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Eight Decades of Mutual Support

Cooperation between colleges of the Atlanta University system has been a matter of record for 80 years. In 1897, Spelman faculty, students, and alumni participated in the second "Annual Conference for the Study of Negro Problems" sponsored by Atlanta University. Its president, Horace M. Bumstead, had stated the need for a "systematic and thorough investigation of the conditions of living among the Negro population." In that year, W.E.B. DuBois came to Atlanta University from Pennsylvania—after studies at Fisk, Berlin and Harvard—and directed these annual sessions for 13 more years. George A. Towns and James Weldon Johnson were among several A.U. graduates who compiled a monograph that became the first of the University's continuing publications on these conferences. The substance and productivity of the annual conferences prompted Wallace Buttrick of the General Education Board to report that Atlanta University was the only institution in the world engaged in "a systematic study of the Negro...and putting the result in a form available for scholars of the world." Thus the tone was set for education in the Atlanta University Center to be engaged in service to the cause of improving the human condition. That theme and that concern have remained constant during the ensuing years.

Dr. John Hope, soon to become President of Morehouse College, predicted in 1906 that Atlanta University would in time become a graduate school, conducting its work under some form of agreement with Spelman and Morehouse. In 1906 Mrs. John Hope organized the Neighborhood Union, later to be the core of Atlanta University's School of Social Work. The Union pioneered in a tuberculosis case-finding clinic, a dental clinic, a playground given by Spelman College, and classes at Morehouse for over 100 local poor families.

In 1912, Atlanta University joined with Clark, Morehouse and Morris Brown Colleges and with Gammon Theological Seminary to organize the Atlanta Federation of Schools for the Improvement of Negro Country Life. In 1913, students of Atlanta University and Morehouse worked together on a Phelps-Stokes Fund sponsored study of crime in the City of Atlanta.

In 1914 Morehouse and Atlanta University offered their first joint course, in Business Law and Ethics, alternating classes between the two campuses. Cooperation gained momentum in the 1920's. Professor Edward A. Jones' history of Morehouse, A Candle in the Dark, relates that up to the time Spelman became a college, those young ladies who aspired to a baccalaureate degree took their classwork at Morehouse and received their diplomas from Spelman. In the 1927 fall term Spelman and Morehouse jointly appointed Kemper Harreld, who was to chair the two colleges' music departments for 27 years. Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University operated the summer school series of college-level courses together.

In the 1928-29 academic year three faculty members held joint appointments at Spelman and Morehouse, and all upper-level courses were open to students of both colleges. Spelman-Morehouse concerts began their long tradition that year, and Baccalaureate Sunday was celebrated at a combined service in June 1928. 

That same month the Atlanta University board named a committee to confer with Spelman and Morehouse trustees on further cooperative measures that could result in savings of expenditures for all three institutions. Their formal discussion of affiliation began in February, 1929. 

Within a remarkably short period of time the "Contract of Affiliation" was developed. The photographs on the facing page (from top to bottom) document the signing by President Adams of Atlanta University, President Read of Spelman and President Hope of Morehouse on April 1, 1929.

The University agreed to concentrate its energies upon graduate and professional education. Morehouse and Spelman would continue to be undergraduate colleges. They would retain their own trustees, and would each nominate three members of the University board which would keep three of its members. These nine trustees were authorized to elect five additional members.

The agreement, influenced by the success of the Toronto Plan that had led to the federation of nearby colleges with the University of Toronto, produced what then was only the second such consortial arrangement in the United States. The Claremont colleges in California had become the first group to affiliate in this fashion.

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