The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 289, Dec. 1885, U. of Illinois Press

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DECEMBER · 1885 All of us send Christmas greeting to you and Mrs. Marshall. Faithfully yours Booker T. Washington ALpS Con. BTW Papers DLC. Robert Haden Abercrombie (~837-9~), born in Macon County, Ala., attended law school in Tennessee and graduated in 1859. He went to Tuskegee and began practicing law in the firm of Williams, Graham, and Mayes. In 1862 he entered the Confederate Army and was elevated to colonel after the battle of Atlanta. :Returning to Tuskegee after the war, he continued to practice law in the firm of Graham and Abercrombie (later Abercrombie and Bilbro). He moved to Gadsden, Ala., in 1888. 2 This could have been Willie Felts' a thirty-year-old white barkeeper in Tuskegee, but more probably was Charlie Felts, a twenty-nine-year-old white grocer. 3 Jeremiah Haralson of Selma was born a slave in Georgia in 1846. Self-educated, Haralson moved to Alabama, where he became a preacher. He was elected to the Alabama legislature in 1870 and the Alabama Senate in 187~. He served one term as U.S. congressman (~875-77), and later filled a number of federal appointments. Haralson roamed over much of the southern and western United States engaging in farming, coal mining, and other enterprises. He was killed by wild beasts near Denver, Colo., about 19~6. His son Henry attended Tuskegee for one year, 1885-86, as a member of the junior class. 4 Samuel E. Courtney (b. 186~), teacher of mathematics and drawing at Tuskegee from 1885 to 1888, became a prominent Boston physician and valuable ally of BTW a decade later. He was born in Malden, W.Va., the son of a wealthy white planter and his mulatto slave. He attended the school taught by BTW and through his teacher's arrangements went to Hampton Institute. Courtney's father, trained as a physician, paid for part of his son's education at Hampton and interested him in studying medicine. After graduating in 1879, Courtney worked in Massachusetts to pay his school debts. He taught briefly in Virginia and then attended the state normal school at Westfield, Mass. He joined the Tuskegee faculty immediately after graduation and also worked as a northern agent of the school. Courtney left Tuskegee in 1888 to attend Harvard Medical School, where he graduated in 1893. In a few years he had a flourishing Boston medical practice in which most of his patients were white. He was a Unitarian and a Republican, and served on the Boston public school board. In 1896 he represented Massachusetts at the Republican national convention, where he backed Thomas B. Reed for the presidential nomination. He was BTW's loyal lieutenant in Boston, active in the local business league. The National Negro Business League was founded at his home in Too. He opposed the activities of William Monroe Trotter and other anti-Bookerites. At the Boston Riot, at the height of the excitement, Courtney shouted, ''Throw Trotter out the window.'' He attended to the medical needs of BTW and various members of his family when they were in the Boston area. 289