Grand jury report should not be the end of Nolan Wells investigation, human rights advocate argues

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Every county reports a clearance rate for death investigations, and every county can defend the rate in a budget hearing. Whether anyone believes the finding is a separate question, and no jurisdiction tracks the answer.

Nolan Wells was 18. On July 4th he went to Horn Island, an uninhabited barrier island off the Mississippi coast, with high school friends. He was, according to accounts, the only Black person on the boat and the last one back to it. The others left without him, and his body was found in the water two days later.

Recently, a Jackson County grand jury returned a no true bill after reviewing witness testimony, physical and digital evidence, GPS records and cellphone data. It found insufficient evidence for criminal charges and none of racially motivated wrongdoing.

It also recorded non-fatal bruising on the back of the teenager’s head, of undetermined origin. The state medical examiner and the pathologist the family hired both recorded the cause and manner of death as undetermined.

Mississippi convened the grand jury process, ran it and published the results. It still cannot say how Nolan Xavier Wells died. The process ends there by design. Its obligations ended the day the report was published. How the teenager died is now an orphaned question, belonging to whoever volunteers to pursue it.

History of racial violence

The Equal Justice Initiative has counted more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings of Black people across 20 states between 1877 and 1950, most in daylight, most with local officials condoning what they had not organized. Congress made lynching a federal hate crime in 2022.

My grandfather came home from the First World War still a private. Decades later at Skene, Mississippi in the early 1960s he lent money to white neighbors and asked to be repaid. A mob took him for it. He lived through the night and died within the year. The county charged no one.

Redlining did the same work with paper and left a cleaner file. The federal government graded neighborhoods by race and withheld credit from the ones it marked. Municipalities executed the grades in zoning and investment, and the mortality tables record what followed.

The United Nations Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes asks a narrow question, and the narrowness is the point. It sets aside announced intentions and asks whether a state inflicts on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s destruction in part, and whether officials protect the pattern while it runs. My doctoral research applies the Framework to United States’ spatial policy and evidences genocide by attrition against African Descendants of American Slavery, or ADAS (Rosenberg, 2012). The Framework is the United Nations’ instrument rather than mine, and anyone who disputes the finding may apply it to the same record and publish a different one.

The serious objection deserves its strongest form. Fair housing in 1968, hate crime statutes after it, the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act closing a gap the earlier laws left open, and here a grand jury convening, reviewing and publishing within 10 weeks.

Then look at what gets counted. The FBI records the hate crimes police agencies choose to report. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, which asks victims directly, counted roughly 246,900 hate crime victimizations a year between 2005 and 2019. When a repair leaves its own measurement voluntary, enforcement falls to whoever holds the file.

Byron D’Andra Orey, who studies racial trauma at Jackson State University, told Mississippi Today in July people were reading the case of Nolan Wells as another event in which Black bodies do not matter, and that repeated exposure keeps the cycle turning. He is measuring one end of the rope, and the other end goes unmeasured.

Resilience debt, a term I introduced in work now under submission, accumulates where the harm was absorbed and surfaces in wealth, mortality and environmental exposure. The rehumanization deficit accumulates in the population trained to administer it, the population taught to look away. No measurement instrument exists for it yet, and I say so before a reviewer says it for me.

A budget office should care about the second deficit for a practical reason. A population convinced a group’s disadvantage is the group’s own doing will withhold the money required to change the structure, and the money is precisely what the first deficit needs before it can be addressed. The second gates the first. What is being asked for is the recovery of a capacity every working democracy requires: the ability to see the people it governs. This one is measurably losing it. Berwick Mahdi Davenport, who directs the Human Solidarity Project, has spent three decades doing the repair in rooms rather than in journals. He puts it in one line: “The inner work and the outer work are not separable.”

Calls for independent review

Institutions can be retrained on a schedule, and I have done it. Seattle Public Schools came to the work after community uproar over its treatment of Black boys, which is why the policy exists and why it reads as a response to harm rather than as an equity initiative. The district retained my firm to author its anti-racism policy and the superintendent procedures beneath it.

I built them from more than 50 focus groups and interviews reaching every population the district served, on a peer-to-peer method I adapted from the door-to-door canvass W. E. B. Du Bois and Isabel Eaton ran for “The Philadelphia Negro” in 1899. 

The policy carries 100 deliverables, each assigned to a role and each carrying a key performance indicator, because awareness training never reaches a referral and an assignment does. Seattle adopted it in 2020, and King County, the city of Seattle and Washington State Charter Schools adopted it afterward.

Here is the same logic outside a school district.

Governance leaders hold the authority this requires, and they hold it alone. Authorize an independent death review board able to order a second examination and required to publish within 90 days, triggered whenever a county closes a Black resident’s death as accidental or undetermined in a jurisdiction with a documented history of racial terror.

Assign the deadline to one named official. A review lacking a date and a name is a press release. Publish charging and conviction rates for racially motivated violence county by county, because those figures now are located inside aggregate crime reports where prosecutors, chiefs and voters cannot see the pattern training a jury. Pair the board with a standing process open to residents and to the staff running these systems, because a record without a room leaves the second deficit untouched. The ordinance takes authority which coroners, sheriffs and prosecutors hold alone today. Set against what those offices already pay in litigation reserves, consent decrees and the recruiting costs of a workforce residents distrust, it is cheap.

Funders can put the independent examination, the investigators and the counsel within a family’s reach inside 48 hours, so that reaching one stops depending on a stranger with a foundation.

Human services agencies can build a trauma response activating for a whole community rather than one household. Planners can enter documented racial terror sites into the permanent land, title and zoning record instead of onto a plaque. Corporate responsibility officers can require any public safety claim about these counties to rest on data the described community validated. And community advocates can keep their own registry of contested deaths, because a community holding its own evidence stops waiting for permission to be believed.

Because a county coroner, a district attorney, a public health director and a community land trust already hold between them every authority the ordinance needs, a county can draft it with the offices it has.

The structure underneath it, acknowledgment of harm, accountability for the decisions producing it and transformation of the systems carrying it forward, is the spatial reconciliation framework from my doctoral research. It is published, it belongs to the field, and a county attorney can draft from it without asking me for anything. The work is at nikkalemons.com.

Simple request of Nolan Wells family

Mamie Till-Mobley never asked Mississippi for permission. Her son came north in a box locked under the seal of the state, and she took a crowbar to it.

Seventy years on, a family on the Gulf Coast asked for something smaller. Tell us what you found. Mississippi answered recently in the grand jury report, and the answer was undetermined.

A state willing to say so on a deadline, under a name, and then keep working, earns the civic trust it will need the next time it asks anyone to believe anything. A state stopping here teaches its residents the record is negotiable, and everyone who lives there inherits the lesson. The evidence has arrived. The authorization is what remains.

Nikka Lemons is a community scholar practitioner, an urban planning scholar, human rights researcher and governance strategist. She is founder and principal consultant of Azimu Group and founder and CEO of Just Society Technologies, which builds data and research tools enabling state and municipal governance readiness. She is former deputy chief of operations at St. Louis Public Schools and former vulnerable populations unit manager at King County, Washington. She holds a doctorate in urban planning and public policy from the University of Texas at Arlington. www.nikkalemons.com

Courtesy of Mississippi Today