Unfiltered stories of Black resistance, erased heroes, and hidden truths. We connect the past to today’s fights so the next generation never has to ask “why didn’t they teach us this?”
Nolan Wells was 18 years old. He had recently graduated from high school, committed to playing football at Southwest Mississippi Community College, and spent the Fourth of July on Horn Island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast with friends. A few days later, his body was recovered from the water near the island.
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was a state government agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation and monitor civil rights activism during the civil rights era.
Following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi officials established the commission under the stated goal of protecting the state’s sovereignty from federal intervention.
