I’m watching Mississippi again. I keep coming back to the same thing. Nolan Wells didn’t drown. The autopsy findings reportedly don’t support drowning as his cause of death, which makes the questions surrounding what happened to him even harder to dismiss. Yet a grand jury declined to indict anyone in connection with his death. That’s the part I’m struggling with. How can there be this many questions surrounding the death of a young man and the response still be that th

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.