Thursday’s excerpt, “Charles Schaeffer goes to war,” from my book about Christiansburg Institute brings me full circle to my own checkered Civil War past.

Even though I was born and raised in Alabama, the or…

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Aiding the prayers of the 30-year-old Philadelphia Baptist: his business had bankrupted just two years earlier, so work wasn’t competing for his time. Be it life’s circumstances or the Lord, but on June 24, 1861, Schaeffer enthusiastically enrolled in the “Gray Reserves” for home defense, and three months later was offered an appointment as sergeant in the First Delaware Infantry Regiment.

The following spring saw his first action in the Peninsula Campaign. After the surrender of Norfolk, his regiment — of which he was now sergeant-major — served as Provost Guard of the city. In June 1862 he was promoted to second lieutenant, the rank he held as the First Delaware marched north in September to meet Robert E. Lee’s army near a Maryland town called Sharpsburg.

_{1st Delaware monument at Antietam}

His diary entry on September 17, 1862:

Early this morning we moved forward upon the enemy, and having forded the little stream Antietam, came up with the Confederates, and received their first fire just as they were emerging from a corn-field. From that time the conflict raged in fury, and many of my comrades and friends on right and left were laid low in death. For myself, I continued at my post of duty until just before the order was given to charge the enemy, when I received a wound over my left ear which severed a small artery and covered my face with blood. From the battlefield I was taken to the hospital, where I received stimulants to revive me, and had my wound attended to.

Schaeffer left the hospital two days later, one of the fortunate ones of his regiment that saw a 30.8% casualty rate. Of its 708 men, 36 were killed and 182 wounded. No doubt due in part to these losses, he was promptly promoted to acting assistant adjutant-general.

In December 1862, now as assistant regimental quartermaster, Schaeffer fought in the Battle of Fredericksburg where the First Delaware lost another 10 men killed and 74 wounded. A few days later he was promoted to first lieutenant and appointed aide-de-camp on the staff of the brigade commander.

But his war service would largely come to an end on July 3, 1863, as his regiment found itself now in his home state outside the town of Gettysburg. By then only 288 men remained in the First Delaware as they took their positions along Cemetery Ridge against the Confederate advance that would become known as Pickett’s Charge.

“At noon the battle commenced in all its fury by the fire of the opposing batteries of the two armies. At one time the rain of lead and iron around our headquarters was terrific, causing a regiment in a brigade to our left, being panic stricken, to break to the rear; but with this exception the troops in our division remained firm, lying low, and waiting the approach of the enemy, who had massed on our centre and seemed determined to crush and, if possible, annihilate us under their powerful advance.”

The fierce fighting would result in another 77 casualties for the First Delaware: 10 killed, 54 wounded, 13 missing. Command would fall to Lieutenant William Smith until he himself was killed clutching a captured Confederate flag. Three from the regiment were later awarded the Medal of Honor.

Schaeffer’s blood also fell when he was struck by debris from an explosion overhead. Unlike the still-warm bodies he crawled past, Schaeffer would live through the night though, “I was in great misery, but had every attention possible.”

In his after action report, Colonel Thomas A. Smyth specifically commended Schaeffer’s conduct in the action, not that Schaeffer was likely aware of the recognition. His injury merited a surgeon’s certificate of disability that left him out of action for more than two months.

_{1st Delaware monument at Gettysburg}

On September 23 he was finally able to return to duty, now as adjutant of the regiment. He participated in a few battles through the spring of 1864, but much of his service was marked by chronic pain, exposure-related illnesses, hospitalizations and convalescence at home. He wasn’t fully recovered when he rejoined his regiment for the Battle of the Wilderness outside of Fredericksburg. During the night of May 8 the fatigued and fevered Schaeffer became lost and was nearly captured by the Confederates. Unable to go farther, he was transported by ambulance and boat to Washington, D.C., and on to the United States Naval Academy Hospital in Annapolis.

Following another relapse, he was honorably discharged on June 28, and on Sunday, July 3, 1864, one year to the day of his Gettysburg wound, he returned home for what he thought was for good.

