Flashes From The Blade

Five years ago I made a logo and saved it to a folder on my laptop.

The name was The Blade. I had come across the story of Randolph Miller, a Black man born into slavery who made his way to Chattanooga and in 1898 started a newspaper on Vine Street with that name, and something about what he did and who he was would not leave me alone. I did not have a newsletter yet. I did not have a plan. I barely had a direction. But I had that name and I understood what it meant and I made the logo and I closed the laptop and I did not touch it again for five years.

I had done a radio show before that. Brought community members on, told their stories, and when it ended the itch never fully went away. I am a storyteller. That is not something I chose so much as something I discovered I could not stop being. So I did what I do with most things I am not yet ready for. I catalogued it. Saved the logo. Waited.

When we finally launched I kept it safe at first. The roundups. Things to do this weekend. Get outside, support small businesses, enjoy this city. And I meant every word of it, because we do need to get out and we do need to show up for each other and this city has more worth celebrating than most people know. But there was always something underneath that. Something the name had been holding since before the newsletter existed.

Randolph Miller is the reason this publication is called The Blade.

He was born into slavery in Fluvanna County, Virginia in 1842. At nine years old he was taken to Georgia and sold to a man named Andrew Jackson Miller, whose name he would carry the rest of his life, the way so many did, wearing the name of the man who owned them into a future that man never imagined for them. When Sherman's army moved through the area they swept him into it. He survived what came after and arrived in Chattanooga in 1864 with nothing but himself.

He found his way into the newspaper trade the only way open to him. Through his hands. He worked the press manually at the Daily Gazette. Then the American Union. Then Knoxville. Then back to Chattanooga, working for the Times and the Commercial. When machinery threatened to make him unnecessary a man named George M. Day pulled him aside and taught him to operate it. Randolph did not fight what was coming. He learned it and kept going.

In 1898, he started The Blade Weekly.

He was known across both the Black and white communities of this city for saying exactly what he thought, in print, where it could not be ignored. He did not write around hard things. He walked straight at them. When Tennessee passed a law in 1905 segregating public transportation, he organized a streetcar boycott. He launched hack lines, three beat up vehicles by his own description, so that Black residents of Chattanooga could move through their own city with their dignity. Within weeks Black businessmen were applying to start their own bus company. White officials moved fast to kill it.

He wrote in October of that year: "They have taken our school to the frog pond; they have passed the Jim Crow Law; they have knocked us out of the jury box; they have played the devil generally; and what in thunder more will they do? No one knows."

He died in 1915. The Chattanooga Times kept reprinting his editorials after his death under the heading Flashes from the Blade. What he wrote refused to stay quiet even after he was gone.

He was also writing about potholes.

Over a hundred years ago. In Chattanooga. I will give you a moment with that because I know your left eye just twitched. And yes it is a little funny until you sit with what it actually means. Because potholes are not really the point. The point is that the neglect Miller was documenting, the feeling that certain people and certain neighborhoods simply did not count, the gap between what this city promised and what it actually delivered to the people who built it, that is not history. It is not something we solved and moved past. It is present tense. It is happening right now in the same city where he ran that press and refused to look away.

I was born and raised here and I had never heard his name once. His story is scattered between a state archive, the local library, and a few corners of the internet, waiting for someone to gather it into one room. It is believed a few thousand emancipated slaves ever started a newspaper in this country. Out of four million people freed after the Civil War. That is not a local footnote. That is a national story sitting in our own backyard.

Finding his story felt like discovering a rocket with no fuel. Here was a man born into slavery, sold at nine years old, swept into a war he had no say in, who arrived in this city with nothing and still built something that outlasted him. Something people kept quoting after he was gone. Something that challenged this city's conscience when this city would have preferred its conscience left alone. I had his name sitting in a folder on my laptop and I had not yet become the thing that could carry it. That is a particular kind of feeling. Not quite guilt. Not quite pressure. Something closer to responsibility that has not ripened yet.

What gave me the fuel, finally, was understanding what this actually needed to be.

If all you paid attention to was the main narrative about what makes Chattanooga great, you would hear about fast internet. The outdoors. The tourism numbers. And none of that is wrong. But it is not what makes this place home. What makes this place home is the people. The ones doing grassroots work nobody is covering. The ones taking a risk on a business in a neighborhood people keep overlooking. The ones standing up for something at a city council meeting at 3pm on a Tuesday when nobody is watching. The ones who have been holding this city together for generations while the highlight reel runs without them.

That is what Randolph Miller understood in 1898. That somebody had to pay attention. Somebody had to say it out loud. That the people who make a place real deserve a publication that treats them that way.

