Today, just two days after the family and friends of Nolan Wells laid him to rest in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, attendees at the 116th NAACP annual convention in Chicago will hear the preliminary findings of an independent autopsy conducted on the 18-year-old’s body. Former NFL start Colin Kaepernick’s organization funded the independent autopsy.
And now, according to right-wing influencers like Sarah J. Fields and her musty hordes, the fact that attorney Ben Crump and the NAACP leadership has chosen this setting to make the announcement somehow proves the findings will be suspect or fraudulent.
Fields, who has been relentlessly obsessed wit the Wells case, wrote: “If the independent autopsy found evidence of foul play, then why wait until the NAACP Convention to announce it? Why turn a death investigation into a political spectacle? The timing proves they probably found nothing and are exploiting Nolan for attention.”
According to her logic, such as it is, if the independent autopsy really found evidence of foul play or murder, then Crump should have personally handed over the findings to law enforcement so they could identify suspects, secure warrants, and make arrest. Ohhh, what a privilege it is to have such faith that the criminal justice system will respond swiftly and impartially to your family or community concerns in the pursuit of simple justice.
Attorney Crump doesn’t have tochoose between providing evidence to investigators and informing the public. Attorneys can do both. And these right-wing loud mouths don’t know whether Crump’s team has already shared information with investigators or provided them an opportunity to receive the independent autopsy before today’s press conference.
And did it ever occur to these people to question why GENERATIONS of Black folks are skeptical of the “official story?”
After centuries of ongoing racist terrorism and failure to prosecute our serial murderers, we have learned that we cannot trust local authorities to thoroughly investigate the deaths of our loved ones. For example, during the lynching era, it was not uncommon for the deaths of black men to be ruled as suicides to cover up murders by white mobs and police officers. The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, based at Northeastern University, has been compiling a database of lynchings and other forms of anti-black murder and has documented the trend of declaring black lynchings to be suicides stretching as far back as the 1930s. In dozens of cases, a public figure, police officer, coroner or jury deemed the deaths of Black victims to be suicides and not lynchings or extralegal murders.
Given this history, Black communities and civil rights leaders know good and well that the only way to force law enforcement to move on cases like this is to turn on some bright-ass lights, get on the stage, roll the cameras and say, “Look at what our independent investigation reveals.”
We know that an independent autopsy doesn’t produce arrest warrants, not can a private pathologist prosecute anybody. The autopsy will tell us about any injuries, cause of death, and let us know whether the physical evidence is consistent with whatever the Mississippi police and Nolan’s friends have reportedly said went down on that July Fourth excursion to Horn Island. All this matters because before there was even an official cause and manner of death, the police reported that Nolan had drowned and there was no evidence of foul play.
Nolan’s parents didn’t buy that explanation. So naturally, they commission an independent autopsy because . . . a body of water . . . a boat . . . a group of white folks . . . a dead Black teenager . . . Mississippi . . . the same state where Emmett Till’s beaten and mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. I mean, c’mon. These are not exactly the ingredients of a story any Black parent should accept on faith. Especially since more than a dozen Black men have been found dead in disputed hangings and drownings over the past year.
We have questions that need answers: What happened on that boat? How did Nolan get separated from the group? Why did they leave him behind on that island? He was the only Black person among hundreds of people so how did they not notice he was missing? Who was the last person to see him alive? What time was that? Why were his keys and phone with other people? What about the deleted text messages? Has anybody verified the story about the girl he was supposedly staying behind to meet?
Listen, I think its perfectly reasonable for us to suspect that an independent autopsy may have produced something significant enough for attorney Crump to present today. I honestly do not believe that a high-profile lawyer is gonna take the time to assemble grieving parents a couple of days after the funeral, summon the NAACP’s national leadership and a room full of journalists if there’s nothing worth discussing.
Now, I’m not suggesting that what we will hear is proof of murder. It could be a number of findings. Maybe we’ll hear that injuries on Nolan’s body don’t line up with an accidental drowning or the friends’ reported timeline. Maybe we’ll hear that trauma occurred before death or he was incapacitated before he entered the water. Or maybe the findings will show that a drowning occurred but the cause of death is indeterminate.
And for the right-wing assholes questioning the setting for this announcement, they’ve never cared about what happens at an NAACP convention. They don’t support the organization or its mission. So, I don’t know why they have something to say now about the convention’s schedule, agenda, or etiquette. This ain’t no publicity stunt or grift. Those of us who know a little something about civil-rights history and the history of the organization’s annual meetings, we recognize this morning’s announcement as a strategic exercise of public accountability.
Nolan’s family and our civil rights leaders are not trying to let this be another case where evidence gets ignored, or the official narrative harden before all the facts are known. Public attention may be the only leverage the Wells family possesses. And the NAACP was founded and exists, in part, because we cannot depend on local institutions to investigate racial violence impartially. Not to mention, we’re living in Donald Trump’s crooked-ass America where white supremacy is being scrubbed from historical narratives and just about every law, policy, or institution set up to protect Black folks is either being dismantled, defunded, or bullied into silence.
The NAACP has already adopted a resolution that demands local, state and federal authorities to “conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into Wells’ disappearance and death.” Money has also been put up behind the demand for answers. Rev. Al Sharpton, Tyler Perry, and NFL Hall of Famer Terrell Owens have offered a total reward of $125,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction. And so announcing the findings at the NAACP convention today will place institutional power behind this demand for truth, create a public record, and make it harder for the truth to be buried with young Nolan Wells.
At the end of the day, these right-wing grievance goblins desperately want the independent autopsy to find nothing. They don’t give a shit about a Black teenager’s dignity. They want an uncomplicated story that says yet another Black youth made a poor decision, he drowned, and he must be blamed for causing his own death. They want to be able to say, “See! Nothing suspicious here.” They want Nolan’s corpse to exonerate whiteness.
So today, we should listen carefully and wait for the facts about what his body reveals about what contributed to his death. This press conference won’t solve the case, but it will make damned sure our unanswered questions are not asked quietly or ignored.
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