After thirty-three months of field service, nine months as an enlisted soldier, and two years as a commissioned officer, I have been permitted by the mercy of God to return in safety to my home. When I reflect on the dangers through which I have passed, the hardships, the exposure, the want and fatigue, the wounds received and the narrow escapes from the enemy; when I remember the terrible scenes of battle, when shot and shell fairly rained death and destruction around me, and friends and comrades fell wounded and dead at my side; when I consider the severe attacks of disease, and the casualties of battle, which repeatedly brought me very near the eternal world, yet in God’s providence my days were prolonged, I cannot but ask, ‘What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits towards me?’ May I be found living to His praise.

Schaeffer didn’t have to wait long for God’s answer. Less than two months after arriving home, as the war was gearing up for its final battles the following spring, Lt. Schaeffer felt recuperated enough to re-enter the military in the Veteran Reserve Corps. He was stationed in Fairfax County, Virginia, and though his official duties consisted of coordinating the logistics of soldiers, draftees and prisoners-of-war, he still found time to devote to his unofficial, but preferred, mission: evangelization. He conducted nighttime meetings at the regimental camp with larger meetings at the “Christian Commission Chapel” where hundreds converted to his faith.

He was here when, a few miles to the south on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox, and five days later to the north, President Lincoln was assassinated.

In the months that followed, Schaeffer suffered another bout of near fatal typhoid, but returned to his regiment on November 1. Four weeks later he was relieved from duty and ordered to proceed to his home and report by letter to the Adjutant General of the Army. Having served his country to his fullest extent — or so he thought — he was delighted to be able to resume his service to his God.

“Spent the closing hours of the past year in holy services with the people of God,” he wrote January 1, 1866, “the last moments, as usual, upon the bended knee, in consecrating renewedly soul and body to the service of the Master.”

His marching orders once again became union prayer-meetings, services back at Tenth Street Baptist, and visits with Philadelphia’s poor. Fresh from the horrors of the war, Schaeffer described in his personal diary an almost paradisiacal existence during those first months of 1866.

“A precious Sabbath to my soul,” he noted on February 4. “Early in the morning met the old colored people at the Horse Market in their prayer-meeting, and, as on all former occasions, found it the gate of heaven in its soul-reviving influences and nearness to the mercy-seat. At the church witnessed the baptism of twenty happy converts, twelve of them young men in the flower of youth. Found the Communion service exceedingly precious, as also the meeting for prayer which followed. Returned home after evening service with a full heart of thankfulness.”

And as for his required check-ins with the Adjutant General of the Army, he wrote, “my future, I leave to the kind directing hand which has led me hitherto.”

Unbeknownst to Schaeffer, that future had been in motion since March 3, 1865, when Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to help freedmen, or newly freed slaves, transition from their former captivity. Placed under the Department of War, the “Freedmen’s Bureau,” led mostly by former Union officers, had a task far more fraught than the battles they had just won.

_{Freedmen’s Bureau agent — by Alfred R. Waud, 1828-1891, artist, Library of Congress}

More than four million African Americans in the South were now legally free, and for the first time in their lives had to secure their own food, fuel, clothing, shelter, medical care, employment, wages and so on. Nearly all were illiterate since Southern states had outlawed their education. They owned no property to raise crops and livestock. Many sought to reconnect with loved ones who had been sold off to other plantations or slave-owning states.

Led by Union Army General Oliver O. Howard, the Freedmen’s Bureau was charged with addressing all of this in an environment already ravaged by the war and still hostile to the Yankee officers and their charges. Southern legislatures — and even some Northern ones — had already begun replacing slavery with a different form of subservience through what became known as “The Black Codes,” which limited the rights and freedoms of African Americans both south and north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And a new racist Southern army was fomenting: the Ku Klux Klan.

Some of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s responsibilities were straightforward and in keeping with the War Department’s previous mission of daily provisioning hundreds of thousands of soldiers. From 1865 to 1869, the Bureau distributed 15 million rations of food to freed African Americans and five million rations to poor whites, and set up a system by which planters could borrow rations in order to feed the freedmen they employed. But the more complex, nuanced work — such as ensuring fair wages — was driven by the talents and determination, or lack thereof, of the Freedmen Agents in their respective jurisdictions.