The press is not neutral. It never has been. What gets covered and what gets buried, who gets their flowers and who gets forgotten in a scattered archive, that is a choice someone makes. Miller made his choice in 1898 on Vine Street with a hand press and nothing guaranteed. Every Tuesday I make mine. And what I know now that I did not fully understand when I saved that logo is that we are not starting something. We are continuing it. Miller is a link. This newsletter is a link. The people we cover every week are links. This is a chain that has survived a hundred and twenty years of being ignored, scattered across archives, nearly lost. It did not break then. It is not breaking now.

He came to Chattanooga in 1886 during the boom days with a new wife, a law degree, and a family name that already carried weight.

Alexander Wilds Chambliss was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1864, the son of John Alexander Chambliss, a noted Baptist preacher who filled pulpits in Charleston, Richmond, and Plainfield, New Jersey and who, by every account, thrilled every room he ever stood in. His father was also a professor of Latin and English at Maryland College and the first graduate of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville. The son inherited the instinct for language and pointed it at courtrooms instead of congregations.

He educated himself at private schools in Charleston and at Kenmore College in Virginia. By twenty one he was in Brownsville, West Tennessee, editing a newspaper and practicing law at the same time, which tells you everything about his appetite for work. He married Lillian Carter Nelson there in 1886, her father a plantation owner descended from the Carters and Nelsons of Virginia, and then brought her straight to Chattanooga because this was the city worth betting on.

They built a frame house near the corner of Vine Street and Georgia Avenue. He started his law practice, brought in his brother Sam, and later added James Burnet Sizer as a partner. When the Pound Building went up downtown, Chambliss was among the first tenants through the door. He became one of those men whose name kept turning up wherever this city was making a decision.

He served as mayor from 1901 to 1905 and again from 1919 to 1923. Four terms. He was later appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court by Governor Austin Peay. In 1908 he bought an old house at Bluff View that by every account looked genuinely terrible, what people described as a queer contorted monstrosity that just looked awful. He took it and fooled with it, as the saying went at the time, until it looked right. A brick house with a porch at the front and another overlooking the river, a shared driveway curving down to a stone garage on the bluff. That was his way with most things in this city. He arrived, assessed what was there, and made something better out of it.

His son John inherited none of his father's taste for the courtroom and all of his taste for building something lasting. John courted his wife Margaret by riding horseback from Vine Street to her home in St. Elmo, took a two year law course in one year, and eventually turned 300 acres along Lookout Creek in Lookout Valley into Reflection Riding, the nature preserve that still sits there today. He said there was something about the mountain, about the wind blowing up there, that carried him back to something older. Some families build institutions. Some build places. The Chamblisses managed both.

After the death of his first wife Lillian, A.W. married Agnes Shalliday, who had been his law firm's secretary and bookkeeper. The year before he died he gave thirty thousand dollars to build what became the Alexander W. Chambliss Home. He had lived in this city for over sixty years, watched it grow from a boom town into something that would outlast him, and made sure some of what he cared about stayed standing when he was gone.

He died on September 30, 1947. He was eighty three years old.

Pay attention to the Tennessee River this week.

After running steady around 633 feet for most of the past month, the river spiked sharply overnight Sunday into Monday, climbing to 669.46 feet at the Chattanooga gauge, clearing both the minor flood stage of 651.1 feet and the major flood stage of 655 feet. That is a significant jump and one that happened fast.

The good news is the forecast shows the river dropping back toward normal levels over the next 48 to 72 hours. But conditions like this change the river in ways that are not always visible from the bank. When water rises that quickly it disrupts currents beneath the surface, creating unpredictable pulls and undertows that even strong swimmers cannot anticipate or outswim. What looks calm on top is not always calm below. This is not the week to get in the water.

If you are planning to be near the river, on the riverfront, on a boat, or in any low lying areas near the bank, check conditions before you go. The all time record at this gauge is 678.9 feet so there is headroom, but this is not a normal week on the river.

Stay out of the water until levels return to normal. TVA and NOAA are monitoring. Updates at water.noaa.gov/gauges/chat1

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Every story that does not get told disappears. Not immediately. It lingers for a while in the memory of the people who lived it, gets passed down in pieces, maybe makes it into a conversation at a family reunion or a footnote in a document nobody reads. And then one day there is nobody left who remembers and it is just gone.

This city is full of those stories. Some are buried in archives waiting for someone curious enough to go looking. Others are happening right now on streets you drive down every day. Both kinds matter. Both kinds are at risk.

When we tell a story we are not just celebrating someone. We are deciding that what they did, who they were, what they built and fought for and survived, deserves to exist beyond the moment it happened. We are making a record. And records are how the future knows it came from somewhere.

So I want to ask y’all directly. What stories do you think are being overlooked in this city? Who deserves to be written about that nobody is writing about? Hit reply and tell me.

— Marie

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