UNITED STATES – On November 1, 2026, 118 days after Nolan Wells’ body was found, people came together across the United States to march in Nolan’s memory and demand answers about his death. More than 500 people marched from Biloxi to Ocean Springs, the town where he was from, with many more protests taking place in other states and cities in a coordinated effort to dedicate the day to justice for Nolan and his family.
Since the last report on Nolan in The Masses, the Old State has been unrelenting in its efforts to obscure the truth of what happened at Horn Island on July 4. In speeches at the protest in Columbus, Ohio, outside the statehouse, organizers emphasized that nobody is asking for anything unreasonable. All the masses want is the answer to a simple question: what happened to Nolan Wells?
There was no water present in his throat, lungs, or stomach when the autopsy was conducted, leading to one of the most common chants at the day’s protests: “Nolan Wells did not drown!” If he drowned, why were there contusions on the back of his head? If he drowned, why did his so-called “friends” retain attorneys, blurring the extent of their complicity?
Mississippi is part of the territory known as the Black Belt, the home of the oppressed New Afrikan nation. National oppression and terror against New Afrikan people have been especially pronounced in Mississippi for decades. In 1968, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer said in an interview: “Mississippi is not actually Mississippi’s problem. Mississippi is America’s problem. Because if America wanted to do something about what has been going on in Mississippi, it could have stopped by now.”
Her words still ring true almost 60 years later, with Nolan Wells’ case as well as the murder of New Afrikan baby Kohen Wiley in Senatobia by non-national minority pig Hunter Foster. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is similarly not a national minority, called the use of deadly force justified, and Foster has since resigned.
The marches for Nolan Wells and demands for justice for Kohen Wiley bring the question of New Afrikan political power to the forefront. From the unanswered questions surrounding Nolan’s death to Lynn Fitch’s reactionary false-justification for the murder of Kohen, the Old State will defend the bedrock of national oppression to secure its authority while families continue to bury their children.
As stated in The 1930 Comintern Resolution on the Black National Question in the United States: “the struggle for their most urgent partial demands in the Black Belt is nothing more than the struggle for their equal rights, and only the fulfillment of their main slogan, the right of self-determination in the Black Belt, can assure them of true equality.” The right of the New Afrikan nation to self-determination, up to and including secession, must be affirmed in the face of the abject oppression and repression dealt out by the national chauvinist Old State. Justice for Nolan and Kohen, therefore, demands a militant protracted struggle against the Old State’s apparatus of national oppression and for New Afrikan self-determination.
Justice For Nolan Wells!
Say His Name!
End the War on the New Afrikan Masses!
Free the Land!
[Image Source: Activists gather Sunday, November 1, 2026, in Ocean Springs having marched from Biloxi, Tim Thorsen]