On April 6, 1866, Lt. Schaeffer was instructed to report to General Howard, who assigned him to Wytheville in the southwest part of Virginia to relieve Lieutenant B. E. Hess as Assistant Superintendent for the counties of Smyth and Tazewell.

Whether it was simple fate or the faith that he held for a God who directs his disciples’ lives, but when Schaeffer arrived in Wytheville on May 22 he learned of a petition signed by local residents requesting that Hess remain in charge. Two days later, Schaeffer’s orders were revoked and he was reassigned to the town of Christiansburg 50 miles to the northeast, to administer the counties of Montgomery and Giles.

As Schaeffer’s biographer would later write, “These uninteresting and apparently unimportant orders and assignments are mentioned here because they constitute a series of providential steps which brought Mr. Schaeffer in direct relations with the field of his future life-work. It is by such seemingly insignificant events as these that our lives are modified, and sometimes the whole current of them changed.”

Not long thereafter, on July 13, he was informed that the U.S. Senate had conferred on him the rank of captain, retroactive to March 13, 1865, “for gallant and meritorious services during the war.” And so for the remainder of his days he was known to those he served from his Christiansburg headquarters as “Captain Schaeffer.”

Another illness incapacitated Captain Schaeffer for weeks so that by the time he was strong enough to assume command in Christiansburg on August 13, the county of Pulaski had been added to his charge. His reception, like that of most Freedmen’s Bureau agents in the South, was met with hostility by whites, from whom he immediately sought distance in order to ingratiate himself to the Black freedmen who were his responsibility.

His efforts would pay off, as he noted in his diary’s final entry of 1866:

“In my duties as Assistant Superintendent of the Bureau I have endeavored to labor faithfully for the interests of the freed people, and to deal justly and impartially with all classes. They now honor me for my integrity and esteem me as their friend. Feeling deeply interested in behalf of the freed people, I do humbly beg for Christ’s sake that I may be a blessing among them, both temporally and spiritually, and prove; myself a workman that needeth not to be ashamed — honoring God, hating sin, fearing to do evil, whatever my hands find to do, to do it with my might, to serve God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to so live as to have nothing to regret when I come to die. I beg this for Christ’s sake.”

Coming Thursday, September 3, for all subscribers

Part 4: Captain Schaeffer, Freedmen’s Agent: “Their [former slaves’] condition can be better imagined than described … Many of them were clad in rags, and most of them were ill-fed … From their filth and poverty and squalor they came, trooping by hundreds to the Government officials for help in their extremity. They were, in truth, ‘as sheep having no shepherd.’”

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples: “As long as it is day, we must do the works of Him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work.”

The scripture was a favorite of two of the giants of Ch…

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Seeking shelter from the blazing sun and artillery raining all around, Lt. Schaeffer huddled under three wooden rails propped against a stone wall when a shell exploded overhead, killing his horse and shattering the rails just inches from his spine. The shell’s shrapnel didn’t pierce his body, but the shock knocked him senseless and damaged his organs. For several minutes he lay motionless. Then from the plain below came the shrill cry of Confederates making their last desperate charge of the day – of the war.

He would never recover from the wounds he suffered on July 3, 1863. Try as he might in the months that followed, Schaeffer’s days fighting for the Union Army were largely over. But his fight for the cause of African American freedom was just beginning.

Libraries are filled with stories of service and sacrifice on the battlefield. But what happened to Schaeffer at Gettysburg is just a footnote to a life that ranks among the most inspiring, yet untold, legacies of the Civil War. His bravery shone forth not on a random summer day on a Pennsylvania field but over the course of his final 33 years in a rural corner of Virginia, ministering to and educating former slaves through a school that would become the Christiansburg Institute.

