This week the loved ones of Nolan Xavier Wells, the 18-year-old college football player who went missing while partying with friends on the Fourth of July, learned the body authorities found days later was his. Wells was last seen alive on Horn Island, a sliver of undeveloped land that’s roughly 20 miles from the coast of Alabama, 10 miles from Mississippi and less than a mile wide.
In 1978 Congress designated the barrier island a wilderness area and since then, it has become a popular Gulf Coast hangout for young people.
There is no shelter or drinking water.
The only way to reach it is by boat.
According to Sheriff John Ledbetter of Jackson County, Miss., when the group of friends who brought Wells to the island decided to head back to the mainland, Wells stayed behind, telling them he would catch a ride back later. That was at 4:30 p.m. The teenager was reported missing about eight hours later. Now his family and friends are forced to make the unimaginable transition from celebrating the country’s 250th birthday together to saying goodbye to a young soul who had been set to celebrate his 19th in August.
It’s a heartbreaking story.
No parent should have to bury their child.
What makes Wells’ story particularly difficult are the facts. Not the ones specific to this case, mind you. Local authorities do not suspect foul play and said the complete findings from the investigation are likely weeks away. No, the facts that keep me on edge are the historical ones born in the wilderness in places like Mississippi and Alabama.
The autopsy and coroner’s report will reveal the specific facts regarding what happened to Wells on the Fourth of July. Whatever those details turn out to be, they will be shadowed by the fact that the 18-year-old appears to be the only Black person in any of the video footage from that day. This fact may call to mind the 2023 video footage of a group of white men attacking a lone Black man on a dock in Montgomery, Ala. And that footage itself was shadowed by the early morning recording of a group of white teenagers beating up and intentionally running over a Black man with a pickup truck in 2011 in Jackson, Miss. After that murder — of James Craig Anderson — authorities learned the group had tried to run over other Black people in addition to committing various hate crimes throughout the state.
The South is still the South.
As someone who spent a number of summers visiting family not far from the river where Emmett Till was found murdered in 1955, I know the meaning of this phrase has not changed much over the years. I was visiting a few decades after Till’s death, but my parents were sure to give me that warning before each trip from our home in Michigan.
And while I know that over the past 50 years, changes in federal and state laws have led to seismic shifts in the culture of the Deep South, the historic facts about life for Black people in that part of the country still challenge our trust in the justice system as we wait for details about the death of a young Black man.
We do not need to comb through black-and-white photographs from the Civil Rights Movement to remind us of the ugliness of racial animus in the American South. As the (Mississippian) author William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” President Barack Obama was in office as the young teens who ran over Anderson yelled “white power” during their attack.
So no, while we are in this limbo awaiting information, I wouldn’t expect anyone to assume that Wells’ death was an accident. His family has already hired prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump to push for transparency in the investigation. Why do they want an independent advocate verifying the specific facts? Because they know the historic ones.
“Nolan Wells was a beloved son, teammate and friend who went out to celebrate the Fourth of July and never came home,” Crump said in a statement. “His family deserves answers. They deserve the truth. We will not rest until every fact about what happened to Nolan on Horn Island is brought into the light.”
In addition to supporting the family through the investigation, Crump, who rose to national prominence after the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, is reportedly seeking a separate, unofficial autopsy on Wells’ body. Sadly, burying their baby is not the only weight the Wells family must carry. There is still also the added burden Black families, particularly those in the South, must undertake to ensure the specific facts are not clouded by the historic facts.
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