What a gun may be to you may not be what a gun is to a Black Southerner. What a gun became as we watched mass shootings by young white men—so often fitting that same profile of loners immersed in right-wing bigotry—had nothing to do with us. For us, a gun was something you kept under your bed or in a closet for when the white men came around with guns for you. Or a tool for you to seek sustenance from the woods to supplement the meager bit the white man had given; the flesh of deer and squirrel could be food on your family’s table to stave off the ever-encroaching hunger.
Guns are part of everyone’s life in the South. Guns came to the continent of North America as the violent conquering weapon. They became central to white supremacy’s cult, part of how whites terrorized Black communities over the centuries we’ve been coexisting here. Guns are deeply intertwined with the lives of many of the Black folks you’ll find living in Southern states, in Mississippi and Georgia and Texas and Alabama. It’s a fact of life for us that people around us are armed. We hope that those who are armed are on our side, to help defend against threats.
Harriet Tubman was armed leading the enslaved through the backwoods, guided by the constellations northward to freedom. The Black Southerners living during Reconstruction were armed against the Klan. My mother’s father’s people, free Black people who lived as small poor farmers in eastern North Carolina for centuries, kept guns along with their papers demonstrating they were legally free, because white people could raid them and abduct them into slavery at any time.
I grew up in North Carolina, the child of a father who’d been raised in rural poverty in Virginia and a mother whose parents had met at the historically Black Xavier University in New Orleans. Almost all my family lives in the South. I live a Southern life in D.C., in that my people here are D.C.’s Black population, who have lived culturally Southern lives south of the Mason-Dixon line in a municipality where slavery was legal until Lincoln’s decree and Jim Crow was brutal.
Being tied to the land—to the cycles of the crops and the seasons, to the types of soil and the temperament of the winds—is likewise part of the experience of being a Black Southerner, relating to other Black Southerners. The rifle in the Black Southern home served a dual purpose: to protect against the ever-present threat of white supremacist terrorism and to hunt game. It served a utilitarian and practical need. It wasn’t there for plots to commit mass violence. My father’s stories of his boyhood in a small Virginia county of a few thousand people were of shooting house mice, going on hunting and fishing trips, and staying guarded in the night for if the white folks got too rowdy and thought terrorizing their Black neighbors could be entertaining. And his experience isn’t a singular one. It’s an upbringing many Black Southerners had and are still having.
