Kelli McGuffey Pilkington hunts deer and squirrels, fishes whenever she can, stores jars of preserved food she cans herself — and keeps a holstered Smith and Wesson .38-caliber handgun under her T-shirt, just in case.

Pilkington, 48, is a sturdily built 6-foot-tall Black biracial woman who lives in a 644-square-foot cabin on 18 acres of land in southern Tennessee, in a town of about 3,000 people that’s best known for hosting the National Cornbread Festival.

While some might call her a survivalist, she simply sees herself as someone who is self-sufficient. She says with the direction America is going in these days, what might seem like paranoia to some is just preparedness to her.

She told Capital B that what started as a homesteading journey, meaning a lifestyle of self-sufficiency, has evolved into the Redfern ‘Glampground,’ a place she hopes will one day sustain not only herself but other marginalized people. 

“In the inception of Redfern, there was never a doubt in my mind that this was going to be a space for single Black women who didn’t have children, and who wanted to age gracefully in place,” Pilkington said. “Now it is expanding into being a place for all marginalized communities to seek solace and safety because they’re just not safe in these streets.” 

Pilkington is a member of a tight-knit, but fast-growing community of Black women preppers, or survivalists, across the nation. 

Many say they began their journey because of climate change, civil unrest or injustice — between Hurricane Katrina to President Donald Trump’s first term, the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd, and the Jan. 6 riot. They run the gamut from women who work finance gigs by day, with enough water and nonperishable food to last a few months and a prepped “bug out bag” (also known as an emergency supplies kit), to Black women capable of living alone in the wilderness for as long as they need to, armed and fully capable of defending themselves. 

In 2020, the FBI released a report on hate crimes in the country. The data found that under Trump’s term, there was a 17% increase in hate crimes from 2018 to 2019. Under a new Trump administration, experts warn that these crimes could increase.

“I would tell Black women for their own peace of mind, and for their own health, to stand up and walk away from a system that was not designed to benefit us in any way, shape, or form, whether you are young or old,” said Pilkington, who founded the Black Homesteaders and Survivalists Facebook group in 2020. 

Jennifer is a member of the Practical Prepping Facebook group. She would speak with Capital B only on the condition that she be identified by her first name; a single mother of three who works in finance for the federal government, she fears for her job. 

Jennifer, who lives in Northern Virginia, said it was the pandemic that initially drove her to become interested in prepping.  

“That was the first time that I actually dealt with real food insecurity or scarcity in general,” she said. 

Jennifer said she’s just a very practical person but feels America is heading into uncertain times. In response, she said she’s stockpiled enough food and water for a couple of months, has taken steps to make her home safer with surveillance, and has learned how to make a solar still, a device that extracts pure water from contaminated or brackish sources through solar energy. 

“I am not necessarily trying to think of every single worst-case scenario because I feel like that will drive me crazy,” she said. “I plan for the things that appear to be my most immediate concern and just like anything else, I will shift as necessary.”

If Jennifer is on one end of the prepping/survivalist spectrum, Sharon Ross is on the other.  

Ross is the owner of the website Afrovivalist, a platform she uses to teach others about everything from off-grid living to emergency preparedness to how to purchase large swaths of land. 

She worked for the state of Oregon for over 11 years on various emergency response teams and said she was a “unicorn” in the world of survivalists when she started. 

“It’s picked up and there are more women and men of color getting into the swing of things and understanding that I’m not the weirdo,” Ross said. “I’m the one who has a little bit of foresight.” 

She said after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she began by simply stocking up on food with a long shelf life, and then she began attending meetups and outdoor groups in Oregon to shore up her skills. 

In 2012, Ross started to buy property. She found a 20-acre piece of land in eastern Washington, which then blossomed into owning 160 acres of different parcels in the area. Today, she lives on a 66-acre compound outside Goldendale, Washington, where just 0.03% of the population is Black. She lives alone with her cats, chickens, and her dog Spike, a Mastiff-Boxer-terrier mix “who is not nice to others,” she notes. 

Ross gets Wi-Fi via Starlink, which she powers from generators that charge her solar power stations. Her water comes from two 275-gallon tanks. Her heat comes from a wood stove, and she heats water from a heater submerged inside the tanks. She can start a fire without matches and snare or hunt a rabbit using a crossbow or slingshot. 

Like Pilkington and other Black women survivalists, Ross also believes in being armed and educated on how to use a gun. 