Born in 1830 in Philadelphia’s Germantown district, the eighth of twelve children, Schaeffer was raised in a devout Presbyterian family. Despite his pious upbringing, Schaeffer felt as a teenager he possessed an evil heart. “I remember particularly the sin of Sabbath-breaking,” he later wrote in the diary he faithfully kept until his death. “First associating with wicked companions, then absence from the Sabbath-school, and, finally, riding out on the Sabbath, and in an unguarded moment partaking with those in my company of the intoxicating bowl. But I bless God that in this last act He brought such conviction of guilt to my soul that I was obliged to relinquish ever again riding out with associates for pleasures on the Sabbath.”

Despite his acclaimed vices, Schaeffer was considered a conscientious child, according to his cousin and biographer Charles H. Harrison, as well as a good student though his formal education ended at the age of seventeen with a business course from Crittenden’s Commercial College. In 1847 he began a nine-year apprenticeship for a dry-goods merchant.

But the pleasures of cards and dancing continued to torment him. Up in the hayloft of his family’s barn, he prayed to his God in anguish until the “Spirit opened my eyes to my danger, and forced such conviction of sin upon my mind that I was led to hate the pleasures in which I once delighted.”

His conviction also led him in 1850 to step foot inside the Tenth Baptist Church in Philadelphia, a faith choice that would echo out across hundreds of miles and years. On that day, seated straight-backed in a wooden pew, he heard a sermon about consecrating life to God. Torment gripped his heart, as he later confided in his diary, as he pondered his failure in that regard. The existential sickness worsened in the weeks that followed until one night he encountered the climactic spiritual struggle “that either hell must receive me as its victim, or an almighty hand be outstretched for my salvation.” Finally able to fall asleep, he awoke with a start around midnight and there, as clear as if it were day, he saw in a vision the crucified Christ and recalled the lyrics of the John Newton hymn:

My conscience felt and owned the guilt, It plunged me in despair;
I saw my sins His blood had spilt and helped to nail Him there.
A second look He gave which said, ‘I freely all forgive;
This blood is for thy ransom paid; I die that thou may’st live.’

A “sweet calm” took possession of his soul. A few weeks later, on May 3, 1850, Schaeffer was baptized – his life, and that of his future home in Southwest Virginia, forever changed.

Having turned his face from vices of old, Schaeffer’s conversion created a new crisis of faith. By 1851 he was nearly halfway through his apprenticeship, but his heart was quite simply too fertile to be a successful dry-goods merchant. As he confided in his diary on February 23, 1851: “ .... In the afternoon felt the want of my regular Sabbath-afternoon engagements — feel at loss when not engaged in working for my Master, Jesus.”

Since he believed his “capacity of intellect [wasn’t] sufficient for so great an undertaking” as becoming a preacher, he sought to ameliorate his spiritual ambitions outside the church walls by ministering to Philadelphia’s poor, especially its African American families. “From thence attended the meeting among my colored friends,” he wrote on Sunday, November 7, 1852.

Indeed, this passage presaged his Sunday routine. Following Tenth Baptist Church services in which he worshipped his Lord, he spent the rest of the day sharing his Lord with others. He hosted prayer meetings, distributed tracts, led Bible readings, evangelized to the city’s “many young men on the corners of the streets engaged in profaning the Sabbath.”

By now he was living in a boarding house with other young men who had come from neighboring villages and farms to the big city to seek better jobs and fortunes. Released from the restraints of family and home, these men also discovered the city’s many temptations … and loneliness. Around this time, the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA, which had been founded in London in 1844 as a refuge from the harsh city life of the Industrial Revolution, had organized in his Philadelphia church. Schaeffer enthusiastically joined, burnishing his spiritual credentials, and took charge of its “Missions Committee.”

So began a weekly routine that carried on a number of years. On weekdays he rendered to Caesar and tried to apply himself to his apprenticeship. Weeknights and Sabbaths were the Lord’s. But while Schaffer’s soul may have overflowed, his pocketbook did not. In 1856 his apprenticeship ended and he acquired the dry-goods business. No longer beholden to an earthly master, he spent more time serving his heavenly one. Increasingly, his diary reveals missionary activities taking place on supposed workdays.

