Static Disrupters
Public radio station WPFW-FM may be broke, split by staff conflict, and short on listeners, but it's still fighting for the First Amendment.
Cover Story
A guest on the station's noontime talk show, We, Ourselves, Cheatwood says the bloodiness and bondage began in the sixth century B.C. when the “barbaric Caucasians” overran Egypt, ushering in a thousand years of Greek and Roman cruelties. The Arabs were the next oppressors, he says, starting in the middle of the first millennium A.D. White Europeans brought the trade to its murderous peak, pillaging Africa for chattel from the 15th century to the 19th. The enslavement, he says, continues in North Africa today, where Arabs still hold black Africans in bondage. Cheatwood, who's just written The Butcher's Grand Ball, a book on the subject, asserts that 200 million African people have been killed in the slaving “holocaust.”
From the microphone in WPFW's Chinatown studios, Cheatwood's voice casts a radio penumbra 180 miles wide, reaching to the Eastern Shore and West Virginia, north to Gettysburg, Pa., and south to Culpeper, Va. We, Ourselves host Ambrose Lane urges the audience to phone and comment on “Brother Cheatwood's” views; the listeners are enthralled by the guest, thanking him and asking how they can learn more about this suppressed history of slaving. Halfway through the hour-long broadcast, the sole challenger to Cheatwood's thesis tells him that blaming groups like “the Arabs” or “white Europeans” does nothing but divide.
Cheatwood responds bitingly. “I am not in the business of making people comfortable,” he says. “It is not an issue of trying to blame people or vilify. Villainy is something that comes out of the Caucasian world anyway.”... Continued 
Issue of Nov. 19 - 25, 1993
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