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“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
― Lorraine Hansberry -
The whites have so declared; they proclaim that the country is theirs, that the Negro should be thankful that he had so much, when so much more
might be withheld from him. He stands on a lower footing than any alien; he had no government to which he may look for protection.
Charles W. Chestnutt, essay, 1903, reflecting on the then extant tragic effects of SCOTUS decision in Jackson v Giles upholding voter suppression like poll taxes, Plessy v Ferguson, on lynching, removal of blacks from voter rolls and public office at state and federal level, peonage, and the rise of chain gangs for profit—erasing barely 30 years of Reconstruction, passage 13th, 14th and 15 Amendments. Glad things have changed… -
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
—James Baldwin
The Textual, Tactile, Tittilating, Tantrum-ridden, Totally multimedia musings & sometime portfolio of Dangerfield Newby, by and through is instrument on Earth, Christopher Alan Chambers. Newby died in 1859 in John Brown's raid on the federal company town of Harpers Ferry. White townspeople fed his dead body to pigs. He joined Brown to forstall the sale of his wife, not to start a revolution. And in dying, he started a revolution. His body's long disintegrated into loam; his consciousness survives in bits and bytes. Enjoy. Engage. Enrage.
Chambers is alive, of course, and lives 80 miles from Harpers Ferry in Washington DC. He teaches at Georgetown University, contributes to RT America, MSNBC and Smithsonian Magazine.
