Tryon Palace is excited to welcome back Dr. Antwain K. Hunter to the North Carolina History Center!

Explore the fragile and uncertain realities faced by African Americans navigating freedom. Participants will consider how individuals and communities balanced resistance, adaptation, and hope while living within structures that could shift at any moment. Through historical analysis and discussion, the lecture invites audiences to reflect on how this delicate balance shaped the pursuit of dignity, citizenship, and freedom.

Dr. Hunter participated in our panel discussion following the special preview screening of the PBS docuseries “The American Revolution” in Cullman Hall. He brought his insight and expertise, and he had multiple engaging discussions with audience members during the question and answer session.

Dr. Hunter is a historian and author. He is an assistant professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865, explores the legal and community dynamics of free and enslaved Black people’s firearm use. Hunter highlights how they pragmatically used their weapons in a variety of beneficial ways, including subsistence hunting, self-defense, agricultural labor, and rebellion. Further, individual enslavers—backed by the legislature and county courts—tried to use Black people’s armed labor for their own benefit and protect themselves from perceived threats. This examination of race, firearms, and the law offers a compelling look at the American past and better contextualizes the present.