The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 291, Jan. 1886, U. of Illinois Press

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JAN UARY · 1886 We should like to know as soon as possible whether or not you can come and on what conditions. Yours Sincerely B. T. Washington P.S. Prof. James Storum3 has visited our institution and has lectured here. ALpS Con. 9: BTW Papers DLC. John Mercer Langston (~829-97), next to Frederick Douglass probably the most well-known race leader of the nineteenth century. He was the son of a Virginia planter and a slave mother. After the death of his parents' Langston was sent to Ohio in 1834 for an education. In 1849 he graduated from Oberlin College and became a lawyer in the town of Oberlin. He was an abolitionist orator and president of the National Equal Rights League in 1864. During the Civil War he recruited black soldiers for the Union Army and later served as inspector general of schools for the Freedmen's Bureau. During Reconstruction he held several appointive offices, including two terms as consul general in Haiti. He was twice a delegate to the Republican national convention. He became dean of the law school and vice-president of Howard University. In 1885 he became president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute in Petersburg. He won election in :888 to the U.S. House of Representatives in a close race in which Langston appealed directly to black Virginians to elect him because of his race. Much of his two-year term was taken up with feuds regarding his seating. His election disturbed not only Democrats but white members of his own party, and he lost the next election. Langston's political beliefs changed sharply from time to time. In the late 1870s he encouraged blacks to leave the South to escape oppression. A decade later he was optimistic about black-white relations in the South and concluded that blacks themselves would solve the ''Negro problem'' through intelligence and acquisition of wealth. In 1894 Langston wrote an autobiography, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital. 2 Richard Theodore Greener was born in Philadelphia and educated in Massachusetts. In :870, at the age of twenty-six, he became the first black graduate of Harvard University. Greener was principal of a black school in Philadelphia (~8707~), and then worked variously as teacher, lecturer, and editor. He also worked in the once of the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. From 1873 to 1877 he was the only black faculty member at the University of South Carolina, where he taught metaphysics and logic. In 1876 he received an LL.B. degree from the University of South Carolina and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar the next year. The hard-working, ambitious lawyer became a professor of law and later dean of the law school at Howard University. In 1882 he began a vigorous private practice in Washington, D.C. Greener received numerous political appointments under McKinley and Roosevelt. He spent more than seven years as U.S. consul at Vladivostok. He was a U.S. representative during the Boxer Rebellion and represented British and Japanese interests in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1906 his political fortunes ran out and he was unable to find another appointment. Still seeking an active political life, Greener turned to BTW for help and worked for BTW as a spy at the Harpers Ferry meeting of the Niagara Movement. BTW, however was unable to find an appointment for Greener, who then retired to live in Chicago. 29I