Thursday, March 25, 1858. “In my closet today rolled my burden of soul in regard to the poor colored woman right at the foot of the cross, and felt to give over her case into my Saviour’s hands. On meeting her at her humble abode this evening, was not disappointed at the greeting. ‘Old things had passed away; behold, all things had become new.’ Her soul joyful in her Saviour. A new song in her mouth, even praise unto the Lord.’ Found her aged mother in trouble of soul; poured out our heart before God in her behalf. A number of the neighbors came in. We had a little prayer-meeting with them, and experienced the influence and power of the Holy Spirit in the midst.”

By the following year his business went bankrupt and he returned to Germantown to live again in his family home. But he continued to call Tenth Street Baptist his church home. His conscience didn’t allow him to ride public transportation on Sundays so he made the four and a half mile journey by foot to worship and evangelize. In the “hovels of poverty, disease, and death” among Philadelphia’s white and Black communities, he preached to the “poor, distressed, comfortless, and forsaken.”

Thankfully for his future charges in Virginia, Schaeffer lacked the fanaticism of another white abolitionist who was on his own doomed quest of racial justice. In 1859, as John Brown prepared for his raid at Harper’s Ferry 170 miles to the west, Schaeffer faithfully rose early each day to tend to his “colored friends:” “Another soul found Jesus precious — a young colored girl, for whom we have been in prayer for several months. God has eventually answered prayer and given converting grace.”

His love and care for his colored brothers and sisters of course led him to abhor human slavery, so it was with particular passion and patriotism that he wildly cheered the morning of February 22, 1861, as President-elect Abraham Lincoln passed through Philadelphia on his way to his Washington inauguration.

_{President-elect Lincoln in Philadelphia on Feb. 22, 1861}

Schaeffer watched as Lincoln himself raised the American flag over Independence Hall, and then ominously proclaimed to the crowd:

“I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this [Nation] so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time …. I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”

In his diary, Schaeffer later reflected: “A most glorious sight. I felt it to nerve my whole soul to prayer for our country.”

Then eight weeks later, April 18, 1861: “The excitement in reference to our beloved country seems to arouse every nerve and faculty of body and mind. The crisis has at length come. The first blow struck in firing on Fort Sumter.”

Coming Thursday, August 27, for all subscribers

Part 3: Charles Schaeffer goes to war. “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.”

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Like many white Americans, I felt compelled to do something to atone for the long-simmering racial inequality that conflagrated across our country in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. A son of Heart of Dixie Alabama, and by then a resident for nearly 25 years of Confederate Capitol Virginia, I certainly had stacks of historical case files from which to cull too many instances of white privilege and African American injustice. But beyond participating in a Black Lives Matter march in nearby Roanoke, I sought to do something meaningful – and constructive – to contribute in some small way to racial understanding and healing.

_{WSLS-10 features “Night is Coming” on August 14, 2026}

The summer of 2020 also happened to witness the launch of my public television show, Buzz4Good, which highlights and helps nonprofit organizations. As a former reporter for The Roanoke Times and nonprofit leader for much of the two decades since, I had heard whispers through the years about this organization called the Christiansburg Institute. It had something to do with Black history, I knew, and was located just fifteen minutes from my home in Montgomery County.

So I thought it might be fitting to check it out. I was joined by my daughter, Emily, who was pandemic-bound at home awaiting the start of college. What began with a phone call and a few Google searches turned into an expansive hour-long episode in which we chronicled a sliver of Christiansburg Institute’s remarkable 100-year history from 1866 to 1966 as a primary and secondary school for African Americans (20 of those years with Booker T. Washington as its supervisor); its heart-rending dismantling as school desegregation finally took hold; and the alumni who have fought during the decades since to preserve its fading history.

Two moments in the show in particular stuck with me, and have haunted me ever since.

One was a comment from our interview with Chris Sanchez, executive director of the nonprofit Christiansburg Institute, Inc., which was created in 1999 to preserve the school’s legacy: “What is the longest-lasting physical indication of slavery and Jim Crow South and racism? It is the under-preservation and under-resourcing of Black history, period.”

The other came from Rev. Kenneth B. Wright, who graduated from Christiansburg Institute in 1959. Lamenting the closure of his alma mater, Rev. Wright, peering over his square, steel-framed glasses, intoned in his Sunday sermon baritone:

“Even though I knew what the purpose of integration was, I just thought that it was unfortunate that the integration couldn’t have worked in the opposite direction for us … that the whites could have been integrated with us … because we had the better school.”

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.

Not only did they lose an educational community with highly trained Black teachers who – knowing the world for which they were educating their charges – demanded excellence, they inevitably were consigned in their new schools to remedial classes, often as the only student of color, because their skin pigment prejudged their intellect.

Our television show premiered on Blue Ridge PBS in June 2021 around the first federally sanctioned Juneteenth holiday. It continued to resonate with audiences – especially once the National Educational Telecommunications Association made Buzz4Good available to markets across the U.S. including New York, Chicago and California. Meanwhile the nonprofit under Sanchez’ leadership flourished with new programs and a growing staff thanks to increased charitable contributions and grants from both state and federal sources.

But simmering under Christiansburg Institute, Inc.’s outward success was growing frustration from the Christiansburg Institute Alumni Association, which boiled over in 2024 in public feuds that played out in police reports, on Facebook and in the news, culminating in the alumni literally bulldozing one of C.I., Inc.’s projects.

Perhaps the most existential crisis came in April 2025 when the Trump Administration, in the name of anti-DEI, cut the nonprofit’s two transformational federal grants not even halfway through their cycles, leaving the Institute with just months of funding to survive.

In response to this new institutional assault on our nation’s tragic and triumphal history of African American resilience, I began looking anew at the Christiansburg Institute story. I came to appreciate that it’s something of a white privilege to feel so outraged by what has transpired under this administration since 2024 when African Americans have had to endure far worse since 1776.

By this time, Emily was a reporter with The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Virginia, home to one of our nation’s latest racial travesties: the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally fueled by the first Trump Administration. So as journalists, not historians, we got to work – because the saga of Christiansburg Institute isn’t confined to the past; it’s as much a story of our present, and future.

We know how we got here. In a rented, one-room cabin in 1866, the white, evangelizing Union officer Capt. Charles S. Schaeffer kindled the flame that would grow into a bonfire under the charge of Booker T. Washington, the nation’s leading Black voice of his time. One hundred years later, the forces of desegregation would snuff it all out, but not before it engendered such pride that 60 years later not only alumni but their children and grandchildren would gather for reunions, sporting green and gold Christiansburg Institute swag, regaling each other with stories of what they’d gained at their beloved school, and what they’d lost.

To accurately portray the past, we’ve scoured biographical materials and diary entries of Capt. Schaeffer, who worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau and Philadelphia Quakers to create Christiansburg Institute just a year after the Civil War’s end. We’ve read the letters and reports filed with the Friends Freedmen’s Association (now housed by Swarthmore College) by Edgar A. Long, an Alabama native himself who worked for a Black newspaper in my hometown of Birmingham before following his mentor Booker T. Washington to C.I. where his tenure as principal marked the school’s golden age. And we’ve gleaned hundreds of documents and dissertations kept in the Virginia Tech special collections, Radford University, and the Christiansburg Institute Museum & Archives.

To uncover the truth about what’s happened since C.I.’s closing in 1966, we turned to our trusted friends: archived newspaper articles, which described the ebbs and flows of efforts to preserve the last remaining vestige of C.I’s campus, the abandoned and lone-standing building named for Edgar A. Long himself. We interviewed academics, politicians and regional leaders to address the decades-long suspicion that predominantly white institutions like Virginia Tech had sought to co-opt the C.I. story. We met with former C.I. staffers, who revealed concerning practices that undermined the nonprofit’s mission. Most devastating, we talked with the alumni and caretakers of C.I. history who are still living and fighting – sometimes with each other – over how best to preserve their history.

While small, locally produced histories have been published through the years about parts of its story, we are the first to piece together the various disparate accounts of C.I.’s century of service into the complete epic – poignant, personal and powerful – that it deserves. But what has never been attempted – yet is just as relevant – is an account of what has transpired in the 60 years since its closing, and where all this is headed. The legacy and future of Christiansburg Institute hang in the balance as its past and present collide.

