What Happened to Nolan Wells?

On September 21, a Jackson County grand jury decided unanimously that there was insufficient evidence in the Nolan Wells death to pursue criminal charges on any party. The death of the young 18-year-old Black college football player is being treated as an accidental drowning by the grand jury, while evidence from the autopsy suggests a more violent story: a story that elucidates another iteration of racist violence against Black youth and the complicity of the capitalist state in shielding this violence to protect a socially and politically ingrained racial hierarchy. 

Nolan Wells was only a teenager in the blue spring period of his life just beginning to bloom, when his life abruptly ended in July on a boat trip to Horn Island. Nolan was doing what any child his age would do: going on trips and enjoying time off from school. Rather than returning home safe to his family, he was found dead amid mystery, conflicting reports, and strong suggestions of violence surrounding his passing. This is the heartwrenching and spiritually exhausting reality for so many Black youth.

The Mississippi grand jury determined that the location and position of Wells’ body were consistent with drowning and refused to investigate other possibilities, although the autopsy report refutes this as a viable conclusion. The three-page autopsy report that was shared by the Wells family lawyer showed there was no water in Wells’ throat, lungs or stomach. The autopsy also revealed injuries of two red-purple contusions on Wells’ scalp. 

The predominantly white friend group that Wells visited the island with had also left him behind on the island just before he went missing. Members of the group stated they left Wells because he was talking to a girl at the time, leaving with Nolan’s phone and leaving the Black teen alone on an island whose residents were characterized as racists.

The death of Nolan Wells is part of a rash of questionable deaths of Black people, including 10 Black people found hanging from trees just over the past year. Then there are incidents like the Alabama Brawl, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, or the murder of Travyon Martin. These incidents are reminiscent of the regular violence and murder of Black people under Jim Crow, a legal system that took away democratic rights of Black people and relied on the extralegal terror of white mobs, the Klan, and the police to maintain that racist system. The Civil Rights Movement broke the back of Jim Crow and ushered in a series of historic changes. Over the past few years, the Trump administration and the Supreme Court have directly attacked the conquests of the Civil Rights Movement, like affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. 

In a political moment of increased polarization that has given rise to right-wing figures like Trump and Charlie Kirk, and the bipartisan backlash against the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, it makes sense that there is a growing concern among Black people that the death of Nolan Wells isn’t being investigated seriously. It is important that we support the efforts of the family to have his death investigated in a serious and thorough way. However, we must not let these efforts create illusions in the capitalist state as an institution that can dispense justice, or the Democratic Party as a party that will fight for our rights. 

That means we have to fight the passivity of the traditional civil rights organizations like the NAACP, which simply fail to mobilize people on an independent basis, but rather toward electing Democrats. In reality, capitalist parties and institutions have always been reluctant to put up a real fight against racism because of the crucial role racism, like all forms of oppression, plays in dividing the working class and intensifying the exploitation of workers, particularly Black workers. If we want to put an end to racist attacks against Black people, we have to build a mass movement against the racist injustices of capitalism using the methods of the working class.