Hunting While Black: Food, Freedom and Reclaiming the Great Outdoors

For some, hunting is more than just recreation—it’s a revolutionary act of resistance.

From left to right, Dapo Ojeyemi, Cavel K. and Jason Smith wait for their first pheasant hunt to begin in central Oregon. (Photo courtesy of Hunters of Color)

Lawrence Weeks, an executive chef and owner of Murray’s Creole Pub based in Louisville, wanted to learn how to hunt to gain greater self-sufficiency and connect to his family’s legacy as subsistence hunters. He joined Hunters of Color and now, with a mentor, he’s going on his first hunt in early September, starting out with small game like rabbits and squirrels and branching out to wild turkey and deer later in the season.

Preparing for these hunts, Weeks says, stirs his culinary creativity, as he researches Mexican traditions of cooking wild turkey with mole sauce or recipes from his mother’s hometown in Grand Coteau, La., and his father’s home in the Appalachian mountains. “I'm really excited about the small game,” Weeks says. “There's a lot of old Creole and country recipes like squirrel and rabbit stews that I feel like a lot of people don't engage with nowadays.”

In the United States, hunting is largely seen as a sport for white men. Black people have a rich history of hunting, but traumatic displacements like the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Great Migration separated many of us from land traditions. Still, many Black people are finding a sense of freedom, autonomy, and joy in hunting, especially those who are learning for the first time. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s 2022 data, 4% of Black people in America hunt, compared to 6% of the overall population, an increase from 2016 data, which showed that 97% of U.S. hunters were white (the sample size for African-Americans was too small to record).

According to Jimmy Flatt, the founder of Hunters of Color, political upheaval is part of the increased interest, which he says formal surveys often fail to reflect accurately. “With a looming recession, with hate crimes going up during Trump's previous administration and now, Trump 2.0, we’re starting to see a resurgence of interest in our work.”

The hunters I spoke to view hunting as a political act, and attaining and applying land knowledge can often feel more urgent than other forms of political action, like protests or debates—especially when those debates appear to be mostly taking place on social media. Weeks felt himself drawn to the land after Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor in 2020.

“I think that in going back to our roots and building a community based on function and fulfilling the needs of each other, we will realize that is the most effective act of resistance,” Weeks says. “Getting back to the land and using ancestral knowledge of hunting and cultivating the land is the most beautiful and violent acts against a system that has been stacked against [us].”

Flatt says Hunters of Color also saw an uptick in interest after COVID-19, and the police killing of Taylor and George Floyd—along with the subsequent uprisings. “With COVID-19, people wanted to learn how not to be dependent on unreliable food systems and grocery stores. So people had some time to think, ‘What kind of food am I putting on my table?’”

Hicks agrees. “I do feel like we have been taught to feel like these political arguments and debates are the key to survival when they're really not,” he says. “Because you can’t argue your way through collapse.”

While groups like Hunters of Color have become a home for many, others may find it difficult to find hunting mentors they feel safe with. Marrico Vshon Hicks Jr., 21, whose family owns their own hunting land on the outskirts of Atlanta, grew up going on hunting trips with his father since he was 7 years old. Hicks and his father also belong to an all-Black hunting club that gives them access to community, knowledge-building, land and equipment.

But when they moved around while his father was in the military, Hicks says hunting required them to build a community wherever they were, going hunting with friends on their land and joining groups and clubs. His advice to those seeking to learn is to venture out of comfort zones. “Talk to people that you wouldn't normally talk to, and you’ll eventually find somebody who will allow you to hunt on their land or join their hunt camp,” Hicks recommends.

For Black hunters who write about their experiences, there’s often a pressure to focus on their limitations and struggle to belong in the hunting world, rather than on their political ideas and tangible skills. Writer and hunter Jonathan Wilkins noted that after the George Floyd uprising in 2020, there was a “racial reckoning,” and demand for personal essays and content from Black hunters skyrocketed, but most of the requests he received wanted him to focus on the fear he felt while hunting or subtly labeled him as “doing some weird shit.”

He found these angles limiting and wanted to explore hunting as a revolutionary, anti-capitalist practice rather than an outlier activity for Black people. As he points out, prior to the Great Migration, most Black people lived in the South and lived an agrarian lifestyle, which he feels was and remains our strength as a people.

