By Benny Schaft
October 9, 2026

On Sept. 21 a grand jury in Mississippi made its decision in the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells, whose body was found on July 6 in the water off the coast of Horn Island. Nolan had been celebrating the July 4th weekend with friends, who claimed he had been drinking and had a high amount of alcohol in his system, which they said led to his drowning.

The grand jury and District Attorney Angel Myers Mcllrath accepted that account and concluded that no further investigation was needed. She even criticized the Wells family’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump and his team, claiming on NBC News that they “informed her office that they’d found no evidence a crime had been committed against Wells.”

Mcllrath went on to say: “I’m not suggesting that a grieving mother police the rumors surrounding her child’s death. What I am suggesting is that the Crump team knew better but did not do better.” This screams of irony, given that the DA did almost nothing in this case and acted more like an adversary than an ally.

It was clear from the start that Mcllrath and her office held a dogmatic belief that Nolan had drowned, even before the autopsy, performed in Washington, D.C., by Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr. and released on Sept. 26, found blunt force trauma to the back of Nolan’s head as well as bruising. Most vital of all, the smoking gun: there was no water in his lungs. That directly contradicts the position of both the DA and the grand jury that drowning was the sole cause of death.

Students organize for justice for Wells

On Oct. 1, students marched through Atlanta University Center (AUC) chanting “No water in his lungs!” in response to the findings of the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s autopsy of Nolan Wells that disputed the grand jury’s conclusion that he had drowned. The rally was organized by A’nija Hughley, president of the Spelman College NAACP chapter, to demand a deeper look into Well’s death.

1955 murder of Emmett Till

Mississippi’s DAs and grand juries, for as long as the state has existed, have always covered up the lynchings of Black people, and they have always met them with dogmatic ignorance.

Take the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Sheriff Clarence Strider of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and the DA at the time, Gerald Chatham, were involved. Bourgeois historians and academics praise Chatham for his noble, heroic effort to bring justice for Emmett Till, but that is factually wrong. Chatham’s office did absolutely nothing to convict Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam who kidnapped and killed Till.

The investigation fell to the NAACP and other Black organizers, including Medgar Evers, Dr. T.R.M Howard, Ruby Hurley, Simeon Booker and others, who did far more than Chatham’s office, which never once thought to find witnesses or other evidence.

Klan murders of Freedom Summer activists

Nine years later in 1964, the Ku Klux Klan murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. One of the key people involved was Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff of Neshoba County in Mississippi, along with his boss, Lawrence Rainey, who had arrested the three activists on false speeding charges. The cops released the three late at night after they notified the Klan to ambush them.

This is also one of the reasons the FBI had such a hard time finding their bodies, because officials in Neshoba County refused to cooperate. It’s why it took so long for any charges to be brought, since officials literally refused to bring state murder charges. This took place in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

U.S. government officials, including the FBI under the reactionary leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, hesitantly took up the investigation, but they had a hard time finding the bodies, because Neshoba County officials, including DA William J. Gunn, outright refused to cooperate.

Gunn backed the propaganda that the three comrades were unharmed and up north in New York, laughing at the people of Philadelphia, Mississippi. His office supported the fascists who terrorized witnesses and tried to destroy evidence. They knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it, nor did they help the investigation.

Gunn and his office infamously blocked the bill that would have gone to a grand jury to seek indictments against the 21 men involved in the murders. That kept justice from occurring for 41 years, until Edgar Ray Killen was convicted.

Killen, who helped Price orchestrate the murders, had helped organize resistance to Freedom Summer, including the burning of Mount Zion Church, where a lot of voter registration and organizing had been done. The same tactics were used in the cases of Vernon Dahmer in 1966, Rev. George W. Lee in 1955 and Mack Charles Parker in 1959, whose lynching was similar to what happened in Neshoba County.

Pattern of lack of investigations

Now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with Nolan Wells. Every district attorney’s office in Mississippi seems to share a silent agreement: whenever a Black worker is murdered in the state, the protocol is simply not to cooperate, not to investigate, not to do anything. That is why Angel Myers Mccllrath and her office dug in their heels and held to the position that Nolan Wells drowned. They ignored the facts that came out of the autopsy and refused to investigate any further.

This is not only the position of Mississippi but of DAs across the United States, especially when it comes to the murder of Black youth. The policy is open season, not only on Black people but especially Black youth.

We saw it in the decision of the DA in Johnson County, Missouri, not to go further in the lynching of 19-year-old Savion McConell, who was murdered by police on May 1, 2026. Last month, the DA declared that the deadly force used by the officers was, in the DA’s words, completely justified.

We saw it with 16-year-old Juliana Umba Nzita, who was reported missing on April 28 and found hanging from a tree in a church lot in Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 8. The DA did not even bother to look at her case, allowing authorities to rule it a suicide even though no autospy was done.

The same happened to Kyle Bassinga in Cobb County, Georgia, and to Justice Kai James in Albany, Georgia, also found hanging from a tree. In both cases authorities and the DAs ruled the deaths as suicides without any shred of investigation.

This goes back to a simple fact: under a capitalist system, the justice system will continue to serve the ruling class. The DA is one of the key components of the ruling class’s role, especially when dealing with people of color. While they ignore our deaths, police often arrest Black comrades on bogus or made-up charges, and this results in many of them becoming political prisoners or prisoners in the prison-industrial complex.

It is vital for them to ignore, to sabotage and to do anything to make sure the deaths of Black youth never get justice. Justice would make people question the system and question capitalism and its contradictions. That would lead to a revolutionary conclusion: the system must be replaced by a justice system that benefits the proletariat, not the capitalist.

So now you’re wondering, what do we do? How do we stop this terrorism against Black comrades, especially Black youth? We organize, and we connect even more with Black comrades who will take leadership positions in the revolutionary movement. Only by allowing them to take those positions, alongside other oppressed peoples of the working class, can we begin to answer why young Black comrades like Nolan Wells, Savion McConnell, Justice Kai James, Kadir Skinner, Antoneil Williams III, Juliana Umba Nzita and so many others are dying.

This is not only a question that we in Workers World Party must answer. The entire movement must answer it. If that means bringing back the revolutionary people’s tribunals used in the aftermath of the brutality against the people in the Detroit Rebellion, then so be it. It has become clearer that we must draw a line in the sand and say that lynching, the brutality and the murder of Black youth and Black people must end. The system must be changed to one that advocates for the liberation of Black people and all oppressed people around the world.