We hope Night is Coming comes close to doing it justice.

Next on Night is Coming: “Becoming Captain Schaeffer”

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 here.

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_{From our 2021 BUZZ episode showing the expanse that once was Christiansburg Institute.}

First there’s the land itself, green and rolling as far as you can see — 185 acres, almost as vast as the National Mall stretching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, granite bookends to our country’s saga of slavery. There’s the squat Mansion House, so named for the plantation owner who occupied it when not just the land was counted as his property but the humans who worked it as well. That owner is long since dead, and in this vision smartly dressed Black students, descended from illiterate, scarred-back slaves, tote books on literature and geography as they file out the door for the day’s next class.

Some head to the Trades Building for instruction in the “industrial arts” — carpentry, agriculture, printing, cooking, barbering and sewing. Others make their way to the creekside farm to weed rows of carrots and potatoes that will provide the meals in the weeks ahead for the school’s couple hundred students, teachers and administrators. Over there is newly built Morris Hall, the dormitory for the boarding girls while the boarding boys remain housed in the old slave cabins.

On its steps the great man himself, Booker T. Washington, perhaps the most famous Black American of his day, stood in 1909 and proclaimed to a mixed audience of five thousand the merits of industrial education. Washington served as Christiansburg Institute’s supervisor for 20 years following the tenure of the school’s founder, a white Union officer whose legacy still lives in the name of the nearby African American church he founded: Schaeffer Memorial Baptist.

_{Booker T. Washington visits Christiansburg Institute, 1909}

Nearer at hand is the colored hospital, built as an antidote to the prejudice that killed the man Washington brought in from his Tuskegee Institute to serve as principal. Suffering a routine case of appendicitis, Charles Marshall had been denied medical treatment at the nearby white hospital, and by the time the Black doctor from Roanoke some 30 miles away arrived by train, Marshall was too late to save. He was 39 years old.

And of course in the middle of it all is the Long Building. Three stories of stout brick and mortar, the building is named for Marshall’s successor and dear friend, Edgar A. Long, Washington’s protege but every ounce his unassuming equal, who channeled any ambition of nationwide prominence into shaping the lives of the Black children under his charge, and the teachers who would inspire them, in this rural corner of America.

Though once abounding with intellectual creativity and the ambitions of a resilient race, that vision has become a distant memory, faintly echoing off the surrounding Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia.

The Long Building is all that’s left today. That and the scrap of ground around it that survived desegregation in 1966 and the subsequent sell-off by white officials to white developers who whitewashed away the past with traffic lights and trucks, Scattergood Church and the Dairy Queen.

Of course you have to know all that history in order to see all that past, and hardly anyone does anymore. Hardly anyone except Chris Sanchez. If he was standing here today surveying the land, he would see it all. But Sanchez is not here. Today, April 4, 2025, he’s alone in his office, his staff of seven working remotely because it’s a Friday. He’s staring at his computer screen at the emails just arrived in his inbox.

Despair doesn’t come easily to the feisty Sanchez. Nearly a decade earlier he’d journeyed south from metro Detroit to found an evangelical church. Now as executive director of the nonprofit created to preserve Christiansburg Institute’s legacy, Sanchez knows he stands on the shoulders of giants: Schaeffer, Washington, Marshall, Long. They had all faced down Jim Crow, lynchings, discrimination of all stripes, separate but equal … and triumphed. They had created an educational institution rivaling their model and more famous kin in Tuskegee, Alabama. Over its century of service, hundreds of African Americans — just a generation removed from the illiteracy and inhumanity of slavery — were now teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, military officers, farmers, bankers, bakers, barbers and homemakers, sustaining their families and their communities through their wits and hard work.

Just a 27-year-old community organizer when he was hired in 2017, Sanchez in his first eight years has already survived the first Trump administration, a pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and rise and fall of fallout from Black Lives Matter.

