I've written quite a few columns about the deaths of student-athletes over the years.
In 2011, I covered the story of Wes Leonard, the high school basketball player from Fennville, Michigan, who collapsed and died shortly after hitting the game-winning shot that preserved his team's perfect season.
Later that summer, at least six high school football players across the country died during or after preseason practices. I spoke with a father who told me he dropped his 15-year-old son, Montel Williams, at practice in Gurdon, Arkansas, and never saw him live again. At one point during the interview, we both just cried.
None of us knows for sure when our time will come. However, it is always disconcerting when a young person dies. Especially those who excel in sports, because they are often the embodiment of perfect health. Medical examinations revealed that Leonard and Williams had undiagnosed heart conditions that contributed to their deaths.
The question of why God took them so young may never be answered, but at least their loved ones know the cause of death.
It's been two weeks since 18-year-old Nolan Wells died, and his parents still don't know why or how. The only thing they know for sure is that he won't be coming home.
The Southwest Mississippi Community College football player disappeared after a party with friends on the Fourth of July. His body was found two days later, floating lifeless in the water.
Wells was last seen alive on Horn Island, a thin strip of land 10 miles off the coast of Mississippi. His parents began to worry about him that night and tracked his cell phone to a location on the mainland, not the island. Wells' car and his keys were at the house where he and his friends spent the night before embarking on the boat trip.
The results of the autopsy performed by the Jackson County coroner have not been released and the independent preliminary autopsy commissioned by the family is inconclusive. There was no evidence of fractures or deep tissue injuries. However, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the family, said there was “red discoloration” on the back of Wells' skull and foul play cannot be ruled out.
I have written quite a few columns about the deaths of student-athletes. It is rare that grieving parents calling for an investigation into their son's death is seen as political. But because of the location of this story, and the fact that Wells was the only black person seen in the footage that day, this tragedy is political. Mississippi politicians, most of them white, have supported local authorities as the NAACP questions why an investigation is taking so long.
Why can't we just mourn the loss of a young life?
Why does everything have to be about race?
Because many things have changed and many things continue to change. Between those two realities are black parents who silently maintain the tension between wanting their child to see the world and knowing the world their child wants to see. You see, moving up the socioeconomic ladder and landing in a different place, economically, than where you started, often leads to isolation.
This is particularly true for Black Gen Xers, the first generation to integrate American universities and businesses. mass, and thus gained access to more resources in the country. Like good schools and a house in the suburbs. Few talk about what you leave behind to get there: your collective. Because more often than not, moving up means entering predominantly white spaces. Sometimes you're the only one in group photos. Sometimes you are the only one at school or at the company… the neighborhood… the island.
The explorer Matthew Henson understood something about this long before I did. In 1909, he was on top of the world – literally, alongside Robert Peary at the North Pole – because he trusted a white man enough to spend two decades crossing the Arctic with him, at a time when doing so meant betting his safety, his dignity, and sometimes his life on that trust being maintained.
Henson made history. But he also made a calculation that, as a black father, haunts me most of all in Wells's story. To be “the first” or “the only one” it is necessary to trust someone who does not share your experience to see you when necessary.
No matter what we ultimately discover about what happened on the Fourth of July on Horn Island, what will stay with me is this sick feeling that Wells was on a crowded island, and yet found himself alone when it mattered most.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
