Maj Toure, of Black Guns Matter, said he was both using the conservative movement and being used by it: "If you can’t be used, you’re useless." | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Politics New CPAC stars: Black gun rights activists Despite strong support for gun control in African-American communities, pro-gun conservatives see a chance to make inroads.

OXON HILL, Md. — For a few minutes at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday afternoon, the message was more Malcolm X than William F. Buckley.

Sporting a red hoodie, his hair in cornrows, Maj Toure touted his group, Black Guns Matter. "We go where there's high violence, high crime, high gun control — high slave mentalities, to be perfectly honest,” he said, “and inform urban America about their human right, as stated in the Second Amendment, to defend their life."


A besuited interviewer seated on stage next to Toure told him, "You don’t look or sound like your stereotypical Second Amendment advocate."

Indeed, Toure could not have looked more out of place at an annual conservative-activist confab known for drawing throngs of clean-cut, mostly white, young conservatives in drab suits. That was precisely the point.

Opinion polling shows that black Americans view guns more negatively and are more supportive of gun control than whites and Hispanics. But some anecdotal evidence suggests that blacks have shown greater interest in gun ownership in recent years, fueled in large part by the rise of President Donald Trump, who has energized white nationalists and presided over a period of growing racial tension.

Ironically, conservatives have seen that dynamic as an opportunity to make inroads with black voters on gun rights. And CPAC has pounced.

Along with Toure, this year’s CPAC conference features appearances by at least two other black gun rights activists: Antonia Okafor, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality.

The prominent billing is no accident, said Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC. “We are making an intentional statement that all people deserve the protection of their Second Amendment rights," he said.

Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association, said Trump was one driver of black interest in gun rights, along with general anxiety about the state of the world. "They are seeing the uncertainty within society across the board," he said. Smith, who did not participate in CPAC, founded his group in 2015, hoping he might attract a few hundred members. Membership quickly climbed into the thousands, and it tripled in the months following Trump’s inauguration. He said the group now has about 30,000 members.

Smith said that 60 percent of his members are black women, who often feel the most vulnerable to violent crime.

Okafor, 29, who followed Toure on CPAC’s mainstage, became a gun rights activist after being sexually assaulted as a child. As a graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2015, she became an advocate of concealed-carry laws as a deterrent against campus sexual assault.

Though Okafor said she approaches her activism from the perspective of women’s empowerment — she is featured on her website posing with guns in a cocktail dress — she said her black identity also figures into her views. “As a black woman who grew up without a father, I was always especially aware that my safety was in my own hands," she said in an interview ahead of her appearance on a panel that also featured Parkland High School shooting survivor Kyle Kashuv and Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.).

In an interview following his appearance, Toure said he began proselytizing about gun rights in inner cities after seeing too many friends locked up on avoidable gun possession charges. Beyond gun control, he said his mission was to extend conservative values to urban communities, arguing that the blockbuster movie “Black Panther” depicted conservative values in action in the fictional African land of Wakanda. “Think about it,” he said. “Border security; we’re working on our own thing; we don’t really bang with too many outsiders.”

He said he was both using the conservative movement and being used by it. “If you can’t be used, you’re useless,” he said.

Toure also said he wanted to continue the legacy of Malcolm X, the radical black nationalist who was assassinated in 1965. “I want to pick up from where post-Mecca Malcolm was,” Toure said, referring to the activist’s pilgrimage to the holy Muslim city, which led him to express more conciliatory views on race following. “Try not to get to murdered and pick it up and try to take it further.”

But first, he was planning to party Thursday night with Donald Trump Jr., whom he had just ran into in the lobby after a direct message exchange on Twitter. “We’re going to chop it up,” he said.