It’s despicable how far some people will go to promote an agenda that is unabashedly hateful and damaging.
You don’t have to know much else about my home state of Mississippi to know it has a long, dark history of racism. From its origins as a slave state to being the last state to integrate virtually anything (the last school system to do so was in Cleveland, Mississippi, in 2016), the cultural separation has persisted to this day in some places.
But progress has been made. Like the rest of the nation, Mississippi has become a place that, while acknowledging its past sins, can look at its current situation and say that everyone, regardless of race, has the same freedoms under the Constitution and state law. Today, people of different ethnicities live, work, and enjoy life together, and things have only improved in this regard.
So, it makes me mad when people attempt to sow racial discord in otherwise unrelated events to prop up a narrative.
With that, we enter into scenes of tragedy. Nolan Wells was a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College who had recently finished his freshman year. On Independence Day, Wells and some friends went out to Horn Island right off the Gulf Coast. Wells’s friends returned without him because he was socializing and told them he would return on a different boat. Unfortunately, at some point afterward, Wells was found dead off the coast of the island.
Those who perpetuate racism will tell you that this is a story of Wells, who is black, going to the island with a bunch of white people and returning in a body bag, and that is the only thing you need to know about the case.
The racists won’t tell you that Horn Island was packed on the Fourth of July. Hundreds of people were on the island that day, and hundreds more floated nearby on various boats. That’s compounded by the fact that this case gained so much publicity that the likes of Al Sharpton, Tyler Perry, and Terrell Owens have offered a combined $125,000 for new information surrounding Wells’s death. You would think someone would have come forward with evidence, but no one has.
So that leaves us with two options: either Wells was murdered and all the people on the island at the time are so morally twisted that they all decided to be complicit, even with the offer of fairly life-changing money, or nothing malicious happened and Wells unfortunately became a victim of the vicious tides of the Gulf.
Which is the more likely scenario?
Possibly the worst part about it is that Wells’s own parents have bought into the racial agenda. Wells’s mother was quoted saying this: “Me and his dad had conversations with him all the time, not just about the importance of understanding our history as black people, but also the importance of how you have to move in certain spaces.”
This may be true in certain circumstances, but probably not an island tourist destination with lots of people. On top of that, Nolan Wells went willingly with his friends. This is far from a situation that would constitute a racially motivated homicide.
However, that’s not what Jasmine Crockett, a disgraced Democrat representative, would tell you. She very quickly asserted that because of Mississippi’s history, this was a hate crime. That’s not even what Wells’s attorney, Ben Crump, would tell you. Crump is a potentially rotten apple, as he’s taken advantage of grieving parents to promote a morally wrong platform. The blatantly racist agenda these people put on these cases damages centuries of work to eliminate racism in the first place.
At the end of all of this, a grand jury, which had five black members, ruled that given the current evidence, nothing indicated foul play in this case. While the autopsy results have yet to come out, the circumstantial evidence painted a clear picture that, with a little basic logic, you too can remove the hate from this case.
A large part of Mississippi’s history has been the fight for equality and the fight against racism. One can only hope Nolan Wells rests in peace and that the hurtful political grandstanding will cease.
