It was early in the morning, close to Thanksgiving 2006, when ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston, a Black woman, heard the clanking of burglar bars being pried off the door in her Atlanta home. Fearing the worst, Johnston grabbed her “rusty revolver” to defend herself and the place where she had lived for nearly seventeen years. When three men “kicked that door down,” she pulled the trigger. Her one shot was answered with a hail of bullets, thirty-nine of them. Five of which hit the elderly woman.
