalice was not an ordinary anniversary gift. It was presented to Hope and his wife on the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary — the couple had married in Chicago on December 29, 1897 — during a cornerstone meeting of Kappa Boulé's charter members in Atlanta. Hope was then in his 16th year as president of Morehouse College, and the moment doubled as a founding gesture for what would become one of the city's most significant early civic institutions.

Kappa Boulé, the local Atlanta chapter of Sigma Pi Phi (widely known simply as the Boulé), was established on January 24, 1920, as the fraternal organization's 10th member boulé. Hope was not a man who joined an existing group; he was one of its original, foundational Archons, helping to build from scratch an elite council dedicated to addressing Black educational inequality and advancing social and civic action across the Southeast. The 1922 gift to the Hopes set a precedent for that mission — a tangible marker of the personal relationships and shared purpose that drove Kappa Boulé's earliest work.

Two other charter Archons carried especially close ties to Morehouse College alongside Hope: Dr. Samuel H. Archer Sr., a longtime professor who would go on to become the college's fifth president, and Austin T. Walden, Esq., a pioneering civil rights attorney who became Georgia's first Black municipal judge of the post-Reconstruction era. Today, Kappa Boulé has grown into Sigma Pi Phi's largest member boulé, with Archons membership exceeding 125 men of distinction across education, medicine, dentistry, banking, architecture, law, government, foreign service, professional sports, and business.

THE MAN BEHIND THE CUP

Bro. John Hope was born June 2, 1868, in Augusta, Georgia, and rose to become one of the most consequential educators and political activists of his era. In 1906 he was named the first Black American president of Morehouse College, and in 1929 he became the first Black American president of Atlanta University, where he worked to build out the institution's graduate programs. He died February 22, 1936, having spent his life advancing higher education for Black Americans at two of the nation's most storied historically Black institutions.

His wife and partner in that work, Lugenia Burns Hope, built a legacy every bit as far-reaching. A major social reformer and civil rights activist, she founded the Neighborhood Union in Atlanta, a pioneering social welfare organization that became a model for community organizing across the country.

The silver chalice is one piece within the much larger 75-item Hope Family category now administered by APCAA, which became the Hope Family Trust's exclusive archival partner in 2024. Among the collection's other holdings: the original 1936 Spingarn Medal presented to Hope by the NAACP, his 1919 Phi Beta Kappa stole from Brown University, and an original 1944 edition of The Sphinx magazine featuring Hope on its cover — a tribute tied to the 1944 christening of the Liberty ship SS John Hope, named in his honor.

A COLLECTION BUILT OVER A DECADE

The Hope acquisition is the latest milestone in a strategic effort that APCAA has been building since 2014, when the chapter first launched the planning initiative that would eventually produce its landmark 2023 partnership with the Woodruff Library. That early investment made the APCAA Collection the first — and, to this day, the largest — chapter-specific repository anywhere within Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.

That foundation was previewed on July 22, 2026, when a 20-member APCAA delegation gathered at the Woodruff Library & Archives Research Center for the signing of a landmark partnership naming the library as Alpha Phi Alpha's official national archival custodian. The fraternity's national archives had previously been housed at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University since at least the late 20th century.

With the move, the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library became the archival custodian of four legendary collections tied to the fraternity and its legacy: the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Collection, the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection, the Alpha Rho Chapter Collection, and the Morehouse College Collection.

WHAT'S AHEAD: ALPHA PHI ALPHA'S 120TH ANNIVERSARY — FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2026

The newly acquired silver chalice will take its place at the center of the association's most ambitious public moment yet. On December 4, 2026 — the 120th anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.'s founding — the APCAA Collection will hold the grand opening and full artifact unveiling of its Morehouse College Presidential Series, anchored by the expansive Hope Family Trust artifacts and papers.

The inaugural exhibit will feature archival holdings not only from Hope, but from Fraternity Jewel Bro. Dr. Henry Arthur Callis, former Morehouse College presidents Dr. Hugh M. Gloster, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, along with Bro. Wiley A. Purdue, and legendary Atlanta Mayor Bro. Maynard H. Jackson.

The occasion will draw family members with direct ties to the figures whose legacies fill the collection, including Mrs. Alice Anderson Hope, widow of Hope's grandson, Bro. Dr. Richard O. Hope (Fall 1957), alongside relatives of Bro. Dr. Gloster, Dr. Mays, Jewel Bro. Henry A. Callis, and charter member Bro. Fr. Henry J. C. Bowden.

The afternoon event will also introduce APCAA's inaugural class of Hall Of Fame Living Legends — 13 chapter initiates recognized for leading professional and private lives that embody the fraternity's founding aims of Manly Deeds, Scholarship, and Love for All Mankind.

For an association built on a century-long commitment to preservation, the arrival of the Hope silver chalice is more than an addition to a catalog. It is a reminder that the objects entrusted to APCAA's care carry the fingerprints of the men and women who built modern Atlanta — and that their stories, a century on, are still being told.

About APCAA: The Alpha Rho Chapter Alumni Association maintains the APCAA Collection, the first and largest chapter-specific archival repository within Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., in partnership with the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.

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