Northeast on U.S. Route 29, through the Alabama night, a Chevrolet Silverado carried two parents toward the thing no parent permits the mind to name. Sixty miles lay between Troy, Alabama, and Tuskegee University. Larry Johnson pressed the gas harder. Beside him, as Fairriona Magee reported for The Trace, published by Capital B, Tamika Johnson dimmed her phone’s screen and enlarged the photograph that had reached her: the floor of a campus parking lot, and on it, a boy lying still.
“When I zoomed in and saw it was my baby, I just already knew. But I didn’t tell my husband that because I didn’t want him to wreck.”
A cousin met them at a McDonald’s some 35 miles from home and drove them the rest of the way. It was the couple’s first time on the Tuskegee campus; they crossed its grounds looking for landmarks Tamika had seen only on her phone. They followed blue and red lights until they reached ground cordoned with yellow tape. Hours earlier, hundreds had danced there to music pouring from car radios, cellphones raised like lanterns. Now bullet casings littered the asphalt. Under a large sheet of plastic, something — someone — lay covered.
When the couple announced they were searching for their son, they were pulled aside for questions. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Larry told those who approached. Instead he ran, ducked under the tape, and began to search. At his feet, from beneath the plastic, protruded a pair of black-and-white Nike Air Jordans.
“It’s him, Tamika, it’s Shugga!” Tamika had bought him those sneakers a few weeks before; they still bore their smudges. “He’s gone!” Larry bellowed.
Seventeen casualties, one dead, on the centennial
What the Johnsons found at the tape’s edge was the aftermath of the highest-casualty shooting yet at a historically Black college or university homecoming. Thirteen people were shot at Tuskegee and four others injured in the early hours of Nov. 10, 2024; La’Tavion Johnson, a teenager, was the sole fatality. The shooting fell on the 100th anniversary of the university’s first homecoming — a weekend that, on these campuses, has come to stand for communal hope, freedom and safety.
The arithmetic around his death is stark. The Violence Project counts 280 shooting incidents on American college campuses between 2000 and 2025, and 370 lives lost. And though HBCUs make up only 2 percent of the country’s colleges, 81 percent of homecoming shootings happen on or near their campuses, according to a recent report by Everytown for Gun Safety — whose nonpolitical arm helps fund The Trace, a disclosure the newsroom makes itself.
A boy born into the era of school shootings
Tamika Johnson gave birth in a Montgomery hospital on Aug. 18, 2006, and held for the first time an almond-skinned, bright-eyed boy whose name she and Larry signed in black letters: La’Tavion Johnson. He was about eight months old on April 16, 2007, when a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student shot two fellow students around 7:15 a.m. and killed 30 more over the following three hours before turning the gun on himself — still the deadliest shooting on a U.S. college campus. By the time La’Tavion learned to crawl, the country was entering a new era; by his adolescence, thousands of school shootings had taken place nationwide, and assault-style rifles had become commonplace in attacks on schools.
HBCU communities have absorbed much of this rise largely outside the national spotlight. Last year alone, homecoming shootings struck South Carolina State University, Alcorn State University, Jackson State University and Lincoln University of Pennsylvania.
Overworked and overlooked
Students at these institutions describe a generation taught to live with fire. “For a lot of people who come to college, it’s a gateway or an escape from what’s going on at home; it’s supposed to be us moving on to another path in life,” Jaevon Sutton-Rayfield, a senior at Lincoln University, told The Trace. “When you’re hearing about these atrocities and stuff happening around us, it’s going to lower morale and hurt the reputation, even though we don’t have anything to do with it.” Liani Figueroa, a Lincoln junior who left a homecoming celebration 30 minutes before someone was fatally shot on campus, put it more bluntly: “our generation is desensitized to this stuff,” because nothing is actively being done. Yet they see a way out. “Prevention starts with education, especially for the youth,” said Trey Walker, a Lincoln senior, objecting to those who see the festivities on TikTok and mistake HBCUs for “party schools.” “We are so much more than that.”
Researchers point to money before gates. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Education found public HBCUs had been underfunded by at least $12 billion across 16 states. “HBCUs are operating with half the budget of most [predominantly white institutions],” said James E. Jones V, an HBCU alumnus whose doctoral dissertation analyzed three HBCU shootings; the first departments cut, he noted, are IT, security and police, since they do not produce revenue. Private Black universities like Tuskegee run on far smaller endowments, often in communities marked by decades of structural disinvestment — soil in which violence grows. Some universities have answered by closing campuses or restricting access. Jones finds that understandable and insufficient: “A lot of people say that HBCUs are underserved. No, I think that we are overworked, and overlooked in a lot of ways.”
Hours before his parents rushed down that same highway, La’Tavion had driven it too, riding with friends to a celebration known for opening its arms to the whole community, students or not. “There’s so much enthusiasm around homecoming, because as Black people in this country, our spaces to hang out are so limited,” said David A. Canton, an HBCU alumnus and professor of African American Studies at the University of Florida. “There’s line dancing, cookouts, spades. And for many of us, after that weekend we have to go to spaces where we are unwanted or where we are struggling. I love going because it’s Black joy.”