white hope

white hope

The person or thing expected to bring great success or fortune to someone or something. Since being signed last spring, many are talking about the rising football star as the team's white hope. While a great politician, I think it's wrong to see her as some white hope of the party.
See also: hope, white
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

white hope

a person expected to bring much success to a team or organization.
The expression originated in the US in the 1910s as an epithet applied to a white heavyweight boxer who it was hoped (by whites) might beat Jack Johnson, the first black boxer to hold the world heavyweight title ( 1908–15 ).
1941 Lord Berners Far from the Madding War He was a composer: the white hope (so a critic had described him) of English music.
See also: hope, white
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • be in on the act
  • be/get in on the act
  • take a gamble
  • lucky at cards, unlucky in love
  • a hot hand
  • be in tall cotton
  • cotton
  • (one's) star is rising
  • small fortune
  • a small fortune
References in periodicals archive
Henry Cole's famous white cup was not the great white hope; the Renaissance was not simply the start of the modern world but 'a major retrenchment; a cultural and economic movement to stabilise an immensely turbulent and uncontrollable state of affairs caused at least in part by the growth in private ownership of furniture, household goods, jewellery and clothes'.
Harris's campaign manager was Jim Hightower, the great white hope of American populism.
Now the great white hope has withdrawn from the contest because of his children.
Jerry Quarry, a perennial 'white hope' who had the misfortune to compete in an era that included greats Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Ken Norton.
FRANKEL had been racing's great white hope before his only Classic appearance at Newmarket in the Spring of last year.
LEE'S WHITE HOPE Britain has plenty of 'white horse' chalk landmarks but racing has only a few horses registered with Weatherbys as white.
In those days, Milburn was a cipher for Tony Blair, his hand-picked great white hope who might just stop the Brown Bomber.
HUYTON batsmen Dave Conlon and Peter White hope to amongst the runs again tomorrow when they visit Tranmere Vics in Division One of the Bromborough Paints Merseyside Competition.
CLEVELAND AND AKRON, OHIO: Posthumous pardons aren't high on most presidential agendas, but two Ohio theatres are hoping that President Barack Obama will take another look at the case of Jack Johnson, the African-American boxing champion convicted in 1913 for dating a white woman, whose story inspired Howard Sackler's Pulitzer-winning 1967 play The Great White Hope. Cleveland's Karamu House will stage a revival, Feb.
Who was America's 'great white hope' in the 1908 world heavyweight contest against the black boxer, Jack Johnson ?
India and China were recently hailed as the great white hope for car manufacturers, with fast growing, increasingly wealthy populations seemingly offering a panacea for falling demand in the car-saturated West.
Enter protege Tommy 'Machine' Gunn, played by John Wayne's great nephew and real-life great white hope, Tommy Morrison.
"This horse could develop into one who could give Mr Nicholls' great white hope (Kauto Star) a scare up the Cheltenham hill."
Unbeaten Larry Holmes' defence of his title against great white hope Gerry Cooney was on at 9.35pm.
The cause of all these words, all this passion, was not a political crisis or a natural catastrophe--it was a prizefight, the 1910 contest between Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, and Jim Jeffries, who had been singled out as "the Great White Hope of the Western World." But this was obviously more, and less, than a prizefight.