“I think it’s very important nowadays for brown people, in general, to be locked and loaded, and up and ready for something, because unfortunately, now that this new president is in, I’m feeling the same way I did when he first was in, and that was a little bit of fear,” said Ross, who added that she even walks around on her property “packing.” 

Que, who also would speak with Capital B only on the condition that she not be fully identified, is the administrator for the private Facebook group the Tubman Survival Academy: Black Survivalists and Preppers. She lives in the Washington, D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, and self-identifies as a queer woman. She said she believes her community is under a dire threat by the Trump administration.

“My ‘ministry’ is basically teaching Black people, with an emphasis on queer people and the trans community, how to defend themselves. They don’t want them defending themselves. They want to be able to bully without fear for their lives,” she said. “So he [Trump] had so many executive orders against queer people, and I’m queer, and so once the state allows for legislation against a community, then the citizens will start to carry out aggression against that community.” 

When it comes to survivalism, Que said, it’s not necessarily just about the physical tools but also the mental flexibility of being able to shift one’s thinking to leave a place where you’re secure and find safety elsewhere.

“You can’t really be a survivalist and say, ‘I’m planning to stay at home.’ Because guess what? Everybody fucking plans to stay at home,” Que said. 

“It is part of our history”

Larry Brown, chapter president of the Bass Reeves Gun Club, the founding chapter of the National African American Gun Association (NAAGA), said that since 2020, between the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, the group’s 1,300-member Facebook page is now made up of about 35% Black women.

“One of the things we teach in our new member’s course is the history of us and guns, and how we have used them to defend ourselves in the past,” Brown said, specifically mentioning the infamous 1921 massacre in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Black residents attempted to defend themselves against a mob of white vigilantes. The town was all but burned to the ground, and 300 Black residents died.

“We want to make sure that people understand it’s not just the negative portrayal they see in the news. There was a long, rich history of us using guns to truly defend ourselves against racist violence,” Brown said. 

Martina Morale, curatorial and special exhibitions director at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, said the history of Black people as survivalists dates back to a few notable people and groups. 

“Obviously, in addition to Harriet Tubman and her survivalism skills that allowed her to be a conductor on the [Underground] Railroad, there was a group of homesteaders in Louisiana, and this was after the 1862 Homestead Act,” said Morale, adding that there were also the Maroon communities, self-liberated slaves who took refuge in the Louisiana marshes, away from slave-holders and slave catchers. 

A precursor to modern-day Black survivalism can also be found in the late 1960s and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale at Merritt College in Oakland, California, Morale said. 

Using their Ten-point Program, the Panthers instituted dozens of Programs of Survival — free breakfasts for school children, free sickle cell screenings, a news service. Many of those programs were championed by Black women, including gun ownership and safety education. 

For some Black women, survivalism is less about living in a bunker and protecting themselves from civil unrest and more about sharing information and building a strong community. 

Kashana Cauley is the author of the novel The Survivalists, the story of a Black woman lawyer in New York City who gives up her career to move in with her doomsday prepper boyfriend. Cauley said growing up in Wisconsin, her parents were always big on staying prepared — whether it was for an ice storm, a tornado, or a thunderstorm. But, she said, there was also a feeling of being prepared as Black people living in a predominantly white community and with a government that wouldn’t prioritize their needs. 

Cauley said the current rollbacks and attacks on federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are evidence of a government that doesn’t support Black people. Survivalism, she said, may be more about building a community than living off the grid or being armed.

“I’ve never just seen it as a bag and a gun. I’ve always seen it as, who can you depend on in the community? How can you help your neighbor, and how can they help you? And what ties can you form in order to get through whatever the United States has to throw at you,” Cauley said. 

“I think this is a great time, unfortunately, for Black folks — Black women, in particular — to look at these institutions that have decided that they don’t have our backs and go, ‘What do we need?’ And how can we pool with the folks who are in our corner to get that? And, yeah, I think on some level, that does look like survivalism,” she said. 

As Pilkington walked around her Redfern campground, near South Pittsburg, Tennessee, an AK-47 slung over her shoulder and her boots sinking into the deep red Volunteer State mud, she said she believes that in times of unrest, Black women should be tapping into their inner Harriet Tubman.

“Harriet was a liberator. I see what we’re doing as walking away from this system as liberating and freeing. I am more free now in this moment than a lot of people,” Pilkington said. “Freedom’s serious. It’s a hell of a drug.”

Clarification: The Bass Reeves Gun Club, the founding chapter of the National African American Gun Association, reports its 1,300-member Facebook page is now made up of about 35% Black women. An earlier version of this story gave the percentage as of January.