Before the fatal shootings of three Black residents in Jacksonville, Florida, over the weekend, the gunman, a young white man with swastikas painted on his rifle, pulled into a parking lot at Edward Waters University and began putting on tactical gear. Students reported him, a campus police officer approached and he sped off in his vehicle having never identified himself, the Associated Press reports. The shootings dredged up memories of another infamous racist attack in the city nearly 60 years ago known as Ax Handle Saturday. In that incident, a mob of Ku Klux Klan members armed with ax handles chased and beat 17-year-old Nat Glover after he left his part-time job washing dishes at a local diner. Glover, who graduated from and later served as president of Edward Waters, is saddened by the shootings and also the gunman’s appearance on the campus of his alma mater, which was established in 1866 as Florida’s first historically Black college.
“We are just in an environment now that is toxic as it relates to race,” said Glover, also a former Jacksonville sheriff. “This notion of us against them, Black versus white, is being promoted.” While the shootings took place at a Dollar General store in the predominantly Black community of New Town less than a mile (a little over a kilometer) away, the gunman’s earlier appearance at Edward Waters has prompted new fears about public safety for African Americans and the educational institutions that have long served them. It comes amid a spate of recent threats to historically Black colleges and universities nationwide — last year alone, the FBI investigated bomb threats that were made against more than 20 HBCUs in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi.