by Trymaine Lee
CLEVELAND — When Lesley Green was a little girl in Houston in the 1960s — just a few decades after the routine lynchings of blacks in the South — her father would go off to work a late-night shift and leave a gun and a pile of bullets behind.
If any strangers came looking for trouble, he told Green and her sister, you blast them into the stars.
Nobody ever came looking. But even as an 11-year-old, learning to shoot a gun she could barely lift, Green said she recognized the important lesson her father was teaching her about being black in America: it’s a dangerous world out there, and neither the government nor the police are likely be there to save you if trouble decides to make a visit.
“There’s some fiery rhetoric that some would say is incendiary racist rhetoric from the White House,” Green said on a recent evening, sitting in her living room sipping British tea from her finest tea set and nibbling on marble pound cake, cheese and crackers. “White supremacy groups are kind of feeling emboldened.”
And so Green, a grandmother, is now in the market for a handgun.
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