_{Chris Sanchez, executive director, Christiansburg Institute, Inc.}

Survived … and triumphed too. He raised funds to put a new roof on the Edgar A. Long Building and pause its decay. He helped create a master site plan to redevelop the remaining four acres into outdoor educational trails, community garden, café, recording studio, museum and community gathering space. He oversaw the Truth & Reconciliation Coalition: African American Memory & Storyboard Project in the Christiansburg town square, which highlights the county’s Black history from slavery to emancipation and education. In 2021, he was appointed by Gov. Ralph Northam to the newly formed Virginia African American Advisory Board.

And in 2024 he secured two federal grants totaling $668,000, an incredible sum for a tiny nonprofit that netted just $22,547 in total contributions the year Sanchez was hired. A staff of one when he arrived, Sanchez by early 2025 now employs seven thanks to these grants and the goodwill that he and alumni (“elders” he never fails to respectfully call them) have generated not just in the Town of Christiansburg but throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia and indeed to Washington, D.C.

But today, April 4, 2025, the emails inform him the Trump administration has canceled the grants.

This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.

As a Black man leading a Black institution in a country that has never valued either, Sanchez has always known the work would be hard. But this feels different, institutional, deliberate, cruel. For the first time in his tenure, exhaustion overcomes him, and worse, cynicism. His grief isn’t for himself, but for those looking down on him from the framed photographs hanging in his office.

“I do reflect on Edgar Long and Charles Marshall and everyone who made such a tremendous sacrifice that made C.I. produce the fruit that it did,” he confides. “I know they didn’t always feel heroic and part of some great story. I imagine there were real moments of despair and adversity … and that’s where I am now.”

He gazes at those men gazing back at him. Yes, he stands on the shoulders of the elders. But now he feels all too heavy their weight on his.

Next on Night is Coming

I share how I came to care about the story of Christiansburg Institute: “As a middle aged white liberal of the South, I had always viewed desegregation as a good thing … but I had never contemplated the flip side of the coin. The manner in which school desegregation was implemented in the United States became another affront for Black Americans.” Read here.

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The year was 1866, and the echoes of the Civil War’s final shots still rang in the minds, if not the ears, of a battle-scarred nation. Physically wounded in the war’s most famous fight in his home state, Capt. Charles Stoever Schaeffer stepped into town on August 13 with a heart intact and spirit passionate for his new role as district commander for the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.

His charge: ensure newly freed slaves — surrounded by their former owners and other wary white Southerners still bitter over their defeat — at last could taste the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

How Schaeffer would execute his mission would set in motion a story that resonates to this day.

Just months after his arrival, Schaeffer found a Black school that would eventually be known as the Christiansburg Institute. Predating its more famous kin at Tuskegee and Hampton, Christiansburg Institute operated for 100 years — 20 of which were led by the great man himself, Booker T. Washington — and educated thousands of Black children from not just Virginia but as far away as New York and Jamaica at its sprawling 185-acre campus.

But in 1966, its century of service ended when desegregation finally took hold, only to set the stage for more injustices. Though “C.I.” offered a superior education to its segregated counterparts, the white powers-that-be scattered its Black students to previously whites-only schools, shuttered its doors and whitewashed away the institute’s proud history by selling off the land to commercial developers.

The 60 years since its closing have been just as eventful for those entrusted with its fragile legacy. Power struggles among its descendants have resulted in mental health breakdowns, strokes, criminal charges, highly publicized spats, and in May 2026 a seething lawsuit that made front page news.

By the time Christiansburg Institute Alumni Association v. Christiansburg Institute, Inc. was filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court, my journalist daughter Emily and I had been working for about nine months on a book about this untold history that, we believe, deserves to stand alongside Selma, Freedom Riders, Tulsa, Tuskegee Airmen, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, Juneteenth, I Have a Dream, and other nationally known moments in our nation’s ongoing struggle of racial strife and reconciliation.

We thought we were almost finished, our 85,000-word epic ready for print. But then … the lawsuit.

It’s hard to believe a 160-year story still has breaking news! But life once again confirmed William Faulkner’s famous quip: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

So while we await the lawsuit’s resolution, we’ve decided to begin sharing some of our book here. Each Thursday free subscribers will receive an excerpt from Night is Coming. Each Sunday paid subscribers will enjoy a behind-the-scenes experience from our research.

Here is the beginning …

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