One year ago, Maj Toure founded Black Guns Matter,  a gun safety workshop in a North Philadelphia community center. Now he’s in the midst of a nationwide tour, teaching in schools about de-escalation techniques and local gun laws, taking any and all questions.

Toure, who grew up in Philadelphia, is a celebrity on Breitbart.com, he has read Mein Kampf three times, and feels like an heir to Pan-African awareness, as reported in The Philadelphia Citizen.

For him, black consciousness and patriotism are aligned.

In high school, he found friends among the nerds playing Yugioh and chess, and the dealers slinging crack and pills. Going between, navigating contradictions, Toure became a protector.

Outside of school, in the poorer, blacker parts of Philadelphia that inherited the patriots’ contradictions, Toure found heroes in Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and Harriet Tubman, all of whom—like those earlier patriots—took freedom and firearms in hand.

Hence, Black Guns Matter, an effort to bring informed gun ownership to African Americans, and with it, an enduring defense of black freedom.

Read more about the founder of BSM in The Philadelphia Citizen.