When I was 9 years old, I was glued to a documentary series on PBS called Eyes on the Prize, and particularly a segment featuring Emmett Till, a boy not much older than I was, who was lynched while visiting his Southern relatives. His fate troubled me deeply, and I ran to my father, who was relaxing in his comfortable chair in our rumpus room. “Dad,” I asked, “did you ever know of anyone who was lynched?”
“All the time,” he replied. And he left it at that.
Emmett Till’s story became a permanent part of my imagination. It was the first time I’d contemplated the weight of that narrative within Black consciousness in America: how violence has shaped our existence and limited our freedom. Over time, I understood how outdoor spaces became exclusive, unwelcoming and even deadly.
I believe that we can hold multiple truths at one time. My parents’ story is not merely one of pain and peril growing up in the Jim Crow South; they went on to lead remarkable lives in California, creating a 14-acre hobby and recreation farm with abundant fruit trees, a flourishing garden and a swimming pool in the rolling oak-studded hills near Clear Lake. It was an outdoor refuge — a place of respite and celebration. Their spirit of can-do determination and hospitality was part of a larger tradition in nature for many Black families. Resistance and agency are present in nature, and my parents wove those qualities into everyday life — tending animals, tilling the soil, sharing the land and its bountiful harvests with friends and family.
Yet safety and comfort have remained persistent themes in my personal journey outdoors, and in the conversations I have with the people in Outdoor Afro, the organization I founded in 2009 that reconnects Black Americans to nature. Even today, at trailheads with cheerful interpretive signage and around the glow of campfires, the question still surfaces, sometimes quietly, sometimes with real urgency: Will we be safe here?
I’ve learned over the years that feeling unsafe in the outdoors goes beyond the threat of physical violence. Discomfort can arrive with a lingering stare or pointed, awkward attention — perhaps a question about what you’re doing in that particular place.
My first experience with this came at a youth church event. We’d gathered at a city park in an affluent, predominantly white hillside neighborhood in Oakland, California, and I remember the squeals of excitement as we explored the playground, surrounded by a stunning canopy of redwood trees. The air was cool, and the afternoon felt made for children to run free. Then, as the sun began to fade, a heavy scrutiny settled on us, cast our way by a group of nearby adults. Nothing was said; nothing needed to be. I knew it was time to go. That was the first time I understood that some of the most consequential conversations outdoors occur in silence.
THERE WAS A TIME, not so long ago, when going to a park, swimming in the pool, enjoying a beach or having a picnic could be legally — sometimes violently — prohibited if you were Black. Lists of “Sundown Towns” — places where Black people carefully timed their road trips and visits to avoid lingering after nightfall — were well circulated: real barriers that shaped generations of memory and habit.
Before the Great Migration, the vast majority of Black Americans lived in rural communities in the South. Many pursued nature tenaciously, even creating their own destinations. Places like Idlewild, Michigan, Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard and Lincoln Hills, Colorado, drew people from all over, serving as hubs of enterprise, recreation and community life where families knew they could recreate free from the weight of racism. Overnight inns, campgrounds, guides, outfitters, programming for children: These communities built infrastructure that worked, and they thrived.
During this period, the Negro Motorist Green Book, or The Green Book, was an essential pocket travel companion for Black Americans. It was created by Victor H. Green, a New York postal worker who leveraged his professional network and knowledge to circulate it widely. The Green Book, updated regularly, meticulously listed safe havens along interstates: overnight accommodations, dining, shopping, entertainment and outdoor destinations that were safe. It ceased publication around 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed and its publisher believed — and hoped — that the need for such a guide had finally passed.
But feelings of being unwelcome persisted; some families chose to stay closer to home rather than test uncertain territory. As Black Americans migrated in large numbers to Western and Northern cities, many of those old safe enclaves faded, were sold or disappeared through eminent domain.
The uncertainty over safety outdoors, especially far from one’s own community or in remote public lands, remained.
In 2020, I went on my first dove hunt in the sweltering heat of California’s Central Valley and got lost. It was a season of heightened social and racial tensions across the country, and there I was, wandering through waist-high grass, surrounded by people who did not look like me, many with loaded firearms.
I eventually stumbled into a field where a man met me with a hard, measured gaze. Goosebumps rose on my arms, and I moved on quickly. My first instinct was that I was unwelcome because I was Black.
I have turned that moment over many times since, now that I have more years of public-land hunting experience behind me, and I think my instinct was only partially right. That man had likely done his research, risen before dawn, driven a long way and hiked in to stake out a prime hunting spot. Then I appeared, aimlessly wandering into his carefully chosen ground. His cold frustration may have had less to do with who I was than with the competitive, careful nature of the sport.
As I have continued to hunt, fish, hike and camp on public lands, I’ve learned that seasoned outdoorspeople often guard stretches of river where fish are biting, the ridge where the elk are, the still flat on Bureau of Land Management land with the perfect morning view. None of them are freely shared with strangers. The outdoors can be quietly competitive, and there’s a persistent concern that too much attention on a good spot will eventually diminish it. That attitude can read as coldness or hostility to someone new, but it doesn’t always carry the meaning it appears to carry.
There is a quiet wondering that surfaces when there is no one around who shares your history, humor and way of reading the world.
I have found some grounding in that understanding. Many moments of feeling unwelcome have nothing to do with identity and everything to do with the competitive spirit that runs through outdoor culture, and in the real safety considerations involved in sharing space when firearms are present.
There’s another dimension to the safety question, one that goes beyond what strangers might say or do. Growing up in Oakland, my experience was also shaped by places like Joaquin Miller Park, where the people hiking in the hills above the bay reflected the diversity of the city itself. That felt natural to me, and right — a very different feeling from that childhood afternoon in the park, and a reminder that place and context shape the outdoor experience as much as anything else.
It was when I ventured farther afield that things shifted again. At 20, I mountaineered with Outward Bound, the only Black woman in my group. Trekking for miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, I often felt alone. There is a quiet wondering that surfaces when no one around you shares your history, humor and way of reading the world. Yet when fear pinned me to a mountainside one night, my instructor’s simple advice — “trust your feet” — sparked the courage I needed to keep climbing toward the summit. It made me realize that feeling isolated can coexist with being supported.
In many ways, Outdoor Afro is doing what The Green Book did for an earlier generation. Victor Green believed that Black people deserved to move through the world freely and with dignity, and he built a tool to make that possible. We are building something similar: drawing a living map from the stories, experiences and relationships that help people navigate unfamiliar places confidently. While generations before us handed down painful memories of being excluded, we now have the opportunity to create and share stories of connection, confidence and joy.
Every Black person who steps onto a trail today, casts a line for the first time, wakes to birdsong in a tent, carries something forward. They carry the legacy of those who built Idlewild and Lincoln Hills.
Every invitation, every trip, every first outdoor experience expands what the next generation believes to be possible.
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This article appeared in the August 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The conversations we don’t have about safety outdoors.”
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