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It was common during those times to open carry however. It's just that concealed carry is much, much more common now. Quite a bit of that has to do with people's attitudes toward arms. It's much easier to not upset people if they don't know you are carrying.

And I can tell you from personal experience, even if you are printing, vanishingly few people notice. When I quit my last job, told my manager I had carried every day for the last years. He had never noticed.

Conceal carry restrictions have a long history of being created and selectively enforced against the black population.

Example:

During Reconstruction, several states, especially Southern states, passed laws banning concealed carry. These laws were often aimed at disarming African-Americans, and though they did not explicitly say so because of the 14th Amendment, were not to be >enforced against whites.

Rivers H. Buford, associate justice of the Florida Supreme Court, said that the Florida law banning concealed carry, "[t]he original Act of 1893 ... was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers ... and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. ... [I]t is a safe guess to assume that more than 80% of the white men living in the rural sections of Florida have violated this statute. It is also a safe guess to say that not more than 5% of the men in Florida who own pistols and repeating rifles have ever applied to the Board of County Commissioners for a permit to have the same in their possession and there has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it >has been generally conceded to be in contravention to the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested."[11]

In fact, Florida was not the only such state to ban the carriage of arms by blacks, nor was it the most explicit. The 1834 Tennessee Constitution, 1836 Arkansas Constitution, as well as the 1838 Florida constitution, stated "That the free white men of this State shall have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence."

This continued into the modern day, with Ronald Reagan and the NRA supporting and implementing the Mulford Act specifically to illegalize and target the Black Panthers and other black communities, who were exercising their rights to arm themselves to protect against police brutality and racists. Unfortunately the arming and legal targeting of the Black Panthers for that arming was very likely an FBI operation.

There were some concealed gun control laws in old west towns that were implemented against whites as well, but even then, only selectively against those the local Law Enforcement didn't like.