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.
Black Southerners weren’t displaying their guns as a visible symbol of defiance, like the iconic portraits of armed Black Panthers from the 1960s. There’s nothing wrong with that at all—to stand in the face of white America and boldly announce you won’t be backing down. But the ways guns were culturally held in the Black South were different, the covert protection kept for when white supremacists reared their heads at you, that you pull out when needed. That is the distinguishing feature of Black Southern gun culture as opposed to mainstream white gun culture: Black Southern gun culture is a response to violent white supremacy and a defense against it, not a colonial offensive against marginalized groups to subjugate them.
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.
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.