On its surface, the so-called “Research Triangle Region,” formed by North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, seems an unlikely place to find a minority community living in fear. But news of the February 10 shooting deaths of three young Arab-American Muslims moved like an electric current through North Carolina’s Muslim communities. It was a shock for Chapel Hill, a community best known for its university, basketball team, and progressive politics.

Mirroring what groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations believe are national trends, residents I spoke with said that even before the shooting, anti-Muslim sentiment had grown progressively noisier in the Triangle. This was particularly true after Muslims had been invited to host a weekly call to prayer at Duke’s chapel, which was opposed in January by popular Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. Then, on February 10, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha—Barakat and Yusor were married; Razan was Yusor’s sister—were shot, assassination-style, inside their apartment by a neighbor, Craig Hicks. Police said the shooting was the result of an “ongoing dispute over parking,” touching a raw nerve among Muslims across the United States.

The news, understandably, hit particularly hard in Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, where members of the Muslim community, which includes Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans, traded text messages in the aftermath of the shootings. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Barakat was a second-year graduate student, the news was met with horror. At nearby Duke University, where Muslim students and staff had recently been the target of threats, following January’s call to prayer incident, the university’s imam, Adeel Zeb, said security was immediately increased.

Since the shootings, Muslims have looked for ways to honor the legacies of the three young people. Art projects, outreach, and a continuation of the charitable work that Barakat and the Abu-Salha sisters were known to take part in have all been started, including a “Feed Their Legacy” food drive that collected more than 170,000 cans of food and raised more than $20,000.

Beyond tributes, however, lies a new fear for personal safety. Some young men posted on Facebook about the need to keep guns in their homes for personal protection. Other residents told me they have changed their personal routines, such as no longer going out alone after dark. The day after the shootings, some Muslim parents kept their children home from school.

“If I hear somebody behind me, I’ll turn around and see who it is,” said Zeb. He said that, after the shootings, additional campus security was requested for students heading to and leaving from Muslim group events.

Taiyyaba Qureshi, a Triangle-area civil-rights lawyer, said talk about acquiring guns for personal protection is a “natural reaction” to the shootings. “That’s normal that people would want to defend themselves,” Qureshi said. “I'm a little more cautious when I'm getting out of my car, walking to my front steps.”

Dr. Salahuddin Muhammad, an associate imam at As Salaam Islamic Center, a predominantly African-American mosque in Raleigh, said that their members have become more security conscious. He added, however, that his community has been dealing with bigotry for generations. “Muslim brothers and sisters across the country are getting to feel what we've been dealing with for a long time,” Muhammad said. African-American Muslims find themselves doubly targeted. Shamira Lukomwa, president of the U.N.C. Muslim Student Association and a Ugandan-American, said she had already been reflecting on bigotry before the shootings, because of racially charged battles over “Silent Sam,” a statue of a Confederate soldier on the U.N.C. campus; the renaming of Saunders Hall, an on-campus building named after a U.N.C. trustee who many historians believe, in the 19th century, was a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan; and “other campus responses to the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.”