Terror in Mississippi

On July 6, the body of 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells was found in the water off Horn Island, on the northwest end of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Wells had been celebrating the Fourth of July with friends before he went missing and was later found dead. 

The case has raised serious questions, chief among them why Mississippi authorities were so quick to rule his death an accidental drowning while doing so little to actually investigate it. That refusal to dig deeper is exactly why his family has now hired attorney Ben Crump and paid to have an independent autopsy performed outside the state, flying his body to Washington, D.C., so a doctor with no ties to Mississippi law enforcement can examine him. 

Black communities across Mississippi, who know this pattern all too well, have been vocal in their criticism. Nolan’s death joins a string of deaths of Black comrades in Mississippi, most recently one-year-old Kohen Wiley, murdered by police after they accused his mother, Vellesiya Wiley, of stealing diapers she had already paid for. Officers responded by firing into her car and killing her son.

Of course, many will say people are jumping to conclusions — that Black comrades are “making it about race” again. But all you have to do is know the history of Mississippi, which reads like a horror novel in the scale of murder committed against the Black proletariat, from chattel slavery to the modern prison industrial complex. Landowners openly threatened the sharecroppers they were exploiting. Any organizing, any resistance, and you’d be sent to Mississippi . 

Advertised lynchings a Mississippi tradition

The Equal Justice Initiative has documented the lynchings of over 581 Black men, women and children in the state alone, not counting the many more simply murdered outright. Terror like this isn’t just an aberration in Mississippi; it’s woven into the fabric of the state.

Take John Hartfield, murdered in 1919 for being accused of assaulting a white woman and for being in a relationship with one. He was shot three times. But he was kept alive and conscious overnight so a mob could lynch him the next day, since advertising lynchings in advance was itself a Mississippi tradition. Hartfield was beaten, hanged, shot well over a thousand times, then burned. Roosevelt Towns and Robert McDaniels were tortured with a blowtorch until they “confessed” to a murder they likely didn’t commit, then shot dead in their chains and burned too.

These crimes went unpunished, and the killing didn’t stop. It continued with Reverend George W. Lee and Lamar Smith, murdered in 1955 for registering Black voters, and with Emmett Till, whose murder the state tried to bury. 

It continued in 1964 with James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three Freedom summer volunteers murdered by Klansmen with local law enforcement’s direct involvement. And it continued with Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith of the White Citizens’s Council, which functioned as a Southern Gestapo running sabotage, informants and killings statewide.

Then there’s the killing the state carries out through its courts instead of its mobs: legal lynching. Willie McGee is the clearest case, executed in Mississippi’s traveling electric chair in 1951 for the alleged rape of a white woman, in a trial so rigged it became known as a legal lynching. 

That’s the same state machinery that opened fire on students at Jackson State University in 1970, killing two young Black men and wounding a dozen more for protesting. And it’s the machinery keeping Mississippi prisons running on the slave labor of incarcerated people today, good for capital and exactly why the ruling class deals with Mississippi so gently, if at all. The state has always been a hub of profit, from “King Cotton” to the prison system it pioneered.

Which brings us back to Nolan Wells. The state’s refusal to investigate his death follows the same script used with Trey Reed, who last year was found hanging from a tree at Delta State, and Raheem Carter, who was found dead and brutalized near Taylorville in 2022. Across Mississippi and the South, Black people are being lynched, and the denial that follows is policy, not incident. That pattern has deepened since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in April, emboldening reactionaries to treat this as open season on Black communities.

Fighting back

So what do we do? We organize and show solidarity with Black comrades carrying the brunt of this violence. We follow Black leadership rather than pushing Black voices to the margins, still one of the movement’s most persistent failures. We educate ourselves on the material conditions Black Mississippians live under, including the deep SNAP (food stamp) cuts that hit the state hard last year. 

Freedom Summer in 1964 is the model: Black and white organizers working together, guided by revolutionaries like Fannie Lou Hamer to understand the material conditions oppressed people were living under, not just the symbolism of the moment.

Only by doing this work can we stand with our Black comrades in the struggle for Black liberation.