Night is Coming: The Untold Story of African-American Triumph and Tragedy at Christiansburg Institute is a time-traveling odyssey that chronicles Black resilience in an Appalachian corner of Virginia. It deserves to be known alongside Selma, Freedom Riders, Jackie Robinson, Henrietta Lacks and I Have a Dream in the ranks of Black history. First inspired by a two-part episode of my TV show BUZZ, I’ve now written a book about C.I.’s remarkable 160-year history, which I began releasing in August 2026 on Substack.
Part 1 – Prologue: The Weight of the Elders
(August 13, 2026) – If you can ignore the present and look far enough into the past — gazing beyond the trucks and traffic lights, subdivisions and stores, past Scattergood Church and the Dairy Queen — you can glimpse the expanse and improbable grandeur of what was once the Christiansburg Institute. READ MORE
Author’s Note – Why I started buzzing about Christiansburg Institute
(August 16, 2026) – As a middle aged white liberal of the South, I had always viewed desegregation as a good thing. Sure, I bemoaned the flight of white families fleeing once-segregated school systems to incorporate into alabaster cities gleaming again with only white children, but I had never contemplated the flip side of the coin: The manner in which school desegregation was implemented in the United States inevitably became another affront for Black Americans. READ MORE
Part 2 – BEcoming Captain Schaeffer
(August 20, 2026) – Christiansburg Institute is a saga of Black resilience, but its first chapter is written by a white Baptist from Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Charles Stoever Schaeffer would go on to become many things over the course of his 69 years: failed businessman, wounded Civil War hero, U.S. Freedmen’s agent, teacher, ordained minister, prohibitionist, and namesake to an African American church that still worships to this day. READ MORE
Part 3 – charles schaeffer goes to war
(August 27, 2026) – “My prayer is for direction in every step I take …. My mind is particularly exercised as to the course I should pursue with reference to preparing for active service of my country.” READ MORE
Part 4 – Captain Schaeffer, Freedmen’s Agent
(September 3, 2026) – Appalachia has often been stereotyped as a landscape, both physical and psychological, that didn’t welcome slavery. Its mountainous terrain was unsupportive of the large-scale plantations found in the eastern part of the state. And its people —poorer in the pocketbooks but richer in their hearts, so the myth goes — didn’t countenance ownership of other humans. READ MORE
Part 5 – Friends in Philadelphia
(September 10, 2026) – If Capt. Charles S. Schaeffer had any regrets about the school he built for newly freed slaves atop Zion’s Hill in Christiansburg, Virginia, it was that local whites didn’t avail themselves of its educational opportunities. READ MORE
Part 6 – Zion’s Hill
(September 17, 2026) – In the years that followed the move to Zion Hill, Capt. Charles S. Schaeffer’s spiritual and educational missions went hand in hand. Together with his new wife, Schaeffer grew the Christiansburg school along with African American Baptist churches in communities far and wide in Southwest Virginia. READ MORE
Part 7: Interlude – The Sanchez Story
(September 24, 2026) – “I’m playing the race card because it is my card, it is the card of my oppressed people … who were lynched on American soil not too long ago.” READ MORE
Part 8: The Tuskegee Effect
(October 1, 2026) – “The road along which we have traveled has not been, by any means, a smooth one. We all had been toilers at Tuskegee and knew well how to face the duties of life.” READ MORE