Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

It’s Scary As Hell Being Black in America Right Now

The deaths of Nolan Wells and Kohen Wiley are symptoms of a nation retreating from any pretense of equal rights.

Alain Stephens is an investigative reporter covering gun violence, arms trafficking, and federal law enforcement.

There is a tangible heat to being Black in America this summer. 

Every morning starts the same. A jolt of coffee and nicotine as my thumbs scroll a daily intake of Black death and indignity. 

It mostly comes dosed in tears. Tears of Black moms and aunties, projected behind stone-faced fathers and grandpops trying to hold it together behind press podiums. 

This summer, it was Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old who disappeared during a trip to Mississippi’s Horn Island over the Fourth of July. Wells, who traveled to the island with a predominately white group of friends, was found dead in the water two days later. Authorities have not announced a final determination of what happened, but Wells’s family has challenged the official timeline and sought an independent autopsy. The investigation remains ongoing, which is to say that another Black family is waiting for answers in the indeterminate dark. In a state synonymous with deep-seated anti-Black racism, and the highest number of recorded lynchings, speculators and community members have begun to fear the worst.

It’s an expectation that has set the tone for living while Black in this new era. Where at any moment you, as Black person, can be erased for the most negligible of offenses, and if you’re not careful, be discarded into the void.

Before Nolan Wells, we watched in June as another Mississippi family laid their Black boy to rest. Kohen Wiley, who was just a year old, was shot and killed by Senatobia police officers, who fired into the vehicle where Wiley was sitting on his mother’s lap. After a friend of Wiley’s mother was accused of shoplifting a box of diapers at a Walmart, police opened fire on their car under the pretense that the vehicle was “oncoming” toward the officers. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has said the officers were not in the car’s path, citing a photo from the scene. A month later, investigators have yet to release body camera footage of the incident or provide any new answers. No charges have been filed.

Black Americans had already borne witness to those familiar echoes. Earlier that month, a jury in South Carolina acquitted 61-year-old Rick Chow of a murder charge after he shot and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, 14, for the alleged offense of stealing bottled water. Video evidence of the 2023 incident shows the store owner chasing Carmack-Belton out of the shop after falsely accusing him of theft. Chow, who had twice before shot........

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