“We had a Great Migration. I think it was then that we developed this idea that eating wild game and growing gardens—this lack of explicit consumerism—was linked to the poverty and oppression that our great-grandparents were running from. It only takes two generations for someone to lose sight of that stuff,” says Wilkins.

“So now you have people who look at wild game and say, ‘I’d never eat that,’ but they don't understand the connection to it,” he continues. “They don't understand the empowerment that comes from it, and they don't understand how it can be a revolutionary act.”

Like many hunters, Wilkins is trying to pass hunting skills down to his three children: two daughters, ages 6 and 8, and a 2-year-old boy, who’ve been immersed in the hunting lifestyle since birth. “The first piece of meat my oldest daughter ever ate was wild turkey. My middle child was a squirrel, and my youngest boy was black bear,” Wilkins says. “I caught a baby alligator and let [my younger daughter] touch it. I catch snakes for them.”

He says his children have learned to glean information about an animal's age and sex from their droppings, and that they enjoy going on small hunting trips and interacting with the butchery process, but he doesn’t push them. “I don't believe in forcing kids to do stuff or traumatizing them, like making them watch me gut critters,” Wilkins explains. “But they have to be aware of where their food's coming from, and why it's important. … And if I'm lucky, one of them will want to hunt with me when they get older.”

Those who grew up hunting seem more likely to maintain the hunting lifestyle as adults, partially because it wasn’t taught to them as a hobby or leisure activity, but as a critical vehicle for environmental and ancestral knowledge and survival. Hicks says he always knew that hunting would be part of his life because his father believed it to be an essential life skill.

“Subsistence living is so important. It's our lifeline. It's how we live and survive off the land, and live in harmony with it,” says Charity Blanchett, a Yup’ik and Black woman from Alaska who currently lives in New Orleans. She advocates for traditional Native Alaskan Indigenous food knowledge through her non-profit, The Dipping Spoon. “Hunting is a sacred practice. It's centered around identity, but also the heartbeat of the identity is community.”

For Tia Clark, a Charleston, S.C.-based crabber and hunter, this community can be found through representation. She’s hunted alligators in the lowcountry, and this fall, she’s heading to Alaska, where she aims to go on a moose or caribou hunt. Clark was recently accepted into the prestigious Explorers Club, which was founded in 1904 and counts luminaries like Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle and Carl Sagan among its ranks. Women weren’t allowed to join the club until 1981, so Clark’s presence as a Black woman is even more significant.

Tia Clark posing with an alligator she hunted. (Courtesy of Tia Clark)

As a crabber and a hunter, Clark says she’s often the only Black person—and certainly the only Black woman—in the spaces she enters. That’s why she’s so passionate about representation and aspiring hunters having mentors they can feel safe with. “When your teacher or mentor is someone that looks like you, your guard goes down and you're able to receive the knowledge because now you're comfortable.”

Since people often come to her asking how to learn to crab or hunt, Clark has noticed an increased interest in hunting from Black people and all people of color, but acknowledges that it’s hard for everyone to take action. “It’s not easy,” she says, adding that many Black hunters don’t have the time or the resources to teach everyone who is interested. “But I believe that there needs to be that network, and that community.”

For aspiring Black hunters like Weeks, who plans on buying a significant number of acres in the near future, Black land ownership—or joining Black-led hunting clubs where hunters have access to land—is key to creating that community. “There's absolutely been a concerted effort to remove Black people from large-scale land ownership and our connection with the land, with natural systems,” Wilkins says, adding that land ownership is also a privilege many Black people have been denied.

Hicks points out that when his family bought their hunting land, it increased their collective skills as a family, not just in the simple point-and-shoot aspect of hunting, but in other areas of land knowledge. For him, one of the most useful skills he’s picked up is soil reading, knowing what soil is most nutritious for plants and being able to track animals and identify plants.

Over the past year, Clark has made an intentional effort to only eat meat or seafood that she has either harvested herself or bartered for from a hunter or fisher that she knows personally. “Besides the taste being better, it fulfills my soul and my body. We're supposed to have a bond with our food.”

For Flatt, he wants Hunters of Color to continue to be a place where people can come and get support to begin their food sovereignty journeys. “The ultimate conclusion people came to was even if they don't hunt all the time, it’s a nice skill to have. And along the way, people connect to their culture, and that makes them stick around hunting forever.”